BP1: Nial C. DeMena

I see bibliographies, search engines, and your Project MUSE sites as an aggregation. You're pulling in vast quantities of information and with that the "white noise" just in terms of the volume.  It's your job to sort through that. Ten-percent maybe have immediate use. What doesn't have use sits there in your mind for awhile. You can use it later.  But I guess I'm not shy in the collection process. How do you know you don't like it, or you will, until you read it?

The research is in the ten-percent. These books are what's leftover. You read, condense, translate and organize according to your caprice. You're making the work of a scholar you're own: understanding it, organizing it to your liking, making use of it, dismissing it--the reactions are yours. I like to chart. If it doesn't chart, I probably don't understand it. Comprehension for me is in the visual register. The charts, which are not necessarily preconceived, are my reactions I use as primers for me to write. 

I start at the typewriter. I stand up--because you think on your feet--and face my charts and write the connections, focusing on the play language and keeping up with my thoughts, and the implications of the ideas I've written down from my readings, however jumbled or banal or brilliant (or shit) they are.

I take my charts, my free-writing on the typewriter, and sit at the word processor and hammer away.



On a more general note:
Wikipedia sucks in my experience. Comic books and their longer form, the graphic novel; scenes from movies; comments I make haphazardly and write down; an unintentional pattern in a chart I made; an idea I co-opted from video game design, or architecture, or biology; these grease the wheels of creativity in my brain. Proper rest, sun light, a diet of tea and coffee and snacking, help me keep vigilance. As for the rest, it's an alchemy of common sense, intuition, and a fear of making an epic mistake. And I check when I don't know and try to do as much as possible at one sitting. Using Boolean characters helps once in a while. Knowing the terms to generate the hits you want, or search engine efficacy, makes a difference in the amount of time spent.

In the end, my research method is to visualize the person who takes three hours to do a term paper and scores better than you do. How would they do it faster, better, and more efficiently? The less time I can take to do what I want, the more time I have to spend on another problem. I will find a topic from my notes, chart it, play with it on the typewriter, and try to be original in my language and argument.