On the 21 September 2009, my questionnaire about the possibilities of collaborative research among REELC/ENCLS members was posted on our website. Since then, it has been viewed 505 times. I’ve got 24 individual replies, what is 8% of registered members of our network. I would like to thank to all of you who expressed your wish to participate in the envisioned collaborative research groups by filling in the questionnaire forms. The aim of this initiative is to increase transnational research collaboration among REELC/ENCLS individual and institutional members. There are manifold possibilities of establishing smaller groups or nets of scholars having common interests, methods, and goals; these forms range from forum discussions on our website, through devising outlines of bi- or multilateral conferences, seminars, or workshops, to preparing international project proposals and submitting them to different European or national foundations. A necessary condition for this to happen is to get a better knowledge of what those of us that were interested in working in collaborative research groups are actually doing or planning to do. The questionnaire has the following rubrics: Name & Address, Interests (participating, leading a project, organizing a conference, taking part in our forum), Experience in international research collaboration, Topics of current interest, Methods applied or intended, Suggested research topics.

Although the response to the questionnaire could be better, I feel encouraged by several common fields of interests and methods, considerable bi- or multilateral research experiences, pronounced commitments for sharing them with other REELC /ENCLS colleagues, and, above all, by valuable ideas for the future research projects that could be conducted by international research groups within our network.

thesis I am still hesitating if we should post your individual questionnaires to the website (because they include personal data) or at least circulate them to other respondents. Perhaps we could also use nicknamesin place of your names and addresses. I think that a kind of posting your individual replies would be necessary in order to establish links between those of you that have common interests, methodological orientations, etc. I am suggesting the following form of circulating your responses on our website or forum.

 

Please reply to me as soon as possible if you disagree with such way of “publishing” the rubrics from your questionnaires. For the time being, I would like to present some preliminary observations about your replies.

As said, 24 individuals (one of them as a representative of the institution) have sent their replies (the Lithuanian colleagues have instead provided a kind of presentation of their researches, but this could not be included in the analysis) (see Graph 1 in the appended file). The majority of replies have come from France (4) and Romania (3) (see Graph 2). 23 respondents expressed their will to participate in a research project, 8 are ready to play the role of a project leader, 16 are candidates for organizing a conference and 14 would like to enter into discussions on our website forum (see Graph 3). Because of some vague and descriptive formulations in the replies, it was a little more difficult to quantify the data about experiences in international research collaboration, but it is fairly certain that 11 respondents have more than 2 such experiences, while 6 of them have none (see Graph 4). It is really promising that 17 from 24 respondents proposed their ideas for research projects (Graph 5).

As shown by simple images of “word clouds,” generated by Wordle, there is an interesting hierarchy of most prominent “topics of  your current interest” (Picture 1), “methods, approaches that you apply or intend to apply” (Picture 2), and “suggested research” (Picture 3).  From these images it is rather clear that “literature”, “the literary” are – contrary to lamentations about the crisis of literary studies as literary – still in the focus of our discipline (although in strong presence of “cultural”, “history,” etc.) and that “comparative” approach still prevails. (Note: Word clouds were generated by an easy bricoleur’s method of literally copying and assembling the individual replies; the program splits syntagms and syntactic connections, words are treated as separate items). Unskilled in computerized text analysis and thus using only popular and open-access internet tools, I attempted to prepare lists of the most frequently mentioned words that refer to current research topics (List 1), methods (List 2), and suggested research (List 3). Among your CURRENT RESEARCH INTEREST the following words have the highest frequencies: “literature, literatures, literary” (46), “culture, cultural, culturology” (12), “comparative” (9), “art, arts, artistic” (8), “history, historical, historiography” (8). The most represented groupings of METHODS are: comparative: literary, cultural, poetics (7), discourse: analysis, history, theory (7), thematic and myth criticism: imagology, image studies, myth analysis, mythocritical approach, thematic criticism (7), cultural studies or history (4), interdisciplinary (4), reception (4), literature and space (4). And among the PROPOSED RESEARCH TOPICS, the following groupings include the largest quantities of the mentioned terms (however, a lot of them are sometimes used in a single questionnaire!): Transfers, mobility, globalization, world literature, national literatures, (10), Approaches, methods, disciplines (8), Literature and the arts, aspects of creativity and intermediality (7), Genres, types of discourse (7), Cultural representation (6), Europe: history, imagination, tradition (6), Geocriticism, literature, culture and space (5), Imagology (4).

So much for now, further steps towards research networking will follow soon.

 

 

Thank you for your cooperation! I wish you all the best in the coming year!

 

Marko Juvan