Friday, March 4, 2016

The Amazing Race

Currently, I lay unable to sleep. This post was definitely supposed to be posted before midnight, but in a frenzy to get to bed before 10 pm for a 6 am shift, I forgot to upload a blog post. Upon realizing my mistake, I set an alarm for 4:30 am so that I would have time to shower, eat, get ready, and write a blog post. But as I lay awake in bed for two hours, I decided that I would be too tired to write in the morning and I may as well be useful in this cursed insomnia stage. I will definitely be getting less than 5 hours of sleep tonight, but luckily I work at a coffee place. If anyone wants to make my day, I will be working 6 am-11 am at Dutch Bros on Bell and 62nd! I can give great drink recommendations and high fives!
As far as my research is concerned there are a couple things I want to cover. I have been watching a lot of The Amazing Race, so I am 100% going to be formating my blog post like an episode of The Amazing Race.
Our starting line is the results section. Once teams have completed their results section they will be receiving their next clue.
Detour Info: Teams will be completing their first detour where they will have to analyze their results and how they play into the academic conversation.
For my analysis I have found that there is a strong correlation between the usage of nature and synesthesia, and a weak one between industry and synesthesia. This is important because in a raising industrial world, based on my results, there should be a lack of synesthesia present in literature. The problem with a world where synesthesia is not represented in literature is that even though 2-4% of the population has synesthesia, it is poorly portrayed. If synesthesia is truly eliminated by more industrialization, then we can expect nobody to understand synesthesia whether they have it or not.
The reality of the situation is much more complex. According to Pat Duffy’s research, there is a massive amount of literature with synesthesia, most of it modern. That means that there had to have been a shift. For all of Ms. Duffy’s pieces of literature, synesthesia was used as a characteristic rather than as a literary device. In all the pieces of work I observed, synesthesia was used as a literary device rather than as a characteristic. Meaning that at some point there had to have been a shift.
Roadblock Info: Teams will have to explain the limitations of their research and future research.
One limitation is that although the industrial revolution’s impacts were long lasting, my research only observed the direct consequences. Of course this is extremely helpful in understanding how synesthesia was portrayed at the time, but there is little use in my research in hypothesizing how the shift between synesthesia as a literary device and synesthesia as characteristic occurred.
Other limitations were that the pieces of works chosen had research done on them that explicitly stated that there was synesthesia in the literature. The reason that the pieces of works were chosen this way, was that the literature absolutely had to include synesthesia, and there was not enough time to read hundreds of pieces of literature in Russian and English to discover if synesthesia existed in each book. That being said, there may be many more books that are more popular and have more obvious examples of synesthesia that were not included in this study.
There may have been a bias because in what was considered natural and industrial language and synesthesia. I had to decide whether or not something was considered natural or industrial according to a code I developed. In order to minimize the effect of bias, I had a consultant to identify synesthesia. but none was used to reconfirm natural and industrial language.  
Luckily, our team came in 3rd. So tune in next week to root for #teamsynesthete in a chance to win $1 million!

2 comments: