Instead of a normal class for my CTW, we went to the library to work with an librarian who taught us about contextualized sources.
I had already felt fairly confident in my contextualizing sources skills, but I learned a few things.
We began class with two videos that described scholarly articles. These were both fairly clear and basic but one thing that I found particularly interesting is that they journal articles in different fields tend to have different standards. The librarian explained that peer reviewed articles generally have a shorter length than those in the humanities. Additionally, different fields usually have different structures. I found this to be interesting because since they were peer reviewed, there aren’t any absolute guidelines that can weed out the deviant articles. I took this to mean that the scholars in whatever field all gravitate towards one style for many reasons that make it the best for their studies.
Then, she went on to teach contextualization of sources. I think that after writing my bibliographies I grounded the authors effectively although, I did not and context to my source paper for the individual authors at all. The following image shows same ways that a source can be contextualized.
Contextualizing sources also gives the author credibility which is very important. It draws on the readers logos. I think that contextualizing sources can easily be done wrong, but when it comes to adding a quote to a paper a writer won’t just leave drop a random name then a quote. For a quote to make any sense, readers need it to be contextualized!!
All in all, context is very important