Monumentos, planilhas e origami

Abstract

Planning and developing research on the political use of monuments in Hungary since 2010 led me to a methodological trap and I could not progress by what I understood to be the textbook formula for defining and solving a problem. Although I had a topic, an object, and a feeling that there was something to be investigated, I could neither describe the problem nor the research question in one sentence. I believed I would find the problem by analyzing government acts and public opinion and began the literature review, cataloging monuments and choosing a representative sample. I have treated the monuments as data and ignored that they were the witnesses and victims to be heard. I intend to critically describe this journey through the research object, wrong decisions, and alternative paths that showed me other possibilities. I intend to answer why my starting plan was wrong and what made it possible to correct the route during the research. From field experience, I will illustrate how the individual and collective history of the monuments enabled me to delimit a problem that did not fit into spreadsheets or modeling. The use of authors from architecture, history, linguistics, and memory, among others, allowed a multidisciplinary research perspective that I intend to present briefly. The flexibility of boundaries between areas of knowledge, science, and arts was complementary and should not exclude each other in my research to allow more interpretative freedom in context, space, and time. Additionally, author-network theories and secondary sources, online obtained have been used in my analysis of the research process. I expect to demonstrate that my wrong literal research planning decision inspired by quantitative concepts led me to a place unexplored by me until then: the object as the research object.