Theme 1, Research publications/Theory of science - Reflections

What have I learnt?

Finding research-papers and publications

I think that looking at the impact factor of the journal that an article was published in is a great way of determining if an article might be worth the read or not. Previously when writing my Bsc. thesis I only looked at the number of citations that articles had to weigh different articles against each other, but this of course tends to favor older articles. By looking at the journals I hope that I'll have an easier time finding recently published works that might be of interest.

I also practiced a technique of finding papers that I haven't used before, where I first put toghether a list of relevant publications with an high impact factor, and then searched in those publications using the web of science database. This I find was a good way to use more general keywords even if I'm looking for articles in a specific area, so for example using "Social media" as a keyword in a publication that focuses on audio engineering might actually work better than trying to use for example "Social media music and audio" in a google scholar search. I hope that the list of publications that's now compiled on KTH social will help me practice this technique in the future. 

Philosophy and the theory of knowledge

I think the problems of philosophy was a really good read and I might come back and read it again in the future. Hopefully the discussion about what knowledge is will help me to analyze ways of achieving knowledge through research. For example to sort of sort out methods that aren't really useful  or research questions that can't produce a satisfactory conclusion.

The book also got me thinking about the issue of what we really know on a more basic level, wich might not be something that will be of use for me as an engineer, but nonetheless interesting. I was really intrigued by the concept of sense-data, and how our perception and cognition relates to what we believe ourselves to know about the world. The distinction between what thought that are produced from sense-data and what thoughts that are purely thinking doesn't seem as clear to me after the seminar as it did before. I think it's interesting to have that perpective when thinking about media-technology that use the human perception. The sense-data is really put to the test when we design media-technology that tries to give the notion of one type of sense-data trough another sense than what is common. For example ideas about hearing color and  seing music etc.