Abstract
This paper proposes that the WWW is able to be fruitfully understood as a research tool when we utilise themetaphor of the cabinet of curiosities, the wunderkammer. It unpeels some of the research attributes of themetaphor as it reveals the multiplicity of connectivity on the web that provides serendipitous interactionsbetween unexpected materials thus bringing new ways of thinking about a given research topic.It explores howthe singular research journeys may express themselves so differently that they find a comfortable space for adefinition only within an academic cabinet of curiosities. Yet these differences are also made available throughutilising an academic search engine in the WWW because it doesn’t literally obey the instruction you have givenit. I give examples of methodologies and theories that I have found to be apposite for such serendipity. I showthat the narrative of the research journey is a significant contribution to knowledge through explicating asubjective academic narrative in an auto-ethnographic methodological framework.
Highlights
Much is obvious about the value of the WWW as a research tool
The object of this paper is to look at the serendipitous nature of this as I have discovered it by writing a subjective academic narrative as the methodological framework
The disorderly and even disruptive discourse of poetics and the personal has begun to be valued in the academy alongside the orderly and in many ways complacent discourse of scientific methodology
Summary
Much is obvious about the value of the WWW as a research tool. The object of this paper is to look at the serendipitous nature of this as I have discovered it by writing a subjective academic narrative as the methodological framework. Within the academy there remains a space in which we can develop new ways of publishing our work that provide narratives peculiar to the person writing the works that are accepted as both academic and subjective This opens up the privileged academic discourse to display itself within an auto-ethnographic framework that explores the individuality provided by the postmodernist dispersal of certainties. Anderson notes that “evocative ethnographers...remain largely marginalized in mainstream social science venues, due to their rejection of traditional science values and styles of writing” (2006: 377) This auto-ethnographic challenge to genre within academic discourse is an outcome of the postmodernist moment in the acceptance of variability in knowledge structures, methodologies and theories rather than the urge for replication and certainty. I have written in a subjective non-conformist academic methodology that is based on personal insights rather than theories and evidences
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