And I had a few questions, not specifically related, but that have been on my mind for a bit (if this is the wrong forum, please move. Also, sorry about the title, I wanted it as descriptive as possible):
The thread seems to suggest that the vast benefits of a PhD program involves the opportunities to do research, which definitely makes sense to me. However, is there any way to alternately have a chance to have these type of research opportunities?
I ask the question because there is a specific subject I would like to do research on, and while I have a Master’s degree, my undergraduate and Master’s degrees are in no way related to the subject I want to research (which would be under medieval history, art history, or manuscript studies programs). There are research postings that can be gotten by PhD’s that would allow them to have housing and a stipend at libraries, but as far as I know there is no way for non-PhD’s, and certainly no one who does not have the proper credentials to get these sort of opportunities.
Also, suppose I were to research this and come up with some new knowledge about the subject. Would I be able to publish or present it without a PhD?
Can anyone provide some advice or strategy in this regard? Is there something I’m not thinking of?
Well if you write something that adds to the knowledge in the field, there is no reason why you couldn’t publish it. Many scientific articles are published by people who don’t have PhD’s (yet), although most of them are probably PhD students. One thing you should be aware of is that scientific articles have a very specific form, which would probably be hard to come up by yourself if you don’t have any experience in the field. You certainly would have to spend a lot of time reading up on what others have found over the last decades.
I think it might be possible to do this type of thing in the arts if you were determined enough, but it does sound difficult. Accessing the raw material for your research in the appropriate libraries / museums etc is the obvious first question - if you can’t do that by yourself then you can’t even get started.
Beyond that, you would lack the PhD advisor and corresponding research peer group to guide your studies. These people train you in the how and the why of research. If you’re talented then you might be able to pick up the ‘how’ bit on your own, working in isolation. What you won’t know, though, is the ‘why’ of research. Why are these questions interesting? Are they important to advancing knowledge? Do they fit into the art of the soluble?
You could have an idea for research that has already being done, or is so incremental that it barely counts as research. Or it is fundamentally flawed in some way(s) that will prevent the right questions from being asked. Working in a PhD structure goes a long way to preventing these ill-wrought research ideas from getting off the ground. Ask any scholar what the quality of their ideas was like after their Masters and I think the majority will say that they were shite. However, it’s the fact that they had original ideas at all at this stage, of any kind, that marked them out as having great potential. It’s potential that just needs to grow in the right environment.
I have done research for non-fiction books outside my degree disciplines. That was great. You could consider applying your interest is towards a non-fiction book. Most university libraries will let you research there, but not borrow or use the full facilities. “I am working on a book about …” does open some doors to experts. More so, if you have a publisher. I have found that assistance with research can be found if - and only if - you can show that you have really done your homework and really engaged with the topic. Then people will help.
I am now doing a doctorate. My PhD topic has no obvious relationship to the topics of my Masters and earlier degrees. I am now working on showing the way primary orality (the way knowledge and communications work in purely oral cultures) might be applied in the archaeological context. It doesn’t fit into any specific discipline, which is causing me some hassles. I have a scholarship in the English Program of a university as a science writer, which is allowing me to cross the disciplines.
As I am working on a topic in which I did not have the necessary background, the value of being in a university makes a massive difference. It gives me the credibility to work with people in related fields (archaeology, linguistics, anthropology) as well as having access to all the resources and the invaluable advice of my supervisor. The goal is more books.
This is precisely why I wrote and published my book on mythology.
I do have a Ph.D. – but it’s in physics. I have no degree in classics or linguistics or anthropology. But I made some observations that I thought (and still think) no one had made before about some Greek myths, and I wanted to get the idea out there. I’d originally hoped to do so via a letter or article in some interdisciplinary magazine, but couldn’t interest anyone. In addition, the subject seemed to be a very broad one, with a lot of background material to be presented.
So I wrote a book. I gave it to my wife to read, and she said that it “read like a thesis”, and that no one would read it. So I rewrote it as a popular book. To my delight and surprise, it was picked up by a major academic publisher. And the idea has definitely gotten out there – my book has been cited numerous times in academic publications.so i have achieved my goal.
There’s not a lot of monetary justification in this – no one supported me in my work, and I still haven’t made back my advance. But I feel that I’ve contributed to the store of knowledge.
In the process, you learn something about the field and you have to do quitre a bit of research. I have addressed several academic organizations – Classical, Astronomical, and other – on a regular basis, which also gets the infotrmation out there.
There are other people doing this, and there are organizations associated with them (and ways to obtain grants). Look up the Organization of Independent Scholars
If you make a new and interesting discovery, you can submit it to a journal (you should read some papers in that journal to see how they are written). The editor will subject it to whatever refereeing procedure it uses and you will find out in due course if they want to publish it. Only the fact that you lack a university affiliation (so you have to put a home or other address on it) will suggest that maybe you don’t have a PhD. But these days of academic unemployment no one will know–or care.
I know at least one mathematician who has had a full career and never got a PhD. I think there was a fight of some sort and he walked out. Many years ago, I was asked to write a letter of support for his application to be put into the “equivalent-to-PhD” pay scale at his unionized university. Another I knew 50 years ago had, in 1917, escaped out a back window of his apartment in St. Petersburg while the NKVD was breaking down the front door. He got to England somehow and got a job in an English University (no PhD required in those days) and had a distinguished career never bothering to get a PhD.
I myself have a published paper in a linguistics journal and a couple in computer science journals without ever having taken a course in either subject.
May I know the title of your book? And the author name? I tried to find it by intelligent guesswork, but wasn’t intelligent enough. If you’d rather, a PM would be great.
Give us some details, infinitii. What is the subject that you want to do research on? What are the degrees that you have at the moment? Would you be willing to get a degree in the proper subjects if you had to? Could you move to a location near enough to be able to do the research if you couldn’t get into a degree program?
I would like to respond to everyone, but quoting this post will probably let me hit everyone’s questions to me.
Mentioning the subject will probably have everyone write me off AND get picked up by Google, but it is the Voynich Manuscript. I don’t think it’s a hoax of any kind, and I think there is a lot to be figured out about it. (Also there are a couple of other historical subjects I would like to do research on as well, but they are more 19th century and not really related).
I have a Bachelor of Science in Math, and I will have my MBA (General Business) next month. Don’t get me wrong, I would LOVE to get the proper degrees in Art History, History, etc., but as far as I can tell I would have to go all the way back to an undergraduate degree in one of those fields and work my way up. Also, while I don’t have a job right now, I am in talks with getting one right now, which will probably dictate where I will be moving to.
I think the main thing is, while I would love doing a doctorate program for the learning and research, as well as the doors it would open once having it, I don’t really want to teach or do anything else with it necessarily. Writing a non-fiction book is certainly an idea which I have thought of (both on that subject and the others I mentioned I was thinking about), especially if that opens doors, but I assume that would entail going to libraries on my own dime during my vacation or something. Hmm.
By the by, CalMeacham, I found your book based on the information you gave in another thread, and I really enjoyed it. It’s on my shelf right now next to Panofskys’ Pandora’s Box.
If you have the funds, equipment, etc to do the research, go ahead and do it, nobody’s going to stop you.
If you’re trying to get funding to do a research, I imagine that would be extremely difficult without a high level degree in a related field, or at least a collaborator with such a background.
As for publishing, it depends on the journal, and probably depends on the field as well. I definitely think the bar would be much higher (i.e. you have to try harder to get the paper accepted), but not impossible. It would help if you have co-authors with the right credentials.
Yes, it doesn’t sound like the kind of topic where you would get any sort of advance from a publisher. But do you want an opportunity to do research in the sense of getting access to material and a place to publish, or in the sense of being supported to do it? If the former, you have gotten plenty of answers already. If the latter, you are probably out of luck unless you make friends with a rich patron. My sense is that it is hard enough to get a job in the arts with credentials, getting one without would be impossible. Perhaps you should start small and write an article about a very specific facet of what interests you and try to get it published. At the worst, the feedback you would get would be valuable. The real value of a PhD is not actually the dissertation in most cases, it is the process of learning how to do research, which usually requires getting knocked on your head by your adviser when you do dumb things or aren’t self critical enough. I bet all of us who do research have the voice of our adviser in our heads when we write, asking us if we can really support that statement.
O.K., let’s talk about the Voynich Manuscript. A facsimile edition of it has been published. You need to buy this. It’s not necessary for you to see the actual manuscript itself unless you’re claiming that there are substantial differences between the facsimile edition and the actual manuscript. What you need to do is show that you can translate the writing in the manuscript. You have to produce a translation or at least a theory of what the language is in the manuscript that convinces most other people who’ve worked on trying to understand it. So go ahead and do that. You then need to distribute your paper about this subject to as many experts on the manuscript as possible. You need to get past their initial skepticism, since they will be familiar with a number of nutty theories about the manuscript and will be reluctant to even read your paper. You could try to publish the paper or you could just post it to the Internet. In either case, you need to get the experts to read your paper. My impression is that the people who have theorized about the language in the manuscript are not ones who have degrees in particular fields but ones who are willing to try oddball theories. That’s what you have to get around. Everyone will of course consider you an oddball, but then all the other people working on the subject are oddballs. You have to convince them that you’re an oddball with a reasonable theory.
Yeah, I have the facsimile. I wasn’t really interested in seeing the manuscript itself, but other manuscripts in other archives (for iconological precedents). While there are several archives online, the vast majority aren’t reproduced anywhere (Lynn Thorndike will describe several manuscripts but not provide illustrations; only some pages are reproduced in books or online, but the rest of manuscripts are not available, etc). There’s just too many dead-ends really.
But yeah, I figure the subject would keep me away from archives and libraries without any sort of credentials…
Perhaps I will have to attempt some sort of translation and then proceed as you suggest. Thank you.
Many history works are written by interested amateurs who have no relevant academic credentials, and libraries give them access. I don’t see any real difference between biographies of US Civil War figures (what I know about), and this, in terms of library access. Ask. They are likely to say yes, I would imagine.
Just for the record, it isn’t (in my experience) true that PhD admission requires that you did your degrees in the appropriate discipline. Any bachelor’s degree satisfies that requirement.
I’ve got to say, I’ve not developed a complete list or anything. Off the top of my head, I know the Vatican Film Library would (or might, I don’t know how complete it is) have some of the things I was interested in seeing. Other than that, I would have to check out some books again and go through everything I wanted to see.
But this begs the question related to my OP: even assuming I could see some of these documents, how would I find more? Archives and such aren’t categorized in a helpful way, and I would bet that most manuscripts don’t have images reproduced anywhere. How would someone know what they wanted to look at, or where it was located? I would imagine that advisors in a doctorate program might be able to help in that sort of respect.
Not quite true. You have to give the admissions committee some reason to believe that you’re familiar enough with their discipline to make it through graduate-level coursework. That doesn’t mean that you have to have a bachelor’s with exactly the right major, but you do have to have appropriate coursework.
To the OP: By far the biggest problem with doing research without any academic training is that you don’t have anyone to tell you what’s been done and what other people are doing. This is a huge problem in the more technical disciplines, and I can’t imagine that it’s much easier in the humanities. Obviously it’s not insurmountable, but you have your work cut out for you.
