Research Strategies

Class Zone's Web Research Guide seems pretty helpful; it offers several tutorials, and an introductory quiz for the totally clueless.

Cornell University Library's Seven Steps of the Research Process. This site provides a straightforward set of guidelines for developing a topic and initiating research through a variety of media, from books to the Internet.

Finding Scholarly Content on the Web. This is from the Internet Tutorials site, and includes some very helpful suggestions. Go to the main page for more advice on using the web effectively.

Chris Witcombe's guide to researching art history on the internet. Most of the work we do at the Art Institutes involves art in some way. Chris Witcombe is the author of the quintessential links page, Art History Resources on the Web, and this related site offers advice and strategies for conducting research on topics of interest to most of my students.

Important note: Please remember that the World Wide Web is not the only source of information available to you; the librarians in the Kelley Library (with some help from your instructors) have been working diligently to build a substantial collection of print and electronic sources to help you conduct research. I thoroughly recommend that you start in the library first, unless you simply want a quick introduction to an unfamiliar topic. Once you get serious, however, begin with the library and augment what you find there with information from the Internet. When you do search the web, be sure to evaluate your sources using the techniques and criteria recommended in these links.

Evaluating Web Sources

Just as you can't always believe what you see on TV (especially on TLC and The Discovery Channel!), or what you read in print, be wary of what you see on the net, a good percentage of which is absolute crap (pardon the lingo). These sites can help you separate the wheat from the chaff.

How to Critically Analyze Information. This site is maintained by Cornell University's library and contains a very thorough list of criteria for evaluating material from the web.

Evaluating Information Found on the Internet. Elizabeth Kirk, Electronic and Distance Education librarian at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins, has put together a useful site that provides an introduction to the problems presented by web-based information, guidelines for evaluating Internet material, some interesting links, and information on citing web sources.

Evaluating Quality on the Net. This article, by Hope Tillman, the Director of Libraries at Babson College (Maryland), not only offers ideas about how to assess information, but essays into the whole idea of internet-based information and associated problems. The essay is rather long, for those with short attention spans, but well worth reading. Even skimming through it for particular kinds of information can be helpful, because she establishes criteria for good web design, discusses search engines, and assesses the current state of web-evaluation tools--among many other topics.

Research and Documentation Online by Diana Hacker and Barbara Fister. This online version of the book by the same authors includes not only citation information for a variety of disciplines, but information on evaluating web sources, as well as examples of properly documented papers and bibliographies.

Website Evaluation Worksheet: this is a Word file my students must use to justify including in their bibliographies websites I have not already screened.

Creating and Annotating MLA Style Bibliographies

Bibliographies provide a kind of "hard copy" of research; they help us keep track of our sources, organize our research efforts, and document our use of others' work. An annotated bibliography takes the process a step further; it lets the reader know how the sources have been used and reminds the researcher of the relative value of the sources.

For your work in this you will be required to consult a variety of works: books, periodicals, databases, films, CD ROMs, and/or internet sites. Good research makes use of this variety of media to develop background for a project from different perspectives; thorough, creative work does not rely on a single source or a single medium. For my purposes, I would like to see you use at least five sources from at least three different media. The most common of these will be books, print periodicals, and websites, but I encourage you to look into videos, CD ROMs, and online sources of periodicals as well (such as those made available through the Library).

All bibliographies require alphabetical listings of works by author (or by title if an author is not listed) and include titles, publication information, and dates of publication (not copyright dates). Double-space all entries except annotations, and indent second (and subsequent) lines. Since I want you to become familiar with the Modern Language Association (MLA) bibliographical style, it will be useful to know the following pattern:

Author (Last name first; subsequent authors of the same source are listed first name first).

Title (underlined or italicized for long works; shorter works are noted in quotation marks).

Publication information and date of publication.

Use my "Flintstone Bibliography" (included with your Bibliography Worksheet) as a model for how various sources are set up within this pattern, and consult the most recent MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, (on Reserve in the Library). Textbooks for most written communication courses also contain information on MLA style, and a few useful sources are linked below.

The information you provide should usually be as succinct as possible. Therefore, a university press can be listed as "Princeton UP" rather than Princeton University Press; "Routledge and Kegan Paul" is typically listed as "Routledge," and Harry N. Abrams, Inc. is listed simply as "Abrams." Leave out "Inc." and "Ltd." and Company, and use only the first city listed if more than one appear on the title page.

You are no longer required to include a URL for web materials (either websites or online databases). But you will need to identify the medium: Web, Print, Film, etc.

Remember that the purpose of a bibliography is to tell your reader where you got your information, so that he or she can pursue a topic you raise, or check on the reliability of your sources. It's therefore to your benefit to locate the best possible sources to support the work you do in this class.

Important things to remember about bibliographies:

They are not numbered! The reason the author's name is reversed (Uhlmeyer, Candace) is so that it can easily be alphabetized; numbering a bibliography is superfluous and also indicates that you're not paying attention. Don't bullet entries, either (even if you have access to lovely bullets like mine).

It follows logically, then, that instances of multiple authors require that only the first author's name be reversed: Fry, Roger, and Vanessa Bell. If more than three authors are listed, you may choose to use the Latin abbreviation et al. (et alia = "and others") after the first one or two.

Bibliographies should contain sources appropriate to a college-level assignment. This means that general encyclopedias (including Wikipedia) and dictionaries (except historically-oriented, scholarly efforts like The Oxford English Dictionary) are not suitable sources for my classes. If you know absolutely nothing about a word or a topic, or if you don't understand something you read or I say, by all means look it up. But this kind of basic information does not reflect the level of research you need to be conducting for this class. When using a dictionary, by the way, try to consult one with at least 50,000 words listed. And please be sure to keep the context of what you're reading in mind. Since most words have multiple meanings, it makes no sense at all to simply take the first meaning listed and assume that it's correct for any context.

I realize that many of you have spent a good deal of money on textbooks. However, for research purposes, textbooks are only marginally appropriate sources. Even a comprehensive art history survey text, such as Gardner's Art Through The Ages or Janson's History Of Art are meant to be used as general reference books, not the the kind of specialized resources I want you to locate.

Bibliographies must be properly formatted on a word processor, and all entries (including names) should be properly spelled. Edit your work; don't simply slap your bibliography into the computer and print it out. Carefully go over it for spelling, punctuation, etc. before you print it. After you print a copy, go over that, and make any changes necessary before you print the final copy. Spell-checkers are not trained to recognize many proper nouns, names, foreign words, etc., so you will need to examine details carefully.

Annotations in bibliographies let your reader know something about the source, and remind you of what you found useful or valuable about it. If you do not find anything of use, don't list the source.

Annotations should be made in complete sentences, and set aside visually so that the fact that they are separate from the entries themselves is apparent. One way to do this is to reduce the size of the font you are using, and block-indent the annotation. A short paragraph that describes your debt to the author, with specific information on how you used the source will usually do the trick.

The proper heading for a general bibliography is simply Bibliography. No quotation marks, no "works cited," no nothing. Just Bibliography. For the most part you will not be quoting or paraphrasing in your process essay anyway, but even if you do, call the bibliography a Bibliography. Don't bold or italicize it, don't change the font size. The bibliography is paced after the last page of your process essay, and is numbered in sequence. Do not use a header or footer.

Did I mention that bibliographies are not numbered? Rather, they are alphabetized according to the first letter of the entry (usually, but not always, the author). Please remember that in English, the articles a, an, and the do not "count" in determining alphabetical order.

MLA Style

Using Modern Language Association (MLA) Format. Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL). Follow the guidelines on page style as well as those on citations, but see my requirements for a cover sheet/title page instead of placing that information on the first page of your essay. Do, however, include the title of your essay, centered, after the top margin.

Research and Documentation Online by Diana Hacker and Barbara Fister. The section on the Humanities includes up-to-date information on MLA style.

The Kelley Library has sources on using MLA style, but make sure you get the most recent information. Please resist the temptation to use a "fill-in-the-blanks" engine/template that does your work for you, because they're frequently not up to date, and you really have to know what you're doing in order to use them properly. If you're having trouble sorting it all out, e-mail me or come by my office.

Feel free to consult me for advice and information. As you all know by now, I'm full of it . . .

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07.18.10