As I mentioned in my last post, my critical thinking and writing class this quarter is based on a research project. I wrote about how at the time, not only did I not have a lot of experience with research, but I also had no idea what I wanted to write about. Two weeks later, I am unfortunately still in the same boat.

But fear not! This is not about to be some lame repetitive post of the last (I hope please bear with me).

Every girl has these moments whether she wears makeup or not

So for my class, our professor assigns us readings on articles and snippets from books that not only reference our research process, but give us a source of discussion for our class time together.

My professor mentioned to us we would be visiting the archives for resources for our research papers. Initially when she mentioned the term archives, I thought Indiana Jones, archaeology, and digging through some ancient cave for readings and maybe artifacts. However, that is not exactly what she had in mind.

Archives will be EPIC

The archives are our schools catacombs in a way. They have all of the information from the beginning of the establishment and then some. She mentioned to us we would be visiting the archives and to have some ideas in mind as to what we would want to research.

But walking in the archives is not going to be the same thing as walking into your public library. So she gave us some articles to read in order to assess the archives with the best of our abilities.

The first was from Tirabassi. The first few pages were interesting because not only was she a normal archive goer, but she specially sought out a cushioned chair in order to begin and I found that hilarious. I found her principle of cross referencing to be extremely relevant  to no only searching through the archives, but understanding sources in every day reading. This technique was understanding how to link the gaps between the sources found in the archive, and using that knowledge to get a better understanding of how the documents relate not only to the question you are searching to answer, but how they ended up in the archives in the first place.

The second was reading by Gaillet and it was titled as a survival guide to the overwhelming stacks or archives. I enjoyed how the chapter laid out basic instructions and guidelines for visiting libraries and the material to be found there because if anything else, that is good general information to know. I found it interesting how that the first step when examining archival data, it is important to reference the initial question you are trying to answer… the only problem is… I currently am still sitting with out a question to be answered henceforth, I cannot maximize the data I find.

Gaillet mentions that it is the role of the researcher and how it is about infusing our interests as the author with historical context of the writings we find, and I thought it was interesting because obviously, our taste and experiences could initially hinder what we do find. Who we are and what we prefer may taint how we see artifacts, so it is important to really analyze and read what we are reading in the context in which it should be read.

All in all, after reading these articles all I can think about is what I want to research since I have not found an idea for a topic. I’ve toyed with college nutrition, STD’s and skincare, but I can’t seem to find a solid idea on what I can write research paper on. I am excited for our trip to the archives in the upcoming week. More details to come.

…For next week’s blog post

♥Little Kelli