Maybe now is the time to have a whiteboard session and rework my planned academic article list. This could be as simple as making a list on a blank page of paper or it could get a lot more complex. I’m thinking taking the complex road might be the way to go with this one. To that end, right now I’m wondering about the top 5 articles I would like to sit down and write. I can begin to see a few of them in terms of structure and breakdown, but none of that inspired me to stop working on this post and begin the process of writing. I’m going to need to focus on two directional elements. First, what is my academic writing trajectory and what are the results in terms of article output that would arise from that path. Second, what are the articles that I would really like to read that would be groundbreaking in some way. Plotting out both batches of content should help me find somewhere where either some overlap occurs or maybe somewhere where a little bit of intellectual stretching could get me closer to the edge of what is possible and avoid derivative muddling. 

In order to start that effort I’m going to map out my general areas of research interest. The last time I did that in a serious way was back on September 5, 2021. I’ll take that base and begin to expand it to the next level. You could build your own base by quickly making a list of the top 5 research interests you have. From those general interests you will find that you want to add more words to the topic to shape it into a more specific and targeted point within that larger topic. 

• Public administration
  • Local government administration
  • The intersection of public administration and technology
  • How technology influences government
  • How government uses technology
• Changes and uses in encryption technology
  • Encryption and society
  • Quantum encryption
• Sentiment analysis and modern polling methodologies
  • Automated sentiment analysis
  • Sentiment analysis and machine learning
  • Modern polling methods
  • The breakdown of polling
• General uses cases for machine learning
  • Common API use cases within the ML space
  • General ML use cases compared
  • My general look at MLOps open source code
  • A review of MLOps Github repos
• The ethical use of large language or foundational models
  • Language models and society
  • The intersection of technology and modernity
  • Oversupply of information (flooding) 

Those areas of research interest have a trajectory. Each of those general themes is going somewhere or evolving somehow. To capture that I started to draw out the 5 topics above and consider what’s next. What would be the bubble next to these 5 bubbles. How do those bubbles interact and in what general trajectory are they starting to move? Building out that series of relationships helps me think about what areas need the most consideration and where the most movement is about to happen. I’m going to spend more time today on that mapping and whiteboard effort. It is not something I can do with a pen and paper as a lot of give and take needs to occur within the live editing consideration brought to that type of landscape.

Ultimately, understanding that general research trajectory is key to being able to complete the action described above that inherently stretches things toward the possible and away from the derivative. 

Reworking all of that made me wonder if I should just pull up my 5 year writing plan and see if it still makes sense. At some point, I’m going to need to rewrite my 5 year writing plan and figure out what things on that list really deserve my time and attention.