How to Plan a Ph.D 7: Methods

So, you have your archives figured out, right? (See the previous posts.) And you have 2-3 hypotheses per archive, yes?

Now you can build some methods. ONLY now: for various pedagogical and philosophically sound reasons DO NOT attempt this first or you will be blocked a year or two in, I guarantee.

Methods are machines that help you test hypotheses. Imagine you have a hypothesis about a certain philosopher's belief. You will need some biographical research, you will need critical readings of ALL her texts: books, essays, letters. At this point why narrow it down?

Now the more methods you have, the more expertise you build. So if you are doing lit crit, try some history and philosophy and software coding. Why not? And so on.

After some time you'll see how your methods map quite nicely onto your hypotheses and so provide different ways of "mining" your archives.

Have some fun with this stage. The idea is to slightly stretch yourself, to give yourself at least one more skill to learn so that you end the process with more expertise in techniques than you started with.

Many people have trouble distinguishing between a method and an archive in our "meta" style epistemological age. You think you want to study deconstruction but actually you want to DO deconstruction. In this case it's best to have at least one more method to analyze the deconstruction. Don't just paint to study painting. You need to do history, too, right? It's confusing and it can be circular if you only use the methods supplied by your archive.