Excess and abundance

Matei Candea is the guest who will join us this Friday on the walk from Overveen to the beach and back to Zandvoort. Matei currently explores questions on interspecies sociality next to lecturing at Durham University.



While walking he will help us to sort out or (or at least become aware of) a particularly tricky issue:

Dealing with excess and abundance

There are all but endless articles, books, authors, concepts. There is a lot of ‘world’ to go and do research on and once you have done this research, your material (interviews, observations, or other objects to analyze) tends to be excessive as well.
What to do? You cannot read everything, cite everyone, use all possible concepts. You cannot relate every story either, analyze every detail. Thus, a few questions present themselves.

How to recognize which literature is – and which other literature isn’t – relevant?
How to distinguish which interview partners or places to head for?
How to handle the limits of your possibility?
Is the rest not worth your effort, or simply too much? Once you have ‘material’, how do you select, quotes, examples, stories?
And how do you decide which points to make?
Once you have a first version, how do you recognize (or decide!) what ‘the argument’ is and what serves this argument?
What you expand, what you delete?
And when, in this process, is it productive to go back to the literature?