What I’ve tried to do is combine both my personal experiences with scientific research. I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.
Research
It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.
To me, the Quran is a research book.
Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic.
My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.
I’ve always found it best to have a routine. I go to my study at the same time every day and climb into my bay window. I may not be inspired every day, but on the days I am, I need to be in place to write. If I’m not particularly inspired, I’ll revise or do research or correspondence.
But what many psychologists have done, probably because they did well on a test themselves and everyone wants high self esteem, is to create this little box and then do their research inside it.
There is more to folklore research than fieldwork. This is why in all of my other upper-division courses I require a term paper involving original research.
My Ph.D. is in operations research. I was interested in making things work better and using mathematics to help do that. So operations research is what I studied as an undergraduate and graduate student.
Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.