Blog Posts 1, 2

1:

Most of my research, like my work, is done haphazardly. My goal with research is less to find that one perfect document and more to finagle an understanding of an era from contemporary texts. Much of the research that I did as an undergraduate centered around primary documents and their recreations. Many of these works were old, fragile, and without proper annotation. The challenge that opens up before me when confronted with an enigmatic work is the thing that drives me to continue my research. My research tools in the past have been OskiCat, EEBO, JSTOR, the MED (Middle English Dictionary), Oxford Catalog, the Digital Scriptorium, and another Oxford Collection. These sources were able to allow me an understanding of the time period through offering an organized collection of the works. The best part of these sites is that several of them offer more than just prose or poetry. There are biographies, vitaes, illustrated editions, and histories.

I guess if my process had to be summarized it would go something like this: find interesting person/idea in time period, research person/idea through primary doc's, research person/idea through secondary docs, examine the affects of the person/idea on the larger scheme of time.

2:

I have to agree with Mike, who agrees with Quinn, who agrees with Hayley. The future of the literary discipline will take place in an almost entirely digital universe. Any marginal publications that are production intensive or costly will no longer have a physical form. The literary universe is merging with the digital one and there is very little that those of us who still value the aesthetics of books, libraries, and the literary process can do about it. I see the peer review process as moving further down this road as well. I can imagine a wiki styled site run by a community of experts, operating as moderators, that would allow peer discussion to take place in a healthy and productive environment. The movement into this digital realm will democratize the information so highly guarded in the top end libraries of today.

The notion of the 'invisible college' is interesting as it maps what many would see as a successful dissemination of information from the source. The invisible college is autonomous, run through the desires and whims of it's members. I believe that this structure is, like most resources on the internet, effective when dealing with the general, but not rigorous enough to cope with the abstract or specific. While these digital catalogues and communities may bring about a conversation, they certainly do not offer the final word.

Responding to Blog Post 1

Wow--it has been so interesting to read about everyone's different research interests and approaches to research.  There are a few comments, in particular, that I definitely want to respond to.

First of all, I am so glad that some of you, like Jess and Jennifer picked up on this idea of  research journal or a research record.  This is probably one of the most important things that I have learned as a "professional researcher" (i.e., librarian, or "glorious" person, as Jennifer wrote).  Although it seems like it might take a lot of time to record your steps, it actually SAVES a lot of time in the long run, because you don't end up repeating yourself.  You get a much better sense of what works, and what doesn't, and this helps you become a much better researcher in the long run.

I was also glad to see that many of you are really using this class as an opportunity to supplement either your work in another class or your creative pursuits.  Again, although the syllabus (and some of my communication) had used ENGL 5014 as an example of a course/research project that you could use as a starting place for this class, I want you all to feel comfortable using this class in a way that best suits your work and your research needs.

I'm really looking forward to reading the next group of blog posts!

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.

Blog Post 1-Jennifer Schrauth

Research was always something my mother was good at and I was (and still am) not. Like me, my mother likes to know things, but whereas I am lazy and limit my intake of knowledge to what I can absorb through stumbling through books, attending classes, and performing basic web searches, my mother searches until she finds the exact answer she's looking for, wherever that search may take her.

Of course I had to do research in my undergraduate, though most of it was more scientific than literary. Like Robert, I did a good deal of my research online through online databases and ebooks. Typically I would play around with different combinations of subjects, key words, and boolean phrases until I found enough articles. If I was unable to glean sufficient data from home, I would go to the campus library and ask a research librarian to help me find more information in print. If I didn't do a citation immediately after finding the article, I would typically end up with the hard copy I had printed out with no idea of which database I had found it through or how to find it again to properly cite it. To avoid this headache, I, like Jess, plan to take Towheed's advise on "recording the research route."

For my research this year, I expect that I will begin about where I usually do, through using broad subject search vehicles like Google Scholar, Wikipedia, websites, and databases to gain general knowledge and help key in on a specific subject before moving on to search spots with more specific information. I expect that as I get further into my research I will go to the library more than once and will inevitably enlist the help of a research librarian, because they are glorious people who know a lot more about research and the ins and outs of the library than I ever will.

Blog Post 1: Kevin, the Reluctant Tech Convert

My first real experience with research was in 11th-grade AP English. I had to team up with 3 other people to find what we could on Sylvia Plath...and we had to present the paper. Unfortunately, we had few of the resources available today in 1994. The school library nor the local library presented us with many options other than primary sources--and the ones available were not so helpful. I viewed research as an unfruitful pan for gold long after I was finished with Ms. Plath.

By the time I finally became serious about completing my undergrad in 2005, the research landscape had undergone a huge shift from limited print resources that were clutched stingily to the hearts of faraway universities...to the great information share of the vast caches of internet sources that sprouted in the ether. My freshman year, I was lost in unfamiliar territory. My experiences with computers were at that point fairly limited. I'm still learning, but I've worked hard to get up to speed.

I began with Wikipedia, though unlike Jamie, I tended to use it as a tertiary source in almost everything I turned in. My early profs didn't seem to mind so much--but after the widely-reported flaw in Wikipedia's review of credentials (whereby an unqualified hack altered hundreds of articles from Baywatch to heart surgery)--I stopped using it as anything other than a quick review of a given subject.

I felt like a research beginner for a long time, much like Dana , Hayley, and Michelle feel now (though I suspect a touch of extra humility, since they seemed to have a decent approach in the works;). By the time I finished my BA, however, I felt like I had a pretty good idea where to look. I made a special trip to VT's wonderful Newman Library to research a paper that ended up having legs in several different directions. The paper, "The Shared Cycle: Daoist Principles in the Appalachian Writings of James Still," helped me complete an independent study, was cropped and submitted to become a finalist at WVU's Annual Literature Symposium (the link direct to Concord's writeup of the previous year, as I could not find the article for 2010), was also extended and greatly altered for an application to VT's Philosophy MA program (a failed app, as it turned out)...and was finally reconfigured for my VT English application (thankfully a successful one).

Throughout the course of the research I've done thus far, I've familiarized myself with JSTOR, the MLA International Bibliography, Google Scholar, and a few others (many of which are mentioned in the Towheed article. I intend to continue use of these resources, but I'm also excited about the additional resources offered at VT, such as Summon and Addison.

For my upcoming research paper, I plan to start with these online resources, then move on to print. As of now, I think my subject matter will likely be William S. Burroughs (one of my favorite authors/miscreants from the Beat Generation) though the amount of material out there might end up redirecting me.

Mike Roche: Blog Post 1

In my own writing, research is the cure to my writer's block. Often, I will find I can't complete the next line of a poem because there seems to be no information on the topic left in my head on the particular subject I'm writing about. When this happens, it's usually a good time for me to go looking for interesting facts. If I'm writing a poem about astrophysics I will usually Google it and see what kind of stuff shows up, or like Jamie mentioned in his blog, use Wikipedia. It's not usually a lot of information I need, just some clarification here or a tidbit there to give me some inspiration and keep me writing. And as we read in the reading, Wikipedia is frequently updated; so it can often reflect recent changes in a scientific topic like astrophysics.

The way I research for this class will be different, though. I've learned from the readings that I need to start paying more attention to my sources' credibility, especially when writing a scholarly research paper. This week's reading emphasized the need to verify the credibility of our sources. One helpful way to evaluate it, I found, is by looking at the publishing company. Is it a traditionally "big-name" one like Harper-Collins? Or if it's not, is it at least a university press? Just noticing this stuff will be very helpful when I am collecting sources for research papers.

Dana - Blog Post #1

My research method is elementary at best. As an undergraduate at VT I used Newman library search tools like Addison but never became proficient in the site itself. Like Michelle, I'm fond of Google and Wikipedia as starter sites for personal research. When it comes to scholarly research however, I'm a hard-copy kind of girl. I prefer books as references and will choose those over an online database or journal article any day. Consequently, this has caused me a considerable amount of research grief in the past and has severely limited the kinds of research I've allowed myself to explore.

The screencast in Module One of the Newman library homepage enlightened me to all the ways I failed to use my own library as an undergrad. Module Two's reiteration and deeper discussions of Addison and Summon by way of tutorial links built on the general information of Mod One and gave me a better idea as to what kind of research each tool focuses on. Also like Michelle, I found Towheed's reminder of how to refine Google searches by ~, +, and - functions to be helpful.

As far as my own research goes, to get a vague and general start I'll probably begin with a generalized masculinities search on Google Scholar since my interest is interdisciplinary in nature. I'd like to get a brief overview of what research is out there concerning perceptions of masculinity in American literature. Because masculinities and femininities as a comparative study is generally new, I may be limited in my research to new articles. Dependent on publication dates and the availability of sources, I'll narrow my literature focus based on either on author or decade and then pursue a Summons search. I'm not sure I will indulge in Towheed's suggestion of joining a research community since I've never tracked my own research trajectory before. However, I am interested in charting my bibliographical findings by way of either Endnotes or RefWorks (probably the latter since it doesn't seem to require software).

Hayley's First Blog Post

My research style up to this point has been quite rudimentary. I mostly searched in Addison, and tried to stick with JSTOR or Project Muse as an undergraduate, because I did not know a whole lot about evaluating information sources and wanted to be sure that what I was using was scholarly.

To begin researching for the wiki and the ENGL 5014 essay, I plan to use Summon—the “brand-new ‘library search engine.’” This is an especially attractive resource for me, because, as an undergraduate here at Virginia Tech, Summon did not exist yet. I know I want to research in the field of Medical Humanities, or illness in literature, so I hope that with thought, time, and Summon I will be able to refine this broad research interest into a manageable topic that fascinates me. Once I find this topic, and a few search results that seem dependable, I will begin evaluating/analyzing the information resources each result comes from, using, for example, the site (http://olinuris.library.cornell.edu/ref/research/skill26.htm) included in Module 2 for guidance. I will also use the specialized collections that were suggested to me when working on the Module 2 assignment: “Humanities International Complete,” and “Literature Research Center,” as well as related journals I already know of: “Literature and Medicine” and “Journal of Medical Humanities,” which Summon linked to here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/104920/. This site is very exciting for me, as it includes all articles that were published in the journal from 1997 on. Also, I would like to complement the scholarly journal articles I find with novels—which Module 2 described as primary sources—that depict different facets of medicine, illness, and dying.

Michelle's First Blog Post

Currently, I have very little to no research style. I haven’t needed to conduct scholarly research in years. However, I have researched topics of my own interest outside of the academic sphere and have used primarily online search engines such as Wikipedia and Google. I was forced to pay more attention to my search and research methods while preparing application materials for MFA programs. I implemented quotation marks as a method to pare my search results to the exact criteria I specified.

The readings for Module 2 have reintroduced some research strategies such as utilizing the – and + signs (from the Towheed reading) when limiting search criteria for online search engines. I was also introduced to brand new research techniques and resources, such as Project Gutenberg, and The Library of Congress. I have already used these two sources to seek information on Sarah Grand, a writer I am focusing on in a research paper for my Genre Studies course.

For my Genre Studies paper I intend initially on locating a myriad of sources in order to decide on the focus of my paper. In this primary search I will locate some of Sarah Grand’s articles and novels offered via Project Gutenberg, and explore JSTOR and other article databases through Virginia Tech’s library website. This module introduced me to the difference between VT’s library Addison and Summons search mechanisms. I will most likely use both to locate physical and online materials for my paper.

Then I will narrow my research after identifying a topic. I will maintain a research log as the Towheed reading encouraged, which was a new idea to me. I look forward to using this course to continue improving the way in which I research and organize my approach to writing scholarly papers, particularly my Genre Studies research paper.

Welcome!

The first week of class is officially over, and everyone should now have some idea of how we will be using this class blog.  I'm delighted to be the first one to post to it!

Over the course of this semester, I will provide eight different blogging prompts, and you will be required to respond to this on this blog.  However, if you ever have anything else you'd like to share in this community, don't hesitate to go ahead and throw it up here!  I will never detract points for extra posts; and, if you've read the syllabus, you know that you even have the opportunity to gain extra credit points by writing additional blog posts.

I've posted our first prompt in Module 2:

You've now read several articles about literary researchers and the tools that they (we) use.  Describe your own research style (or perhaps, lack thereof), and how you plan to start searching for resources for this class's wiki (and your ENGL 5014 essay, if appropriate).  For example, how will you decide on your topic, and where will you start researching?  


It has come to my attention that not ALL of you are currently enrolled in ENGL 5014 right now.  The ENGL 5014 class is required to turn in a bibliographic essay at the end of the semester, and I tried to make this class supplement the ENGL 5014 essay requirements.  However, if you are not taking ENGL 5014, then I encourage you to make this class supplement whatever research projects you're currently working on.  Talk about it here (on this blog), and we'll build our own support community.

Remember to tag your post with Blog Post 1 when you write your blog post!