Monthly Archives: May 2017

to Annotate to Annotate to Annotate

Posted on May 26, 2017 | Leave a comment

So, as of this Tuesday our class turned in our annotated bibliographies, which are, if you didn’t know, really annoying to say the least. It’s not that the process is necessarily hard, but reading the articles that you find is a really big time suck. Especially if you can’t understand what the author is saying in a single read.

I spent a lot of time reading.

But besides from that, what was the most difficult part of creating the annotated bibliographies was connecting the articles together. Comparing them, contrasting them, how they aligned with one train of thought, how they aligned with another. It was all really messy.

Source: Awesomely Luvie

So what I did was I started to write all the articles down on a piece of paper. Then I sorted them into different categories: archival research, modern undergraduate research, and archival research for undergrads. And what I ended up with was an outline for how I wanted to write my essay, the plotline for the narrative that I was going to create. Thus, while annotating was annoying, mostly because of the time it took to complete the annotations, it also proved to be extremely helpful to me overall.

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File Me

Posted on May 26, 2017 | Leave a comment

Source: Giphy “As of right now we’re re-entering the library.”

Okay, so we (my class and I, though I assume you know that by now) have once again visited the great lands of the library to learn about annotated bibliographies. Please take note however, that we turned in our annotated bibliography assignment the day that we went to the library.

[Cue X-files theme.]

But anyways, I don’t know if I necessarily learned anything from this library session, mostly because the last time we were there our ‘bonus round’ game was basically what this session taught. Okay, that was a little wordy. What I mean is: we repeated the activity that I got to do last time we visited the library. Bonus though, Gail (the very helpful and very grandma-chic librarian) still had candy.

What we did however, was helpful in that it was review. The activities which Gail tasked to us were essentially the things that we had to do in our annotated bibliographies. We had to take into account what the content of our article was, who the author was, and how the context of both the article/author affected how we read/summarized our sources. So yeah, while nothing was new, it was still applicable for future projects.

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I’m Illiterate?

Posted on May 25, 2017 | Leave a comment

Source: Tumblr

As a disclaimer, I had no idea what information literacy was, at all. I had no idea that these two words could even be joined together to form a single phrase. I had no idea what this term could even refer to. And I definitely didn’t think that it had anything to do with me – or anything really, but we’ve established that I was clueless about this subject already. So, what is information literacy? (I’m asking because I am also assuming that you have no idea either.)

Information literacy is according to the Association of College & Research Libraries, essentially, a set of abilities requiring individuals to ‘recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information’  (ACRL).  So, essentially, information literacy is a skill set identical to the one that archival researchers have and continue to advocate – locating, evaluating, analyzing, and effectively using your sources (the information) to support your arguments/viewpoints.

So am I as illiterate as I thought I was? Hopefully no, because it seems that all I need to do to become information literate, is to change the dialect in which I speak. I need to expand my vocabulary, and like that – bam.

I’m speaking plain English.

 

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Roadmap to Archives

Posted on May 18, 2017 | 1 comment

Source: Giphy

Alright, so I’ve been talking about the archives, about research, about research skills, and undergraduates for a while now. I’m sure for anyone reading this, you’ve might have gotten bored with the whole “Wow, archives! Wow, undergrads! Wow, no information!” song and dance. But, please stick it out a little (actually, probably a lot) longer, for me? Thanks in advance.

Okay, so, we were asked by our professor (the whole class, that’s the ‘we’), to explain the “territory” (the subject) of our research and the gaps (literally, the gaps in knowledge) that we had observed when reading various sources for research purposes. Recap: I have been reading long articles, and trying very hard to finish homework up for this class, a bit unsuccessfully because I’m one or two annotated citations behind. But I digress.

Original Image: Barnes&Noble
Edited Image: K. Harada

The “territory” that I’ve been exploring is the realm of dusty books, the archives! Big surprise right? More specifically, I’ve explored the field of archival research and the available methods/methodology written accounts created by researchers. Furthermore though, I’ve also broadened this territory to include the modern day research methods which students are more exposed to, or the methods which are directed at students. The latter is more to illustrate the extent of the ‘undergrad desert’ that I have observed in archival research literature.

And it is this ‘undergrad desert’ that acts as my “gaps in knowledge”. The gaps that I’m seeing are the same that I saw before, which come as no great surprise. There is a lack of archival research literature, it appears that no researchers had really thought about writing down their processes. But furthermore, it seems like researchers never gave the thought of student research the time of day. Archival research literature almost entirely neglects to include undergraduates, focusing more on academics and graduate students. And even when research skill literature does focus on undergrads, often these skills are not explicitly related to the archives/they don’t provide the instruction needed for archival research.

So, I’m therefore planning on further staking it out in the ‘undergrad desert’, and expanding on how this desert might be crossed.

 

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Can you or Kantz you?

Posted on May 15, 2017 | Leave a comment

For our latest writing assignment, as a class we were tasked on reading Kantz’s “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively”, which focuses on the methods students can use to rhetorically read their sources and then use rhetoric devices (like questions such as “Why?”, “How?”, and “So what?”) to frame/write their arguments and/or papers. As such, post-reading, I am now expected to reflect upon the ideas which Kantz lays out, and connect said ideas to my own research process.

“Studnents Vs. Non-Pro/Con Sources” Source: Giphy

So, Kantz describes that many students struggle with creating original material when they are asked to use resources to create an argument or idea. As such, many are apt to repeat the ‘facts’ their sources provide or they see their sources as only ‘pro/con’, as disagreeing or agreeing with an idea – and that students become confused and often unable to reconcile with sources that do not fit into these categories. To help cope with these struggles, Kantz suggests that teachers should introduce students to tools like “Kinneavy’s triangular diagram of the rhetorical situation”, which allows sources to be read in three different aspects (Kant 74). These aspects include:

  • Speaker/Writer (The Encoder)
  • Audience (The Decoder)
  • Topic/Subject (Reality)

Likewise, Kantz also suggests that students focus on finding and filling in ‘gaps’ in the literature to create original ideas and thoughts. What doesn’t the author say? What doesn’t the text address that affects how it communicates its ideas? What unintended effects did the text have? Why? How? And so what?

Now, I have definitely fallen on both sides of the student spectrum which Kantz implied, and I have gone through the same struggles that Kantz describes in regards to examining my sources. I’ve only recently gotten better at the entire thing involving finding and addresses gaps in what others have said. (In fact, that’s what I’m hoping to really get into when writing my argumentative essay that’s coming up). And like Kantz, I also agree that students would benefit greatly from being taught these patterns and lessons concerning reading texts – for said gaps, for the context of these texts, and then their overall meaning in a broader view.

So the question is, can or Kantz you apply these ‘triangular’ skills from now on?

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Pop Goes the Article

Posted on May 11, 2017 | Leave a comment

Beginning my search for an article related to my argumentative topic: undergraduates and archives/archival research, though my professor had informed me that this topic was recently of great interest to many scholars, I more so expected there to be great difficulty. After applying the skills that I learned in our previous library session, using the keyword: archives and the phrase “undergraduate student”, I honestly expected no relevant sources to appear. Essentially, I expected this:

Source: Giphy

But actually there were so many articles, relevant, articles that popped up that I had a hard time narrowing my choices down. Eventually I settled on Silivia Vong’s “A Constructivist Approach for Introducing Undergraduate Students to Special Collections and Archival Research”, which had been published in the journal RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, & Cultural Heritage. The article itself focuses on methods for how to introduce/education undergrads to archival research, which is right up my alley.

So while I expected to use more of the lessons taught by the tutorial provided by my professor, found here, my article search went very smoothly!

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Breaking News: Surveys In

Posted on May 7, 2017 | Leave a comment

Source: Giphy

So the results are in, and overall: there were thirty-two responses across the class years, there were a lot of first years who responded, and I have a lot of basic math to do. But so far I don’t have any clear answers (or winners for that matter) on any accurate measures of undergraduate archival knowledge. However, there appear to be some trends among my data that may support the perspective that I addressed in my archival research paper.

One such trend, would be the large number of first years whose CTW (critical thinking and writing – a first year writing-related class at my uni) coursework has lead them to delve into the archives. Meanwhile, another would be the fact that it seems that many students are under the impression that undergrads cannot use the archives. All in all, it’s looking like my survey reflects the patterns that I’ve already observed during our interactions with the archives, so that’s good! That means I might just be able to use this data (though its skewed/biased) for our argumentative essay that’s coming up.

But for now I’ll organize my findings into why they are significant, linking them to the points I’ve made about undergrads and the archives – mainly that undergrads lack adequate education/resources regarding the archives – and also the points I’ve made about universities and research skills – that universities began to push undergrad students into more complex research skills, archival included, as these institutions evolve over time. After that, I’ll probably use my data to demonstrate what exactly undergrads are lacking in the knowledge department – which can then be used as an example for where universities can began this ‘research education’.

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The Survey Games

Posted on May 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

Source: Michael Hyatt

So for our latest assignment, my class is collecting survey data from students at our university, with our focus being the same or related to our archival research. (Funnily enough, I just took a ton of surveys as part of of my psychology class.) As said before my focus revolves around undergraduate knowledge of archives and archival knowledge, thus my main goal going forward is gauging the extent of this knowledge among undergrads at my school. I plan to generally distribute my survey online to a variety of people across class years, and I’ll try to avoid distributing to my own class to prevent bias. Since, you know, we just learned about the archives.

There will probably be questions on their ability to locate the archives, if they even know the archives exist, and if they participate in the stereotype that archives are only available for research/grad student/professional use. If all things go well, I’ll end up with data which reflects my own experiences concerning archival research. That is, hardly any undergrads know anything concerning the archives. However, because I’m not using random assignment and random selection, the data I receive will have some bias, as bias hasn’t been eliminated (shoutout to Psychology 1 for that lesson on conducting experiments).

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