So with my archival excursion at an end, and my first narrative of the quarter turned in, it turns out I still know very little about research… I learned a lot from my archival experience, however, I still do not feel confident looking up information on topics I am not familiar on.

I was assigned to  read another article regarding research by Michael Klein, and I found it particularly intriguing because like me, the whole concept of research was unclear to him as well.

He devised a strategy with two of his other colleagues comprised of hunters who find what they are looking for, and gathers who distinguish what is useful and what is not. I found this strategy to be extremely enlightening, because it simplifies research in a way to where I can understand it.

Not quite like the stone ages, but you get the idea.

When dividing the process by hunter and gatherer, not only is this strategy applicable to archival research, but it is also applicable to research on google. Searching for what we need, and sorting through it later seems to be the perfect balance to analyzing materials for research instead of copying what we find in textbooks. With this method we are able to really comprehend what we are looking at by forcing ourselves to read deeper because we have to decide if this source is of use to us or not.

I started to think about how I would approach any topic in a hunter and gathering fashion. I imagined myself hunting by sifting through the library and pulling any book by using keywords, but then I also imagined me going on google and also browsing articles on the internet. I would implement the gathering technique by opening the books or links and then reading to see if the source had any relevance to my topic.

When we were discussing the topic in class, my professor brought something up very interesting; she mentioned to us that you could also maybe take a spin on the hunting perspective because when you are reading the materials you found, you can be hunting for material within. This made my head spin, because things no longer seemed as simple as they were before… I began to wonder what was hunting, and what was gathering, and how can you decider one from the other?

I have yet to figure this mystery out, but Klein’s article gave me a new found confidence and made me want to try research again. Stay tuned for more research updates regarding what I find next.

More to come in next week’s episode

♥Little Kelli