Monthly Archives: April 2017

[Insert Arthur episode on visiting the library]

Posted on April 27, 2017 | 1 comment

 

Source: A. Raymond

Just a quick post about the prevalence of research across disciplines, and how schools focus on cultivating researching skills in students, but more importantly, about visiting the library for help on researching. Above is e-flier that students at my university – that includes me – recently received. The email itself describes how student at the university’s business school can contact one of our university’s librarians for help with business research.

Now, this past Tuesday, my class took a trip to the library for that exact reason. We met with this very cute grandma-esque librarian who had us play a series of research-based games. Through these games we learned how to use the databases available to us, how to efficiently search (using phrases and asterisks and the works), and how to write quick descriptions of articles that we might come across in our research process.

I don’t know if the business students are going to be playing any games, or if they are even going to be searching through databases. (Spoiler alert: I’m not a business student, I’m apparently not that interested in the stability of my financial future enough.) But, they are using the resources available to them – librarians – in order to cultivate their researching skills, just like we did this week.

Source: Giphy

 

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Globalization, Media and the Four Stages of the (ess)A(y)pocalypse

Posted on April 27, 2017 | Leave a comment

Alternatively known as how I wrote an essay in two days (long story, no time to tell) on the themes of economic globalization (EG), the role of media in EG, and two “Made in the USA” companies – and how I’m relating that to this post.

[Let’s backtrack.] 

Source: Giphy

(Disclaimer: You’ll be seeing a lot of air quotes, ignore them, the reason that the air quotes are there is another area of study entirely, here in this post we’re trying to focus on writing and research related stuff.)

Why was I writing this essay? To explore how media, specifically ads, play a role in economic globalization,  and to explore the effects that economic globalization has on less dominant, non-western countries, which in Communication studies, are referred to as the “global south”.

What is economic globalization? Well it’s basically the spread of western private enterprises (and the accompanying western cultural values/ideas) into foreign markets/countries, which are typically less powerful (economically and militarily) than the ‘industrialized’ west.

How do/es media/the two “Made in the USA” companies contribute to EG? Well, that’s what I set out to explain, starting at around 2pm this past Sunday. And kudos to Michael Kleine, I was on the four stages of his research project like a novice ice skater on ice for their first performance. (Meaning trying my best and hoping desperately that I wouldn’t fall through the ice before my allotted time was up.)

[End backtracking.]

Source: totalprosports

(Also, spoiler alert, we’re going to be focusing on those four stages in this post.)

The Four Stages of the (ess)A(y)pocalypse

1. Collecting Data
I collected data like it was the newest release of every books series that I have ever loved ever. Both of my Communication textbooks were open and highlighted to Antartica and back. I had tabs open on: labor statistics, the store locations of the two companies mentioned above, the products these companies made, where they made those products, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I basically binged on data.

2. Sifting for Relevance
Keeping in mind Tirabassi’s principles of closure and cross reference though, I made sure that everything I collected was at least relevant to my topic – and that I limited the amount that I collected to what I could realistically analyze. The statistics? Related to the effects globalization had on foreign labor workers. The store locations, the products? Related to where the companies had foreign outreach. And so on.

3. Seeking Patterns
I tried my best to become a pattern seeking mastermind. I probably didn’t succeed, but I did notice some patterns when going through my data. Like how, despite economies in which the average person cannot realistically afford products that are $100 US Dollars and above, western companies continue to advertise these goods in the countries with said economics. Another pattern? How advertisements sell not only products, but imagined lifestyles. (Again, this is a discussion dedicated to another subject entirely, so I won’t go into too much detail.)

4. Translating into Writing
AKA, the majority of my Sunday and Monday evenings. I took the data I’d collected, sifted, and analyzed for patterns – and put it through the translator, me. Old ideas were framed, challenges to those old ideas introduced, and then my thoughts on how two companies (in this case, Apple and Bose Corporation) demonstrated the effects of EG on the global south were sewn into the essay quilt. Major translation, from corporate America to college student 101.

Okay! So that was a brief summary of the amazing race that I ran through, and an analysis of my efforts and how they reflect the four stages of Kleine’s described ‘hunting and gathering’ process for research! For anyone, I hope this at least somewhat demonstrates how, intentionally or not, many of us embody Kleine’s four stages whenever we write a research paper.

Sidenote: This post was meant to go up on the Tuesday that I turned in my economic globalization essay, but the internet was having a “Treat Yo Self” day and decided to not connect to my laptop.

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Into the Wild: Modern Hunter-Gatherers

Posted on April 27, 2017 | 1 comment

This is Michael Caine, not Michael Kleine. Source: CBAMB

Alright, so Professor Michael Kleine, not the actor with the similar name, has written an article titled “What Is It We Do When We Write Articles Like This One?”, which goes on to describe those writing and researching as individuals who alternate between being “hunters” and “gatherers” (Kleine 25). The idea is that research can be roughly composed into four stages and two parts.

Source: K. Harada

But today I’m going to leave behind the words shown in the gif above (mostly because I think that other posts like this or this have covered the whole research pattern dealio well enough) and instead I’m going focus on the two parts: hunting and gathering. Or, more like how Kleine’s hunting and gathering relates to me.

For the most part I feel like my research process is a lot like the one that Kleine describes – I can usually find myself alternating between ‘hunting’ with a purpose and gathering broad data only to discover information that can change the purpose you were searching with. Whether in a database or through a google search, I take care to word my searches specifically with a purpose in mind. So as a young millennial (or Generation Z as some people are calling my age group today), I’m hunting down certain information on the world wide web. However, within that purpose-driven search, whether I want it or not, I also gather related information that is broader in focus than my initial search, which  can then lead to revision of either my ideas or my research.

Now, as for how Kleine’s process doesn’t reflect my own experiences, time is probably the biggest difference. Mostly because Kleine, while he does talk about students the what I’m going to call “the essay system” (aka, how students often find themselves turned into essay writing machines), he doesn’t take into context the time frames research typically needs to be condensed into. I mean, yeah, my research isn’t going to be of the highest quality of if I have week to both do my research and write my paper, while doing a similar amount of work for approximately three other classes within the same time frame. But, that’s my only real beef with what Professor Kleine has to say.

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“Green is Good”

Posted on April 23, 2017 | Leave a comment

Source: Santa Clara University

Okay, so I know I’ve been talking a lot about Greens, Greene, and now green, but hear me out. As said before in “Into the Stacks“, the research question that I held going into my university’s archives was something along the lines of “how does my university express its stance on environmental issues?”. Luckily, I was able to find several documents dating back to the 1970s that explored my university’s outlook on environmental concerns, for example, many of these documents focused on an ecological symposium that my university hosted called “The Crisis of Man’s Environment” (Major 1).

But taking a look at the image above, you can see that many of these environmentalist sentiments still remain today. My university still remains dedicated to talking about the issues that affect our planet and what we, both academics and everyday people, can do to sustain the nature that surrounds us. Though my 1970 archival documents described the events that occurred during the Modern Environmental movement, following in the wake of books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the ideas behind these events continue to fuel the environmental efforts of SCU (“Silent Spring”). Just look at the sustainability efforts pictured in the image below, like the running hashtag #SustainableSCU (SCU).

Source: Santa Clara University

But enough about me, what are some of the things that my classmates unearthed from the far corners of the internet? Well Leslie (found here) related her research on a student sports scandal between our university and UNM to more recent scandals found among universities (and their athletes and their coaches). She brings our university’s past into the context of both a ‘reoccurring’ theme of grade-fudging and student athlete scandals that have spread both across time and across schools.

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Crash Course: How to BEAM and Frame Crash Course Style

Posted on April 18, 2017 | 1 comment

Source: nerdfightergifs

Above, is one Mr. John Green, author of several popular YA novels and one half of the VlogBrothers, who, among many things, run a channel called “Crash Course”. I, a college student who should probably be doing her homework instead of watching said “Crash Course” videos at 12am at night, have recently noticed that many of these Youtube videos show examples of both Joseph Bizup’s BEAM (see this post) and Stuart Greene’s observations on rhetoric framing (see below).

The Other Greene
To loosely summarize Stuart Greene, not shown in the gif above nor a VlogBrother: writing is often about engaging in an ongoing discussion, and the framing of your own input in response to the others before and after you in that conversation is really useful. Framing helps to develop your opinion, not only for your sake, but for the sake of your audience. They are better able to see what you are responding to, why you are responding to it, and what your response actually is – and whether that response is valid given the analysis/evidence you provide.

Crash Course Videos
Alright, so how are these Crash Course videos examples of BEAM? Of Framing?
Well, to start (as in both me, right now, starting this train of thought, and the youtube vidoes), Crash Course often begins with general background on the topic of the video. Authors, historians, facts, or other relevant tidbits are handed out like candy – and throughout the video, these background sources will often pop up again when a new subtopic is introduced.

These background sources can also be used as argument sources, as sometimes one of the Vlogbrothers will argue in favor or against these (usually) long dead figures who they quote/reference. Likewise, using the ideas of these (usually dead) persons, also act as exhibit sources for the Vlogbrothers as they attempt to outline historical, literary, or ~other~ trends/topics.

Source: nerdfightergifs

Framing
Now, as Stuart (not a VlogBrother) Greene mentioned, how you frame your response often helps to organize what you want to say to your audience. Crash Course does that according throughout their videos, focusing on organization according to theme or chronological order. Sources are addressed (definitions, ideas, etc) and then elaborated on – history videos follow a chronogical timeline to frame their content, while other videos will often focus on thematic organization of ideas. And though these videos aim to more inform than than converse, this method of organization helps to simplify and make the process of ‘teaching’ more effective.

So yeah, check out a Crash Course video (I binge-watched all of the World History videos recently just saying), and keep an eye out for BEAM and/or Greene’s (the other Greene) framing method.

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Into the Stacks We Go

Posted on April 17, 2017 | 1 comment

Same, Belle, same. Source: Caffeine and Cabernet

Okay, so, going into the last quarter of the school year, we (as in a class of college students) are off to the Archives of our university in an attempt to find something that can catch our interest for our latest writing assignment. We were also asked to brainstorm some potential research questions to try and help out our search. Honestly speaking though , I’m not excited nor am I really interested right off the bat. But, for the sake of trying to make this experience as painless as possible, I suppose that it would be interesting to know: how has/does my university express its views on environmental conservatism through changes to infrastructure?

Things like that, I guess, could be interesting, maybe not, cure-to-cancer interesting or Wes-Anderson’s-next-film-interesting (the Moonrise Kingdom guy), but interesting enough. But, if I can find some documents, then I’d hope to find out how the school has changed in its attitudes (promoting recycling, etc) and architecture (implementing things like solar panels).

Actually me during finals review. Source: Giphy

Having said that, as prep for our journey into the stacks, as a class we recently read Katherine E. Tirabassi’s “Journeying Into the Archives” and Lynée Lewis Gaillet’s “Archival Survival”, both excerpts exploring how one goes about nosing around an archive. However, where Tirabassi focuses on the nitty-gritty stuff, partially assuming that you are already the overwhelmed guy shown in the gif above, Gaillet talks more about your ‘Ten-Step-Pre-First-Step-Into-The-Archive Plan’.

And, because I’m the kind of person who wanders around campus a week before classes start to find my classrooms, I’m more inclined to stick to the latter’s advice though, because I’d rather have a plan going into a situation than trying to ‘wing it’ once I’m there. So, while I can’t dedicate hours to researching our uni’s archives, hopefully having several research questions that I can use to guide my search will help me out with my ‘pre-archive-prep plan’. 

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Badke and Liw: Old and New

Posted on April 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

Source: Year13

The article reads “The Great Research Disaster” by one William Badke of Trinity Western University, and while yes, there are many things that student Liw Ekdab did that were both a) accurate to students, and b) academically (even morally) questionable, I still feel that Badke’s reaction is somewhat over the top. While I agree that Liw could have better used his available resources – like actually reading articles related to his research topic, accessing online databases like JSTOR, etc. – I feel like Badke carries an undertone of the older generation. Namely, it feels like Badke implies some condescension when it comes to accessing resources through non-traditional, but now modern, means.

He snarks, “[Liw]…had some fun blowing off the library in the process.”, and I must snark back, “Not everyone has the time to go to the library, and also, libraries offer online databases that Liw didn’t use, but many students do, thus libraries are not always a requirement” (50). While Bardke might mean nothing by this statement, I still standby the idea that research as Bardke imagines it – libraries, archives, stacks upon stacks of books – does not fully define research today. In the modern world, students have access to a variety of means of gathering research. GoogleBooks has thousands of books scanned and uploaded online the web as PDFs, while databases GoogleScholar links to online journals and articles that are either published online originally or scanned, again, as PDFs. Likewise, even university libraries provide online databases for students, linking full text PDFs, online articles, and more.

So yes, Liw may have not used these online resources to their full extent (nor did he use them quite the way they are meant to be used), but I have to disagree with this notion that libraries must be the definite picture of research. Education, and that includes research, must adapt with the times. Sorry Badke, but maybe for my next research project, or paper, or assignment, I’ll “[have] some fun blowing off the library” too (50).

Source: The Odyssey Online

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Research: A Process

Posted on April 6, 2017 | 2 comments

Usually, my research process is dominated by a web browser filled with countless tabs, each housing different online articles, or PDFs of scanned books, or maybe even a JSTOR-like database if I can access it. A handwritten outline can, and typically will, be found somewhere nearby, a timeline of “background/ introduction” that is followed by juxtaposed paragraphs of arguments (counter and non-counter) and examples for each. This outline has been oh-so lovingly created by a response to the prompt or question at hand – either answering the question via my own lovely opinion, or creating my own question based upon the prompt that somehow always ends up as an argumentative statement in the end. And it is this very outline which guides my research process.

Source: Giphy

Step 1: Learn more about the issue itself, find the background knowledge, and understand the information. Skim over Wikipedia if you have to, but if there are more reliable or creditable sources – like say, National Geographic or a website ending in .gov – then head over to those. Step 2: Expand the outline. What initial arguments or ideas need to be either expanded on or dropped? What is relevant to the topic? Also, is the breath of the paper too large? If so, get those heads rolling. Step 3: Look at that revised outline, now, what background information can be made into examples? What supports or opposes what you have to say? Play around with the structure of your arguments then, make sure that each is related to the other, that each flows into the other. Step 4: Start writing. Maybe cry, or get a snack. Frantically open another tab to search up Purdue Owl and how to cite this or that, or, for the love of the academic gods, you even structure a footnote. Meanwhile, make sure you get those citations in, and if you discover that a source is not as relevant as you thought it would be, then drop it. If needed repeat steps 2 and 3. Step 5: Review it, revise it, cite it, then somehow come up with both a conclusion that connects to the larger idea (or world or ‘conversation’) and a works cited page that reflects all your in-text citations.

Source: Emolument

Moving on from that 5 step process, let’s talk about BEAM, or Joseph Bizup of Columbia University’s reading and writing model:

Background, Exhibit, Argument, and Method.

The BEAM model, which sorts sources into the aforementioned categories, somewhat reflects my own process of research I would like to think. Sources are meant to be diverse, both in content but also in purpose. Now, I have never given ‘methods’ a single thought, as for ‘background’, ‘exhibit’, and ‘argument’ though, I am very familiar with those. Separating articles, journals, and etc., into nice little categories is a process that has become a necessity for my own organization, as it strengthens the structure of a paper and my own thoughts/arguments.

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