How I Research
How I research:
1. Look up interesting keywords on MLA Bibliography
2. Download whatever PDF full-text articles I can find.
3. Submit a flurry of ILL requests for what isn’t available full-text.
4. When those come, download them to the same folder as the others.
5. Never read more than about a page of any of it.
While electronic resources have made it easier to acquire articles, I feel it may have stopped there, for me at least. Confronted with the idea of reading the whole thing online, I simply skim a little bit and then save it for later, never to return. I could print it out, but most articles are 20-30 pages long, which is a lot of paper and ink, and now that I don’t officially belong to any department, I can’t use their printers and ink. Instead I just collect and collect but never read.
I was always one of the few grad students I knew who preferred writing to research anyway; I always wished I had the problem some of my colleagues complained about, feeling that they could never start writing because they hadn’t read everything yet. I love to read, but only novels; I never truly learned to love reading scholarship. I always jumped into the writing before I was ready. This is still my problem. And I am quick to blame technology for what is probably just a personal flaw. (Though perhaps I can at least claim that technology has exacerbated it — what do you think?)
What if you used technology to make scholarship reading more fun? Like, you could upload the PDFs of the articles into Google Docs, and then highlight and annotate them.
| Posted 4 months, 1 week agoOh… that’s a good idea. I have never used (or, dare I admit, heard of) google docs — I’ll have to try it!
| Posted 4 months, 1 week agoOr… what about this? Scrivener: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html I haven’t used it yet, but recently watched video tutorial for first time, and it looks fun and intuitive and useful. Maybe finding a fun technology would make some of the tedium of a big research project disappear…
| Posted 4 months, 1 week agoI’ll look at that one tomorrow… (love the name of it)… because Google docs doesn’t work for me — unless I’m missing something (which is very possible), it only lets you highlight/comment on Word docs, not PDFs (which is what I need).
| Posted 4 months, 1 week agoMan–I’m having reverse envy to your envy, being at a point right now where I *still* feel like I can’t start writing yet, and I know that I just must have read enough. It’s at the point where I feel like I need to do research to write in my journal.
But…let me know how the Scrivener program works out. Although I still have access to the department copier, my similarly haphazard research style has left me feeling like a really, really bad environmentalist. Not sure if I could go the distance with online reading (see your earlier post about the counter-intuitive nature of Kindle), but I’d like to at least try. You know, for the Earth.
| Posted 4 months ago