I wanted to point you towards some non-traditional resources for developing a topic for this class. Assuming you have a general idea of what you want to study, here’s a few tools you can use to begin identifying material.
Wikipedia
Side-stepping the inevitable debate regarding whether you should use Wikipedia as a source in an academic paper, I do recommend using it to identify preliminary sources for just about any topic. Building from our reading, I am going to pretend that I am researching rape culture. Here’s a link to the Wikipedia page for the topic. Skimming the article, I notice citations to Alexandra Rutherford’s article “Sexual Violence Against Women.” The references section contains a link to the article.
Scanning the “Criticisms” section, I see the importance of Mary Koss’s 1984 study.
I also see Christina Hoff Summers’s arguments in opposition to the ubiquity of rape culture and bell hooks’s complications of the concept.
The references section contains links to at least 25 other potential sources, but I am going to start working with these 4.
Amazon.com
Amazon can be a great place to begin researching a topic, because their recommendation system can point you to other works connected to your topic. Because I know her work is mostly in books, I’m going to look up Christina Hoff Summers’s work here. I am able to locate the book in question and use the “search inside” feature to find references to rape culture. Sure enough, I find that the book contains several discussions of the term.
The most useful component of Amazon to a research project is usually it’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” display (although it doesn’t look like any of the books there will address rape culture, so I am moving on).
Google Scholar
Google Scholar works best with academic sources, but it can also work with non-academic sources as well. The beauty of Google Scholar is that it will show you every other source that has referenced a source. To being with, I am going to try and track down the 1984 Koss study identified in the Wikipedia article.
Here is the search results for Mary Koss on Google Scholar. Looking through her Google Scholar author’s page, I see several other studies that have been cited even more. Any of these would make for a valuable source for my topic.
More importantly, however, I can click to see which papers have cited her work. This allows me to “chain” sources together, to get a sense of the ongoing discussion of which they are a part.
I can also run a search to see what other studies have cited Summers’s Who Stole Feminism?
Of course, once I have these sources I will need to locate them. Most will likely be available via USF’s library (hard copies) or digitally through its databases (such as Jstor). And USF librarians would be more than enthusiastic to help you locate more sources for your study.
Delicious
A final tool I will show you today is delicious.com, a social-bookmarking tool. Delicious works like any bookmarking tool in a web browser, except it saves and aggregates those sites, with tags and notes, and makes them publicly accessible. So, when I search for “rapeculture” on delicious, I am seeing what other people have saved with that tag.
Here, I find an interesting blogpost by Greta Christina to compare to the more academic material I have already identified. This might suggest the scope of my paper, to examine the ways in much public discourse reflects (or diverges) from the more academic discussions.
I also find a link to a reddit discussion on Facts and Myths concerning rape.
