Developing Your Own Strategies for Research:

A Sample to Take You Through the Steps

Now that your group is moving into the second phase of this project-- the research phase-- you'll want to spend some time thinking about how you can find and utilize the research materials to form the backbone of your presentation. You have approximately 5 weeks to work on these steps. By checkpoint #3, April 2nd, I expect the groups to have completed these steps.

The distinction between popular and scholarly/expert sources is an important one to remember for our project. As Sherri pointed out at the library on Thursday, some of the main differences between these two types of sources have to do with who is the author and who is the intended audience for these texts. Keeping these important distinctions between popular and expert sources in mind will be very useful for your group as you begin the research for this project: these distinctions will help you more effeciently and effectively answer the important questions the projects asks.

Another important distinction to make when thinking about how to utilize sources for your project is to differentiate between primary and secondary sources. For now, let's call "primary sources" the essays, articles, drawings, photographs, etc. from the period in which our technology was invented; "secondary sources," then, would be more contemporary looks at the history of that technology.

Step 1. What questions do we need to answer?

One way to begin, then, is to think about what questions the assignment asks your group to answer, and think about how the various materials you'll find in the research process will help you answer those questions. For example, say your group has decided to present on the Corliss Engine at our Virtual World's Fair.

Our first real step in the research process is to find out what questions about the Corliss Engine the assignment wants us to answer. Reading over the assignemnt sheet, our group determines that the questions we need to answer are

• how does the Corliss work? (Or, more precisely, how can we show our non-expert audience of virtual fairgoers how it works?)
• why and how did the Corliss come to be invented?
• how the Corliss might be better than or an improvement upon other similar technolgies that already existed at the time?
• what impact did (or will, to keep it in the 19th century present tense) the Corliss have on the era or culture at the time?
• what were (are) people saying about the Corliss?
• why were (are/should) people from this time (be) excited about the Corliss?

Of course, the larger question this project asks-- how does the Corliss work culturally? What narrative about the present and future does the Corliss tell? What social relations and divisions are petrified into the Corliss?-- will lead to an answer that we'll use as the thesis statement for this project. We'll be able to build to this thesis based on our answers to those smaller questions that we've found in those nineteenth-century texts. But for right now, let's worry about a thesis statement later.

Step 2: What types of sources will help us answer these questions?

Step 1 | Step 2 | Step 3 | Step 4 | Suggested Library Resources