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Journal of Applied Communication Research Vol. 30, No. 4, November 2002, pp. 350 –357 Building Bridges Across Fields, Universities, and Countries: Successfully Funding Communication Research Through Interdisciplinary Collaboration Zena Biocca and Frank Biocca ABSTRACT Even though there are few directorates explicitly dedicated to communication research at places like the National Science Foundation, there are significant opportunities for funding of interdisciplinary research on “communication problems.” This article informally shares some principles, rules of thumb, and ideas about funding communication technology research projects, though it applies to other areas as well. The article draws on the experience of the communication technology research experience at the international, cross-university, and interdisciplinary network of Media Interface and Network Design (M.I.N.D.) Labs. KEY WORDS: Funded research, new media, virtual reality, presence. Do Funding Agencies Love Communication? M any believe that when it comes to funding, communication is a bit of an ugly duckling. “No one loves us,” communication researchers protest. Chances are that most of the readers of this article were not lucky enough to receive systematic training in seeking, writing, and successfully funding their research as a communication Ph.D. student. There probably were not that many grants funding large projects in the communication department in which you were trained. If there was some outside research funding, chances are the funding was not very large and it probably was not from classic sources such as the National Science Foundation. Although there were many exceptions in the health communication and persuasion areas in the past decades, compared to fields such as biological science Zena Biocca is Grant and Administration Manager at the M.I.N.D. Lab at Michigan State University. After a 23 year career in healthcare management, over a dozen of those years in distance/virtual situations, she joined the lab to assist with grant writing, development and administration of the labs. Frank Biocca (Ph.D., Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Ameritech Professor of Telecommunication at Michigan State University, where he directs the Media Interface and Network Design (M.I.N.D.) Labs. He conducts research on cognition and communication when using emerging interfaces, mostly in the area of augmented reality and virtual reality. Copyright 2002, National Communication Association 351 JACR NOVEMBER 2002 and engineering, large government funding (more than $1 million) for communication is relatively new. It is true that sometimes foundations smiled upon communication projects that promised to seek causes or solutions to social problems such as violence, drug use, drunk driving, HIV, etc. In this tradition, communication scholars find themselves welcomed and even pursued by some of the offices of the National Institutes of Health, such as the National Cancer Institute and its Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch. The good news is that today participation in large ambitious projects fueled by large grants is becoming more common in the field, if not in all sub-areas. Times are more promising for communication researchers with good ideas. What follows is based upon our experience in building and funding the multiuniversity, international Media Interface and Network Design (M.I.N.D.) Labs. (More on what these are below.) What we offer in this article is a lively tour with some folk wisdom, rules of thumb, principles that have worked for us, warnings based on errors we have made, and clear opinions. In the literature on “grant writing” you may come across those selling “a certain formula.” Most are either charlatans or fools. On the other hand, we believe that there is a blend of wise practices that a creative and competent scholar can undertake to increase his or her probabilities for funding. There are also a number of mechanical and strategic issues in writing grants. Our experiences in writing grants for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the European Union, grant foundations, corporations, and university-based funders suggest that they can vary greatly. But advice on minutiae and mechanics can be tedious. These nuances may be very different from one funding organization to another. So we will forgo these here to discuss issues that might apply to funding regardless of the organization. (Those details are usually available from the funding sources—pages and pages and pages. . . .) Searching for the “Communication Directorate” at the National Science Foundation Should you wander the information highways of federal agencies, do not look for neon signs that say: Communication funding at the next exit. For example, communication is not recognized explicitly as a field within the National Science Foundation. A problem you say. Yes, to some degree. Rather, the problem is the reviewers of your grant proposal. They will come from outside the field. So assumptions may or may not be shared, and you may get a “not one of us” bias. But, in fact, communication funding is buried all over the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Commerce Department, etc. Communication researchers have to carefully search under sub-headings such as NSF’s Computers, Information Science, and Engineering (a favorite at the M.I.N.D. Labs), NIH’s cancer communication, or behemoth initiatives with communicationfriendly words in them such as “information” and “interface” in places like NSF’s Information Technology Research Initiative and Human-Computer Interaction (under NSF CISE). Communication often finds a home because the research we do often fits in interdisciplinary projects and tends to cross fields. Let’s turn to the key term that helps unlock some of the barriers to communication researchers, “interdisciplinary.” 352 BUILDING BRIDGES BIOCCA & BIOCCA Start Your Grant Writing by Buying a Pair of Shoes The one thing we can clearly link to millions of dollars in successful funding is walking—mixed in with a little talking, of course. The first thing a communication scholar should do is walk around campus. Chances are that you will find many excellent researchers on your campus. When we first arrived at Michigan State University we had an empty room called a lab, a sense we wanted to do humancomputer interaction research, and a small pot of funds to begin the process of building a real communication technology lab. We put on our shoes and walked over to visit psychologists, engineers, education researchers, the medical school, and even unusual (to us!) disciplines such as anatomy and astrophysics. (Meetings with the latter—yes, astrophysicists, you might be surprised to know—led to successful funding. What area of communication? Visual communication and scientific communication funded in the Physics neighborhoods of NSF.) Collaboration with other disciplines is a must for communication scholars. Over 1⁄2 of the very large grants you receive, may not be headed by you, but, by your colleague in another department, another college, or another university. Also, the larger the grant, the more collaboration matters; the less your field matters. Scholars in any sub-area of communication may have more in common with colleagues in other fields like engineering, psychology, or English than with the researchers in their own department. Sound familiar? Communication scholars swim in an interdisciplinary sea. Being comfortable with interdisciplinary intellectual environments can be an asset. Because of this environment and, we believe, one of the author’s intellectual foundations in undergrad philosophy, we realized that it was enjoyable to listen to someone in a completely different field, listen carefully, and understand how their area related to key communication research issues. But do not just look for like-minded scholars. Why? They may not really need you on a grant. They do what you do. But scholars in allied fields like engineering, education, medicine, etc. may need the theoretical perspective or methodological skills that a communication scholar might provide, for example, in persuasion research, human computer interaction, polling, discourse analysis, etc. To ask you to join them, these scholars need to know how your research interests can complement their research efforts and help support a successful grant. Before you talk, you need to listen very carefully with the communication theory part of your brain running at full throttle, carefully translating concepts, causal models, and other assumptions from one theoretical framework to another. Interdisciplinary proposals that truly cross fields are increasingly required by funding agencies and increasingly sought in previously insulated fields. Perhaps we, as communication scholars, just need to learn how our view of communication theory fits into interdisciplinary programs. There are many ways researchers in other fields can benefit from the input of communication scholars. It seems many of these researchers often have communication questions, goals, or needs in their projects. If some of these are related to your interests, then they may drop you an email and invite you to handle the “communication issue” “humancomputer interaction component,” or “persuasion campaign” in their project. If it interests you, say yes. If it doesn’t, say no, no matter how much funding is available. (More on that later.) 353 JACR NOVEMBER 2002 We believe there are communication questions in every other field. Learn to listen to sounds of communication in the discourse of another field. In the area of communication technology you have to love interdisciplinary work, use your training to navigate unfamiliar terrain, and enjoy the creative moments when two fields give rise to something completely new. We listen for the key terms and their definitions, the correlational assumptions, the causal statements, and the methodological assumptions. We are always listening for the “communication question” in any discourse, the place where there is common ground. Let us provide a concrete example. Consider the field of optics and that of communication. Little common ground there? Superficially optics and communication don’t seem related, but have you ever looked at a TV set, the lens in a camera, etc. . . . ? A sunny afternoon and two capuccinos on the deck of Beaner’s, a coffeehouse in East Lansing, with a colleague in optics led us to a patent application. The patent area was projective augmented reality systems, and a technique for using optics to facilitate face-to-face communication technology between two mobile humans. The idea required both fields, as neither one of us had the other piece of the puzzle, but, over coffee, we discovered the connections. There are many such connections across fields, ones that truly create wholes that are more than the sum of the parts. We have found ourselves sharing ideas with astrophysics and radiology, as well as, with the more predictable areas of cognitive science, education, and computer science. Like good communicators, we begin by listening. Build a Place That Welcomes Interdisciplinary Communication Research It is good to have a place where connections across fields occur more often. The first Media Interface and Network Design (M.I.N.D.) Lab was created in 1998 when Frank Biocca arrived at Michigan State University from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where the name was conceived. The M.I.N.D. Lab is focused on the interaction of mind and technology, specifically on how mental processes are altered, facilitated, or impeded by different forms of communication technology, the properties of interfaces, for example. We are particularly interested in how minds adapt to communication technologies, and more practically how communication technologies might be altered to better conform to or leverage psychological processes such as those associated with spatial cognition or intersensory coordination. We also have explored cases where technologies and minds do not “fit,” as when distortions in telecommunication channels affect person perception or when users of virtual reality systems experience simulation sickness or intersensory conflict. Soon after the first M.I.N.D. Lab began, a second lab at Ohio State University led by Prabu David followed. The idea was to create a network of people, each building on the others’ strengths. All the labs are interested in related aspects of the interaction of mind and technology, but have different theoretical, methodological, or engineering skills. Telecommunication links allow research to be distributed across labs doing slightly different things, while remaining coordinated. We added telecommunication to an old idea: the sum can truly be greater than the parts. Each individual M.I.N.D. Lab gains new capabilities by being part 354 BUILDING BRIDGES BIOCCA & BIOCCA of a network of labs working on interdisciplinary and cross-university research problems. The M.I.N.D. Lab network has grown explosively in the past year with labs at the Eindhoven Technical University in the Netherlands, Fernando Pessoa University in Portugal, the Helsinki School of Economics in Finland and the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow! The three European labs have just received two grants from the European Commission on the topic of “presence,” a problem that can only be looked at interdisciplinarily. These labs were added because their unique research focuses complement and extend research capabilities of the M.I.N.D. Labs in general. Because not all the labs are in mainstream communication departments and several of the researchers are not in communication, the network of labs as a whole celebrates the spirit of interdisciplinary research in its very international, interdisciplinary, and distributed structure. Many of the M.I.N.D. Labs also sought out other researchers with whom to collaborate on their own campus, not only in the halls of the communication department. American and European funders encourage and sometimes require cross campus and multi-disciplinary proposals and often want to see some indication that the various settings can work together or have a history of doing so. The M.I.N.D. labs network is already built on the model of interdisciplinary cross-university research. Giving Starts at Home: Your University as a Source of Funding The best place to get seed funding is your university. All campuses have pockets of explicit and implicit “seed funds.” Typically the amounts can be quite small, but they allow you to get a key piece of measurement equipment or to fund a student. The amounts can be amazingly high as well. In its third year, the M.I.N.D. Lab was able to get a $600,000 grant from our university foundation, the MSU Foundation. Because this grant has no “overhead” (i.e., the 40%⫹ amount that universities take “off the top” of most grants) it was the equivalent of a $1,000,000 grant. How did we get these funds? It was an open competition. But we assembled a bold plan to build a large—yes, interdisciplinary—research program in communication technology. Because these university grants are really “grants to get grants,” we boldly promised that we would return all the funds given to us in the form of overhead on future grants for our research! A gamble. Yes. But, from the university’s viewpoint, this is not really a grant. Rather, it is an investment in the power of your ideas. We were happy to be able to keep our promise to the university. In the following three years we participated in successful grant proposals that returned the funds, not just the total funding amount, but in total overhead. We were glad to reward their faith in us and communication technology research. Don’t Make Your Grants Too Lean Writing a grant proposal in the area of new technology is like staring into a crystal ball. There are many things that you cannot predict. Our experience is that 100% of the time we encounter unexpected costs before the grant is over, a piece of equipment we did not anticipate, more staff than we expected, etc. There is nothing worse than trying to accomplish a difficult project with not enough 355 JACR NOVEMBER 2002 money. An under-funded grant can cost money to the lab that is unwise enough to take on a project that requires more money than they are granted. Taking an offer of 80% of the money you need is tempting, but not if you have to deliver 100% of the intellectual product. We never assume that we can perfectly predict the future when we write a grant proposal. Our experience tells us it is not possible. The more you are doing something “truly new,” the harder it is to predict. We always make sure that there is a small percentage of money in the grant for the “unexpected costs.” Day Trips for Grants: Visiting Washington or Brussels If you are extraverted, have some really good ideas, and can think on your feet, you might consider visiting project managers and directorates in Washington or Brussels. We have done both and learned some things along the way. Most project directors love to talk to researchers. That’s their job. In our experience, most genuinely want to help you. They can be amazingly welcoming and generous with their time. But be prepared. Each is a serious researcher who has seen a lot of grant proposals and a lot of ideas. Do not show up with very vague ideas or to ask, “tell me what will you fund me to do.” A colleague, an assistant professor, showed up at the National Library of Medicine with some very vague ideas about his research. He suddenly found himself on the defensive as the director and an associate started tearing into his hastily formed ideas and picking apart his vague logic. It was not pretty. He was rescued from the fire by a staff member of the M.I.N.D. Lab who happened to be along. She simply gave examples of concrete projects and ideas she had heard discussed earlier in another meeting. The assistant professor was grateful. So be ready to suggest several good research ideas. If you have only one, you may find the hour long when the project manager says, “We don’t do that.” Be prepared to listen to the project director and find some resonance between what you want to do and what the directorate does. If there is no fit, you didn’t do your homework, as you shouldn’t be in the room. None of these directorates is a communication directorate, so the theoretical and methodological discourse may not always be framed in familiar ways. Learn to speak languages other than “communication.” You will still be able to “say the same thing” but, an engineer, psychologist, medical doctor, or anthropologist will understand you. The Worst Thing That Can Happen: You Get the Grant! If you are like the authors of this article, you didn’t come to academia to make money. Rather, you came to enjoy the intellectual freedom it affords. We were both executives in corporations, one at a new tech firm in Silicon valley, the other at a national medical firm with over 14,000 employees. We like the idea of getting up in the morning and deciding: what interesting question do I want to think about today? Do not throw away this freedom. You may have heard this already, and it may be repeated in the articles in this issue: Never get a grant for work you are not sure you really want to do. You may find yourself doing three to five years of hard labor in the prison of false dreams. Academia was never a place to make money. Grant 356 BUILDING BRIDGES BIOCCA & BIOCCA money brings few resources to you personally. Only get grants for what you want to do. It is not, as some people believe, that this mistake occurs because a communication researcher made a “bargain with the devil” to receive funding. While national agendas can bend funding priorities by throwing funds at national problems, usually the people working on them are interested in some aspect of those problems. No one is sitting there asking you to enslave your brain by signing a parchment in red ink. Usually, the problem of working on the wrong research happens more subtly. You may be tempted, by a colleague you really admire and love, to join a project. At first you may have dangerous thoughts like: “I like this person.” “It won’t be that much work.” Or “It will fit in with what I do.” These self-deceptions occurred to Frank on one grant. Truly excellent work was done in that project, but the topic did not really interest him. He only agreed because he thought two of the dangerous thoughts: “I really like this person” and “It won’t really be that much work.” Stop and ask yourself, do I really want to study this topic? Ignore all other factors: funding amounts, who else is working with you, visibility, etc. If the answer is no, then step away, even if it is a feast, because the food might be hard to digest. “There Is No Money for What I Do” Some readers will take the warning above as an excuse for not seeking funding. The dispirited communication researcher may say, “There is no funding for what I do.” The cynical one may say, “I can only get funding if I sell out.” In most cases, this is, to say it politely, BS. There is funding for quality work on almost any topic. BUT it may take imagination. And did I say “quality”? Let me add that quality as measured “across disciplines” is important. Consider the dispirited communication researcher. If you listen, you might hear something like, “I submitted one or two proposals, and they didn’t get funded.” Humh? One or two? Did we say that 80% of proposals submitted don’t get funded. You are likely to fail far more frequently than you succeed. Now consider the cynical argument. Chances are that if you are trying to simply “chase funding” in areas you know little about, you will never be able to write a quality proposal because you lack the expertise. What about “obscure” areas? Can communication philosophy be funded? Let me provide an example. The M.I.N.D. Lab has different project areas. One of them is in the area of “presence,” which is most succinctly, if misleadingly, defined as the sense of “being there” in a mediated environment. The way we treat the topic at our lab borders on philosophy. Most will say that surely, communication philosophy is hard to fund. But buried in theory and design projects on new technology you will find this philosophical topic under study. And, in a stroke of justice, if a topic is valuable, it may find funding. After years of unfunded study, the M.I.N.D. Lab found funding under a 20 million Euro initiative on the very philosophical topic of “presence.” It turns out that interdisciplinary teams of cognitive scientists, engineers, and yes, communication scholars, are ready to work together on this “philosophical” topic dealing with a property of consciousness. 357 JACR NOVEMBER 2002 If You Are Funded, Get Additional Funds for Bright Undergraduate Researchers Who Might Want to Work With You The M.I.N.D. Lab at Michigan State University has a very active internship program. All research projects have at least one undergraduate intern. Our forcredit internship program initiates undergraduate students to the world of research. But NSF allows us to reward the best with the opportunity to receive supplemental support for undergraduate research when a grant is awarded. We have funded several undergraduate students through this program. Several of our interns went on to graduate school, graduating with Ph.Ds from Michigan State University, Stanford, CalTech, and other campuses. Learning to Love Forms: Preparing Grant Proposals for Different Agencies, Different Fields, and Even Different Countries Funding comes from different agencies, and it can come from different countries. As we mentioned above, we have had the agony and the ecstasy of writing grant proposals for NSF, NIH, the European Union, corporations, and internal funding sources. Each is different in style, form, and strategy. The process can be tedious and detailed. As you try to get into the nitty gritty of the grant writing style for your target agency, you will have to learn to love forms. A recent set of grant proposals for an agency in Europe led the two of us to several days of brutal, exhausting, round-the-clock writing as we battled our ideas against the minefields of what was to us a very different European format. Take the time to learn grant writing style. NSF and NIH and probably your campus sponsor grant writing and funding seminars all the time. Ask for copies of successful grant proposals from successful colleagues. Find out what funding opportunities your university offers—many faculty members have no idea that they can get initial or research seed grants from their own campus. Make friends with the folks who sign off on proposals for your school—they have a wealth of knowledge and can be critical at deadline time! Someone on your campus has funding. Contact them and find out how they did it. Well worth the price of lunch or a couple of cappuccinos! Conclusion Well . . . the deadlines are solid, the application requirements tedious and the percent of proposals that get funded low. But don’t get discouraged. . . . A good idea expressed clearly in twenty or so pages can convince a group of your colleagues to award the idea millions of dollars, that can even be $100,000⫹ for every page of carefully written prose. Amazing, when you think of it! The funds only go to the person (or the interdisciplinary group) with ideas and the energy to turn them into solid research. Maybe this person sounds like you?