Hello class- this video is part how to start research and part how to organize
your paper okay? So I'm back on the Contra Costa College library research
module which is underneath your tools for the course okay, and I'm gonna start
with library databases because that is the most current information on a topic
and that way you don't have to you know thumb through giant encyclopedias you
don't have to go read long books alright, you can find articles,
journal, magazine, and newspaper articles that are tailored specifically to your
topic. Now there are some nice links
here for you to check out remember that if you're off campus you may need to
sign in with your 7 digit student ID number, but you also can go directly to
the CCC library button which is on your side navigation bar. And then here you
have the A to Z database list for English, right, and what I want you to
look at is there are several choices here. I particularly like academic search
premier, looks like maybe they have changed it to search complete, and it
looks like perhaps we cannot get to that unless we're on campus. Let's see if it
lets us alright, any day now, oh good it worked for me. So one of the things I
tell students when you're doing a search there are really two main things: first
you must spell all of your search terms correctly, ok? Now when I put in "racial"
I get a drop-down menu of a ton of connected ideas. So let's just put in
racial profiling, but don't search yet ok. So the next thing you want to make sure
you have is full text. And that is because you don't want just an abstract
a short little hey, 2 sentencer that you really can't use as a source all right.
Students always ask me well how long should the source be? Well a good source
is usually an article okay, and articles are
you know three pages up to 15-20 pages, but abstracts are not good sources. So
then I make sure those are all set and I click on search and I have a little
trick I do that I teach my students. So you have these articles, you have a
thousand articles you can look at, ok, the age of racial profiling, in the context
of terrorism, civil rights. You have all these really good articles, but you're
not sure which one to use. The first thing you want to do is you want to read
the little abstract and make sure it's related or connected, maybe you're gonna
talk about immigration policies for example, okay, where to draw the line?
Whatever you choose, let's say we choose this first one about racial profiling in
law enforcement, okay. So it's an academic journal I know that because of this
little sign over here and I click on it I can also click on the PDF full text,
but I want to show you something that is very special about research. So once I
click on against racial profiling, I get all the information I'm gonna need for
my work cited page, author -source name- okay, and then I've got this abstract
which tells me more information about whether the article will be good for me
or not. Now "find similar results" so if I love
this article, this is like the best article I've ever found ,or could ever
find I click on the "find more like this button" and now I've really narrowed my
search down to all articles that talk about, you know, the ramifications of
racial profiling okay, and post-racialism right ,racial profiling at traffic
stops. And you see they're just a ton of these alright, and these are all what you
would call scholarly materials. They're all scholarly. Now the other thing I want
to show you when it comes to doing your you're setting up
for your research paper, is students always ask me, well how do I
balance it between say quotes from the songs and quotes from the research and
my own particular analysis. And that's a really, really good question to ask. It is
probably the most challenging aspect, other than the research, okay for this
particular paper. So I want to look at an example on tools for the course. I want
to go to the Purdue OWL and I want to talk about research and citation, but
actually what I want to do really is I want to look at a sample essay okay.
So let's look at sample essay and go there.
MLA sample paper okay and this particular one I'm going to open in a
new window because it is it is easier for me to show you.
It's a terrible paper on 19th century farming handbooks- you can thank me later
for not assigning that assignment, all right. One of the things though to point out is
that there is a way to give, for example historical context, some background
material on your topic, whatever it may be. How it came to be a
social issue or problem and then you can use some quotes okay? You could use
quotes from any of your scholarly sources. And then you can use your
current songs as examples of how this issue is being addressed in modern art
okay? When I think of racial profiling I always think of the NWA song "F the
Police" okay, and that song grew out of tensions
between the police in LA and particularly African-Americans,
and the racial profiling that was going on at the time. So even though the song
is twenty years old- thirty years old- it still speaks truth to what's happening
today with a lot of the "hands up don't shoot" okay, kind of a new more modern
take on the same issue. So you can give a little background. You can use your
scholarly sources and quote from them directly then you can talk about the
problem and then you can quote from one of your artists and say how this
particular artist is dealing with this particular problem in the here and in
the now, all right. The best way to begin though is to get some articles that you
like and that you think speak well of the social issue that you want to talk
about. And then the songs are probably going to be easier for you because you
most likely have some in mind already. One thing I will tell you is I think
it's really best if you have a balanced approach to the music, so that you don't
just have 4 rock and roll songs, or 4 country songs. The best essays, and
again I'll go back to racial profiling, I can think of a song right off the top of
my head in country that is about racial profiling. I know there are lots of songs
in rock and roll about racial profiling ,and of course in
hip-hop and in rap there are tons of songs about racial profiling. So you
could easily find a song from each musical genre that you can think of and
use those. It's a balanced approach, it shows that your essay is timely. It's
something that everybody is talking about, this particular topic ,and it's
something that our artists- our current and modern-day artists- are reflecting on
and telling us how we should think- feel- and respond to those issues.
Alright, I hope this helps!
No comments:
Post a Comment