Beginning a Research Project

Objectives

• Identify possible topics for a paper by reviewing “hot topics” or keywords in current journals and books.

• Use general purpose sources to build up a knowledge base on the topic.

• Use free online note taking tools like Evernote to collect, sort, and organize your knowledge base.

How NOT to Research

• Select a clichéd high school essay topic such as “gun control,” “abortion,” “legalizing pot,” or “doping.”

• Make sure you have a definite position on the issue before doing the research.

• Use Google to find popular sources like online magazines, blogs, advertisements, and news websites. Avoid those pesky old journals!

• Cherry pick your sources for facts, statistics, or opinions that agree with you; ignore the rest.

Begin with your opinion, followed by the most biased sources you can find.

• I chose to write my paper on gun control because my family has lots of guns and Big Government wants to take them away. According to the NRA website, guns don’t kill people, people do. I couldn’t agree more with this fact. According to an anonymous comment on the site Cold Dead Hands.com, more people die each year from traffic accidents than guns. So we should ban cars, too, right?

How to Research Correctly

• First, explore your field’s journals and books to find a relevant topic that is actively being discussed by real scholars.

• When you find one that seems interesting to you, get some general information by consulting encyclopedias, textbooks, professors, YouTube videos, and reference books.

• When you’ve got the basics, go back to the journal articles and start collecting up-to-date information and opinions from the experts.

• Find the real controversies or points of disagreement.

Building Your Knowledge Base

• Make a list of specialized terms that come up in multiple sources: – multimodalities, hegemony, new media,

intertextuality.• Identify foundational articles and books that

are frequently referred to in the newer articles.

• Make note of relevant studies, statistics, and ideas that could prove useful later.

Matt’s Guerilla Research

1. Find the most up-to-date, recent, and relevant journal article you can find on the topic.

2. Go to the article’s bibliography and pick out all the entries that look relevant.

3. Find some of those articles or books.4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you have a huge list of

sources.5. Narrow down the list to a manageable size, favoring

articles that have been cited repeatedly by multiple authors.

Reading an Academic Article

1. It’s okay if you only understand bits and pieces.

2. Take time to study the structure, abstract, section headings.

3. Skim the article.4. Read intro and conclusion first.5. Read in multiple drafts.6. Take notes section-by-section.

Note Taking

1. Organize notes into sections2. Copy and paste useful info like statistics,

good quotations, definitions, etc. Always note page #!

3. Place a dot or mark beside passages you want to come back to later.

4. When you’re done with a section, try to summarize it in your notes.

Step by Step

• General topic: Facebook in Mass Communications.

• Go to Communications & Mass Media Complete database.

Surveillance

• From Wikipedia:– the monitoring of the behavior, activities, or other

changing information, usually of people for the purpose of influencing, managing, directing, or protecting.[2] Surveillance is therefore an ambiguous practice, sometimes creating positive effects, at other times negative.

• The [2]: Lyon, David. 2007. Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Genealogy

• Online dictionary: – A line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor:

"combing through the birth records and genealogies".– The study and tracing of lines of descent or development.

• Enotes definition:– In philosophy, genealogy is a historical technique in which

one questions the commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by showing alternative and subversive histories of their development. It has been developed as a continuation of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Self

• From Wikipedia:– The self is the idea of a unified being which is the

source of consciousness. Moreover, this self is the agent responsible for the thoughts and actions of an individual to which they are ascribed. It is a substance, which therefore endures through time; thus, the thoughts and actions at different moments may pertain to the same self. As the notion of subject, the self had been harshly criticized by Nietzsche at the end of the 19th century, on behalf of what Gilles Deleuze would call a "becoming-other".

Your Turn! (Step 1)

• Go to the library database: – Communication & Mass Media Complete

• Check “scholarly peer reviewed journals” and “references available.” Select English for language.

• Enter “Twitter” in search box.

Step 2

• Answer these questions in small groups:1. What are some of the keywords that pop up in

the titles of the articles?2. What are some of the research questions

scholars here are asking about Twitter?3. What seem to be the “hot topics” or recurring

themes about Twitter?4. Click on an article that interests you, then the

green “Find Similar Results” box on the left. Does anything relevant pop up?

Information Overload!

• Expect to be overwhelmed with unfamiliar concepts, complex ideas, and specialized terminology.

• Strive to answer these basic questions about each article: – What’s the context? (journal name, subject words, etc.)– What questions is she trying to answer? (title & abstract)– What’s the basic purpose and gist of it? (abstract, intro,

and conclusion)– What background information or concepts do you need

to better understand it?