Research Session With Librarian

Wed, Oct 25

Guest Speaker: Prof. Parker Ladwig and Prof. Dan Johnson

“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”

            — Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form

Research is often described as a conversation between authors. When you join a conversation, the first thing you do is to listen–to hear what is being discussed, what the problems are, or where the points of disagreement lie. Once you get a sense of the conversation, you can then chime in yourself, springboarding off the thoughts of others to provide your own perspective. Learning how to access published research is therefore an important first step in the research process, as it allows you to get a fuller understanding of the state of the conversation.

Goals

• Familiarize yourself with the resources available through the library
• Learn how to search for relevant sources
• Understand how to read research papers