Today’s Plan:
- Whoa are We Behind
- Reviewing Proposals
- Methods/Practice Reading a Scholarly Article
- Homework
Whoa Are We Behind
Let’s take a look at our remaining schedule:
- April 6/8: Ideally you would finish your preliminary research, with 4-5 research annotations completed by next week
- April 13/15: You would spend 8-10 hours completing whatever constitutes your primary research
- April 20/22: You would draft the paper, focusing on the methods, findings, and discussion section
- April 27/29: You would finish submitting the paper and submit it for my feedback
- May 4/6: You would revise and resubmit the paper for a final grade. Final papers are due no later than Friday, May 7th at midnight
I lay this out because, honestly, I am a bit concerned. I myself have fallen behind in my grading and work, and there’s a number of people who haven’t turned in a proposal. Only one person in today’s class submitted there 2 research annotations.
Reviewing Proposals
I wanted to quickly examine a few proposals I received for today.
- Victoria’s Proposal
- Katelyn’s Proposal
- Christian’s Proposal
- Isaac’s Proposal
- Leonard’s Proposal
Strategies for Reading Academic Research
As we move past proposals, it is time to dig deep into research. I’ve already suggested some promising research to most of you. Now comes the challenging part–reading and digesting that material.
There’s a lot of jokes out there about the nature of academic research–why is it so difficult? Is this even English? Etc. Some of these chides are well-earned. But the thing to remember here is that academic vocabularies and styles develop over long periods of time. The more people study a particular problem, the more precise and deep meanings become.
Whatever your field, you will encounter these precise vocabularies. At first encounter, the prose can be daunting and appear almost impenetrable. My focus these next few weeks is to help acclimate you to academic discourse, to help you wade in to the kind of material that you will encounter over the next few years. Learning to read complex research in a short amount of time is a hard skill, but it is important to learn how to read it strategically. Likewise, it can be quite difficult to condense a 20-page article into a few paragraphs, and certainly the I have collected a few readings that should help us do this.
- Paul Gillin’s “How to Read and Summarize a 20-Page Research Report in 20 Minutes”
- Wikihow’s “How to Summarize a Journal Article”
- UBCiSchool’s “How to Read an Academic Article” video
From these, we can synthesize a few general rules:
- Pass One–see the framework–Begin by reading the abstract, introduction, and conclusion. Look at any tables, diagrams, and/or illustrations. Have an overall sense of the argument.
- In or near the conclusion, look for where the writer(s) advocate(s) for us to do something differently; what does she perceive as the impact of this research?
- Can you summarize the paper in a sentence or two in your own words?
- Pass Two–
- Highlight and annotate as you go. Look for keywords that indicate findings. Try to identify what problem the article hopes to address
- Especially when working with research, make note of the methodology. Was it a survey? An experiment? Was it qualitative research (textual analysis), or more quantitative (measurement)? When working with scholarship, pay attention to the theorists or scholars the author uses to support her argument.
- Pass Three–Can I answer all of the following questions?:
- What are the central arguments in the article?
- How did they collect their evidence?
- What does their evidence say?
- Why is the article important?
- What recommendations do the authors make?
- After reading this research, what recommendations can I make?
- How does the article contribute to my field of study, my present research?
Stewart, Arif, and Starbird (2018) detail how russian trolls inflamed arguments regarding police shootings in America by creating and retweeting highly partisan, inflamatory statements. They analyzed almost 249k tweets from 160k accounts and found that over 91% could be classified as either leans-left or leans-right. They chart how many of the top hash-tags and tweets from each leaning were produced or boosted by russian agents. Their analysis reinforces research on how filter bubbles are increasingly plaguing American political discourse: they find that troll activity “primarily circulates within and not across” political leanings (pp. 5).
At first, it might take you an hour to go through three passes of a typical 25 page academic article. It might take you two hours. With practice and experience, you will likely be able to cut those times down dramatically. But I want to stress that academic reading takes a lot more time than reading a medium.com post. When doing research, set plenty of time aside and be sure to write–DON’T JUST READ!
For Next Class
I’m expecting a 3-4 hour commitment this week. As the schedule above indicates, you need to read and annotate your research. This should help you tighten your research questions, develop any research materials, before you start your primary research project next week.
The primary research component of your final project is the most laborious. I’m expecting that you will do research (whatever you proposed to do in your paper) for at least 8 hours. This is generally the most labor-intensive time of the semester in this class, as I try to push you through to a draft of the final paper before you start gearing up for finals in other classes. Get’er done.
In class next week
