A semantic challenge of the genuine kind comes to me from the distinguished geographer Professor Alice Coleman. She has been responsible for a survey of the whole country’s land use, or utilisation as her project called it, though that distinction is not the semantic question under discussion. She is also the author of more than 300 academic papers (not that she told me this, being politely modest) and this is connected to her challenge.
Professor Coleman has a high concept of research as the discovery of something previously unknown, or ‘putting one’s hand out into the dark and bringing in a fistful of light, or — since the unknown might not co-operate — risking only a fistful of continuing darkness’.
The trouble is that the word research has, in her experience, become debased. From undergraduates down to A-level students or younger pupils, exercises in finding out things from books (or the internet) are dignified with the name ‘research’.
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