My Research Philosophy

In my mind research falls broadly into 2 categories:

1) Research for profit.

2) Research not for profit. 

Research for profit tends to involve selling an end product where the research time and effort gets paid for at the back end when the product is sold and this is normally reflected in the price of that or associated products.

Research not for profit tends to involve information that should be shared among scolars for the common good and common understanding on a subject.  How different the world would look if Einstein had never published his papers!!....and to be very topical - don't start me on about gravitational waves! - well we know where the Nobel prize for Physics is going this year!!

It is my belief that my research will always fall into the later category as I feel that it is important social history that I will be unravelling and it may be useful to someone in the future.  Understanding our past has always been an obsession with humans and that I expect to continue well into the future.

Being quite new to stone ginger beer bottle collecting, research often starts top down.  What I mean by that is that the evidence of breweries is already there from the bottles I have and so establishing details about breweries is a lot easier.  You already know they existed from the physical evidence.  Already I have found many ginger beers from Berkshire as is demonstrated by my collection.  A friend of mine has recently indicated to me that there could be as many as 300 different types of ginger beer bottle from Berkshire and possibly more.

As my ginger beer bottle collection grows and the rate of me collecting them slows, the research I undertake starts to become more fundamental and it turns on it's head and has to become bottom up.  What I mean by this is that I have to start with information from historical documents and start to establish what possible breweries were around and whether they had their own brand of ginger beer bottle.  From that research it will give me a greater understanding of whether or where I can find the ginger beer bottles that relate to that brewery.

I have created a brief flowchart below demonstrating my expected path on the research that I am beginning to undertake.  This may well change as I find better approaches to the research.  See below.