Today’s Plan:
- Timeline Review
- Paper Arrangement Overview
- Drafting Your Lit Review
- Drafting Your Methodology
Timeline Review
- 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
Paper Arrangement Overview
As we move from secondary research (reading articles) to primary research (playing your game), I wanted to review the overall paper structure. My goal today is to give you a clearer sense of how to outline your paper, and how/where the research you’ve already done might fit into that outline.
Of course, there is no one way to organize a paper. But there are some basic principles I can lay out that will work in most situations (genre here also matters, there’s a big difference between a research report and an argumentative essay–the former is more formal and suggests the structure I lay out below, the latter is more informal and allows for more creative play).
The standard science or social science outline looks like this:
- Introduction: Articulates the problem that generated the research question(s). Poses the research questions clearly. Lays out the thesis: which is the answers to the research questions.
- Literature Review: This reviews previous research on your topic. As I’ll show below, there’s a lot of ways to “group” this research; you should organize this section around ideas, not around individual articles
- Methodology: This section generally needs to do 3-4 things (in our case, most of you will only do two of them). I will go over these below.
- Data / Findings / Discussion: Sometimes you will see these sections separated–especially in the hard sciences where your data can be presented as numbers, graphs, and tables. I don’t think that any of you are working on these kinds of projects, except for those who are extending our race and gender projects. In these papers, you will see one section for Data (or Findings) and another section for Discussion, in which you compare your findings to previous studies in the literature review (noting what agrees and what disagrees with previous findings), you highlight and explain unexpected findings, and you suggest the impact of these findings (what they mean for the field, or what changes they suggest are necessary to our world–note that sometimes this happens in the conclusion).
- Conclusion: I think conclusions are quite hard to write; they have to summarize the entire paper (which, REMEMBER, the introduction should do) and either end emphasizing a change (if you did not do this in the discussion), a hope, a direction for future studies (say, what you would do next or what you would have done differently if you could start over or had more time).
Many of you are not writing a social science, experiment or quasi-experimental paper (that is, you aren’t developing a survey, measuring something, counting anything, etc etc). You are doing a more humanities-focused approach, one in which you interpret a “text” to discover hidden meaning, social/personal significance, cultural reflection, etc etc. But–and I hope you already see this–your papers, like our Sicart papers, are following something pretty close to this approach.
These papers still use a literature review, one in which we survey previous interpretations of that text. Some of them might be more relevant to our study than others. These papers often also include a methodology, even if we do not label it that. That is where we lay out a way of thinking about texts. For instance, in our Sicart papers, we explicated two criteria that he identifies as essential to developing meaningful ethical game play: player complicity and wicked problems. Your papers then turned to examine scenes from video games and assessed how well they executed these elements. Some papers argued that games created powerful, meaningful ethical experiences without using these criteria. I am currently working on a paper comparing Walking Dead to The Last of Us, arguing that the particular form of engaged witnessing Last of Us evokes engenders powerful and empathetic moral reflection, even if we (as players) do not feel complicit in the choices “our” protagonist makes. So, I establish Sicart and use his theory to read Walking Dead and explicate its effectiveness, but they use A Last of Us to illustrate how games can leverage our genre expectations (making difficult choices) to amplify moral experiences (by taking the choice away, making us live through the choices made by another). In my literature review, I talk about the power of books and film to also make us witness and experience, but argue that the interactivity/engagement of games, and the emergence, development, and popularity of the “ethical choice” game amplifies the power here (games are special!).
Writing a Literature Review
Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time I co-wrote a research article on multimodal artist Maira Kalman. The article reported on a multimodal project I developed for a Digital Video course on how Kalman’s approach to art echoed “radical” rhetorical theorists on the unpredictable nature of creative invention–on how we cannot teach creativity, but we can teach habits, practices, approaches, that might allow something creative to happen.
The original outline of that paper looked like this:
- Introduction
- Surveying Theories of Choric Invention
- Gregory Ulmer
- Thomas Rickert
- Byron Hawk
- Jeff Rice
- Sarah Arroyo
- Colin Brooke
- Explicating Kalman’s Aesthetic
Our reviewer feedback was tough, but fair:
On a similar note, the theoretical chops of this article come forward as relatively unconnected blocks. In the ULMER section, we get a block on Ulmer, interspersed with several others, but then it becomes a set of legos: a green block (Rickert [and Rickert and Kristeva]), then a red block (Hawk), then yellow (Brooke [and Brooke and Barthes]), then blue (Arroyo [and Arroyo and Deleuze and Guattari]), then purple (Rice [and Rice and De Certeau]). Each of these feels strangely disconnected and underdeveloped, particularly given the potential connections between Kalman’s work and each of these authors (as well as the theorists they are working in relation to).
Essentially, we had walked through our literature, or research, one source at a time (even if each of those sections often involved multiple sources). What we didn’t do is cut across all those sources to identify the most important ideas they have in common. We didn’t synthesize our sources.
Our second outline looks like this:
- Introduction
- Synthesizing Theories of Choric Invention
- Prioritizing Space
- Juxtaposing Subjective (Affective) Experience Alongside Objective History
- Resisting Synthesis
- Resisting Codification
- Explicating Kalman’s Aesthetic
The difference here is essential: moving from talking about one source at a time to explicating an idea. The Prioritizing Space section has references to Rickert, Ulmer, and Hawk. The Juxtaposing Subjective.. section also has references to Rickert, Ulmer, and Hawk. The Resisting Synthesis section has references to Brook and Arroyo. The Resisting Codification section has references to all of them, and brings in Rice and Shipka. I put this section last because it was the one idea that runs through all of the stuff I read.
Now I had a clear structure in place (four elements of choric invention) to read Maira Kalman’s work (and then to ask my students to consider in creating video remediations of their experiences in historic/affective spaces).
The point of the long story is this: whether you are writing a social/scientific research paper or a humanities scholarly analysis, you need to organize your lit review around ideas, not around names or articles (and researchers and scholars have names. Don’t write “this article” in an annotation or research paper).
In the proposal document, I suggested the following heuristic for helping you carve up your research:
- Research that shows there is a problem
- Also: if applicable, research that argues there isn’t a problem
- Some of this might appear in the introduction, then get repeated/explored in more depth in the lit review
- Research that addresses what is causing the problem
- Not different articles, but different theories for causes (referencing multiple articles per theory if possible!)
Research that measures the public’s perception (or lack thereof) of the problem, I don’t think anyone is working on this kind of project- Research that offers solutions to the problem
- Research from which you can steal methodology for your primary research (which would go in the methods section)
Methodology
As I mention above, a methodology section has four general goals:
- How you collect your corpus (group of object you were going to study)
- How you analyzed your corpus to produce data
- How you analyzed your data or texts
- How you ensured your analysis was reliable
Not every study does all four of these things. For instance, scholars do not have to explain why their interpretations of a text are valid–the act of interpreting a text is making a claim for the ingenuity and relevance of the reading. But if you are reading 500 student papers and assessing them for the quality of their thesis statement, then you need to demonstrate how those evaluations are consistent.
If you create a survey, an interview, a focus group, etc, then this section has to walk us through the questions you asked. How/why did you ask this question; what does it attempt to measure, why is it important?
Let’s look at a very detailed example.
Homework
According to our timetable above, you should be finishing up your secondary research this week and moving on to start playing your game.
To help keep this project on track, I want you to draft your literature review and methodology sections. If you have completed your annotations, then this should be easier.
And it is quite helpful to really pin down your methodology section *before* you start playing your game.
The due date for this assignment in Canvas is next Monday at midnight. I will do my best to check Canvas every day–the earlier you submit this, the earlier you’ll get my feedback.
