While most of you have chosen to pursue a public project, a few of you chose the academic research option. I wanted to put together a quick heuristic to help guide your research. What am I looking for in your weekly article reviews? To begin I think you want to divide these reviews into two sections: for simplicity’s sake let’s call these summary and response.
In the summary section, you will want to do a couple of things:
- You will need to identify the article’s purpose: what did the researchers set out to explore?
- Similarly, but different, you will need to identify the article’s results. Did they reach their goal?
- You will want to identify the article’s methodology. What kind of study is it? Empirical? Experimental? Qualitative? Quantitative? Hermeneutic? Mixed-methods? How did the researchers collect their material? You will want to pay close attention to their methods.
- You will want to pay attention to how they relate to previous scholarship. Every academic article will include some kind of literature review that positions the research in context of the field. With whom do the researchers identify? Who’s work are they continuing and building upon? This is important because it gives you a chance to identify other important sources.
- Additionally, especially if you are working in the humanities, you want to identify the theoretical rationale for the study. This might seem like a part of the literature review, but it often isn’t. This is the writers/concepts that undergrid the research’s approach. For instance, in my dissertation I used Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of ethics to interpret and understand Wikipedia’s rules for negotiating conflicts, concluding that our 21st century world balances ethics against epistemology. Or, in my article on creativity (what in rhetorical theory we call invention) I compared the work of multimodal artist Maira Kalman to a number of contemporary rhetorical theorists. This is what I often call an article’s theoretical lens, the way of seeing it builds in order to examine something.
- Above I mentioned results, but you also want to be able to distinguish results from conclusions. In the conclusion sections, authors often do one of two things (or, perhaps, both). First, they often make a recommendation for future study. What do we need to examine next? Second, they often make a recommendation for institutional, social, or political change. What do we need to do differently?
When addressing the questions above, you want to be as objective as possible. The goal is to write the summary in such a way that the original authors would read it and say “yes, that is exactly what we were trying to say.”
Once you have accomplished this, then you are credibly positioned to craft a response. A response doesn’t have to be negative; it isn’t necessarily a critique. Nor, however, is it a gushing testament of love and admiration. Rather, I think you want your response to pick up where the conclusion leaves off: responding to the pragmatic ramifications of the research you have read. Where does it take you/us?
As the semester progresses, what you really want to do is start comparing and contrasting these authors. Look for connections. Try to map them. Identify key terminology, shared terminology.
