Inf 201: Research Research Methodology for Informatics

Fall Quarter 2006
 

Instructor:

Susan Elliott Sim

Office hours:

Thursday 2:00-3:00pm in ICS2 201
or by email appointment

Lectures:

Monday 2:00-4:50pm in SSL 152

Web site: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ses/teaching/inf201/

Description - Schedule - Assignments - Resources

Description

Introduction to strategies and idioms of research in Informatics. Includes examination of issues in scientific inquiry, quantitative and qualitative methods, and research design. Both classic texts and contemporary research literature will be read and analyzed.

Schedule

The class will meet once per week and meetings will be a combination of lectures, student presentations and discussion. We will be reading literature from a wide range of disciplines as well as looking at informal knowledge about Informatics and research. The format of the students presentations will be discussed further in the section on Grading and Assignments.

Readings are subject to change.

  Thursday
Week 1
September 25
 		Course Orientation
Philosophy of Science
Readings
  • Bruce I. Blum, Beyond Programming, Oxford University Press, 1996. Chapters 2 and 3
  • Steve Woolgar, Science: The Very Idea, Ellis Horwrood, Ltd., 1988. Chapter 1: What is Science?.
 
Week 2
October 2
  
 Scientific Paradigms
Readings
  • Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The University of Chicago Press, 1996.
  • (Optional) Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science, translated by Alexander T. Levine, The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Chapters 4 and 5
  
Week 3
October 9
 		Sociology of Science
Readings
 
Week 4
October 16
 		Data, Theory, and Analysis
Readings
  • A.F. Chalmers, What is this thing called Science?, 3rd Edition, Hackett Publishing Company, 1999. Chapters 1-5.
 
Week 5
October 23
 		No Class- Susan at WCRE  
Week 6
October 30
 		Theory Construction
Readings Student Presentations
 
Week 7
November 6
 		Case Studies, Experiments and Surveys
Readings
  • Robert K. Yin, Case Study Research, Third Edition, Sage Publications, 2003.
  • Dag I.K. Sjoberg, Jo E. Hannay, Ove Hansen, Vigdis By Kampenes, Amela Karahansanovic, Nils-Kristian Liborg, and Anette C. Rekdal, "A Survey of Controlled Experiments in Software Engineering," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol 31, No. 9, September, 2005.
  • Shari Lawarence Pfleeger and Barbara A. Kitchenham, "Principles of Survey Research," Software Engineering Notes. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
 
Week 8
November 13
 		Ethnography, Action Research, and Benchmarking
Readings  
Week 9
November 20
 		Research Strategies in Informatics, Part I
Readings
  • William Newman, "A preliminary analysis of the products of HCI research, using pro forma abstracts." 1994 ACM SIGCHI Human Factors in Computer Systems Conference (CHI ’94), pp. 278-284.
  • Joseph E. McGrath, "Methodology Matters: Doing Research in the Behavioral and Social Sciences," in Readings in human-computer interaction : toward the year 2000, edited by Baecker et al., Morgan Kaufmann, 1995, pp. 152-169.
  • Paul Dourish, Implications for Design. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2006 (Montreal, Canada), pp. 541-550, 2006.
  • Pat Langley, Crafting Papers on Machine Learning, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 1207-1212, 2000.
Week 10
November 27
 		Research Strategies in Informatics, Part II
Readings  
 

Required Textbooks:

Links to Resources:

Grading and Assignments

Grading.
Assignments 70%
Discussion 10%
Participation 20%

Assignments.
Due Date Grade Value
Research Statement Monday, October 9 10%
Abstracts Monday, November 20 10%
Study a Scientist Monday, November 6 30%
Outline a Dissertation Monday, December 4 20%

Study a Scientist.

Outline a Dissertation.

Discussion.
During the term, each of you will be asked to lead a discussion on one of the course readings. For this, you should prepare an oral summary (10-15 minutes) of the paper, and create some discussion points to lead the class discussion (e.g. one slide). The discussion points could be any thoughts you have about the paper, such as anything you think is controversial in the paper, comments about research methodology, questions about things that are unclear in the paper, ideas for follow up research, strengths and weaknesses of the paper, etc. Try to choose open ended questions/issues that will provoke some class discussion.

Resources

Dave Patterson, How to have a bad career in research/academia. [slides] [multimedia]

(C) University of California 2004.