The Art of Cherry-Picking. Building Powerful Knowledge Bases
All good research begins with a knowledge base. Whether you want to conduct a UX study to develop an application or evaluate the impact of a public policy, you need initial knowledge as input to start working.
I often guide my students in building knowledge bases to write their graduate thesis because they must create a state-of-the-art first move. You probably know this, but in case you don’t, the state of the art is a systematization of everything that other people have researched (everything or at least everything you managed to collect) about a topic of interest. I also develop knowledge bases in collaboration with clients who want to study their organization or understand trends that may become an opportunity or a threat. All these paths start with cherry-picking, i.e., selecting, collecting, and standardizing quality information for subsequent analysis and interpretation.
I learned how to build a knowledge base when I did my PhD a million years ago. This fact changed my life (as it should when one does a PhD, right?). Since then, I have embarked on a campaign to accompany others in developing suitable knowledge bases to understand what the f* is going on with a given topic in a given context. But how do you make a sweet knowledge base?
