Or
Why it’s Tricky to do Good Research Without a Physical Library
(and What to Do About That)
I’m writing this partly to work my way through the challenge of helping my students develop their research papers when they can’t actually go to the library, given the whole Coronavirus situation. Pretty much everything hereafter is addressed directly to them, but if you’re not one of them, you might still find some interesting stuff about the pragmatic reasons for using physical libraries to do research.
The research problem here is a weird one, in that you can’t go to the library. In fact, I had originally scheduled a homework assignment that asked you to go to the library. The idea was that you would go to the library to find a book on a subject that interested you, but before you left, find another book on the same shelf (and therefore on the same general topic), and grab that book, too.
The point of this exercise was going to be to show you the benefits of actually going to the library as compared with only finding sources via search engines online. Specifically, I wanted to show you that libraries’ shelving systems are set up to help you find information that may help you, but which you might not have known you needed if you only searched for things online. Online searching is great, and you should make full use of it, but to a large extent it only shows you results based on the keywords you already knew you had to put into the search bar.
In other words, it’s only going to show you things you already knew you didn’t know. It’s not going to show you the things you didn’t know that you didn’t know.
I’m not suggesting that going to the library is morally superior, or something, but rather that it lets you cast a wider net around the area you’re looking into, in a way that an online search isn’t really built for.
But we’ve been booted off grounds and can’t access the library. Okay, what now?
Well, one thing that kind of helps is that UVA’s library website has a function that lets you see titles on the shelves nearby the source you’ve found in the search engine. (The button is supposed to look like books next to each other on a shelf, but it’s so small that it doesn’t look like much at all. It’s mostly green, and it pops up in the search results next to the call number of the book in question).
The problem with this at the moment is that it only helps you if you can find eBook versions of both the thing you searched for and the book that’s supposed to sit near it on the shelf. After all, you still can’t get into the library to find physical books.
So, what does all of this mean when it comes to how our class manages research? Well, you’re effectively cut off from the easy ability to cast a wide net in your research efforts, to search for information you didn’t know about before searching for it. This may seem trivial until you remember that the whole writing process I’ve been trying to teach you all involves running into ideas you didn’t know were there in the first place. I had this whole thing prepared where I was going to point out that research, done properly, is just an extension of that same principle, and that the only difference is that you’re finding the new ideas outside of your own head, instead of locked away somewhere in your long-term memory or waiting to be assembled out of two other ideas that you already have. It was going to be great.
That’s the problem, anyway; you’re cut off from a method of searching for information that is really helpful for research endeavors, especially in the early stages when your topic is still vague and undefined and casting a wide net might really help you find something more specific that you could start drilling down on. To a large extent, you’re stuck with the questions and ideas you already know that you need.
Now, what’s our solution? Well, the short answer is, “Good question.”
The longer answer, at least in my current thinking, is probably threefold:
1) Ask a lot of questions about the questions you’re asking.
2) Use bibliographies liberally.
3) Talk to your classmates and get them to ask you questions where they’re confused or curious about what you’re researching (and later, what you’re arguing).
One at a time, then:
1) Ask a lot of questions about the questions you’re asking.
Basically, you’ve got to be really, really open in your thinking about your research topic. The nice thing about researching widely at the start of your project is that you can’t help but run into unexpected information. The very act of reading widely puts that information in front of you, even if you weren’t cognitively open to the idea in the first place. You do have to be somewhat open in your thinking to cast that wide net, of course, but it’s not a difficult thing to make yourself do, even if you’re already ninety-five percent sure you know what your question and argument are going to be.
Now, you don’t have that easy cure to the pitfalls of narrowmindedness (to which the researching mind is always subject, to some extent). Yours is the hard road: you’ve got to do the hard work of questioning the assumptions implicit in your own questions. It’s hard if you’ve got certain pre-commitments in your head about how things will go. You’ve got to be your own research-bias checker, in other words.
When you ask your main question, is it really a question, or is it actually a thesis that you’ve just phrased as a question? What kinds of things are you assuming in your questions from the start? (1) Are you really asking that question, or do you already have your answer and are just asking the question for show?
Doing this sort of thing should at least distance you a bit from your own preconceptions, at least enough to be more open to those unexpected ideas when they come in from the other two methods or from your own writing. Remember, your job is essentially to posit a hypothesis and then, through research and the writing process, to figure out what the real truth is, to the best of your ability. You are not beholden to your original thesis. You are beholden only to the truth.
2) Use bibliographies liberally
Maybe someone in high school told you that Wikipedia wasn’t a good source to cite, but its references section could point you towards a lot of good sources. If someone did tell you that, that person was right.
What’s more, you can (and definitely should) do the same sort of thing with your academic sources. Lots of times, when you’re doing research, it’s tempting (and sometimes the best call) to skip the part of the source where it lays out the literature review and go straight to the point of the article. It may be worth going back to the literature review, though, just to see who else has said stuff in the ongoing conversation of which the thing you’re reading is just a part.
Bibliographies and citations are how academics track conversations. Even if you don’t have the luxury of going into the library and seeing everything that’s been said about a topic laid out in front of you on the shelf, you can still start from inside that conversation and work out a bit. This won’t usually mean much more than seeing who your current source cites and why it cites them, looking online at one or two of them that seem promising or relevant to your research question, and then skimming the intro and conclusion of those pieces to see if they’re actually worth using more thoroughly. (In other words, it probably means about the same amount of time you would have spent walking to the library, looking through the books, and then walking back to your dorm room.)
3) Talk to your classmates and get them to ask you questions where they’re confused or curious about what you’re researching (and later, what you’re arguing).
It’s usually a good idea to have other people tell you what confuses them about what you’re saying. The nice thing about other people is that they sometimes think things that are different from the things that you think. Your classmates might be able to point out holes in your research, promising areas to explore and expand your topic, flaws in your logic, or just places where things are a little confusing or something. Our schedule is already going to have you talking a lot with your group members about your research progress, but feel free to talk with them (or me) more than the course itself already prescribes.
In any event, those are my off the cuff, barely proofread thoughts on the matter. More than anything, I want you to at least be aware of the problem, because it’s not one that I think a lot of students are aware of. So many students (myself included) are used to doing research entirely online that we don’t even have the experience of going into a library and seeing the information-seeking allowances that the shelving system provides. Now that we’re all locked out of the library, it’s difficult to make that point clear without just straight up telling you.
So…consider yourself told.
(1) There’s a classic example of this kind of loaded question: “When did you start beating your wife?” This is a trick, of course, because unless you’ve already established that the person has beaten his wife, the real question should be, “Have you ever beaten your wife?”
Thoughts on Essay Writing 