Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

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remove anything you’ve written at any point in your project—put the information in a
discard file in a graveyard folder, simply because you may change your mind later and
decide something you discarded earlier is useful after all.
If the book is an anthology, then the table of contents should reveal the topics
covered. If only a couple chapters are of interest, then normally you can treat them like
journal articles and read only the abstract (or introduction if there is no abstract). The
exception is the occasional zealous editor whose introduction synthesizes the
contributions of individual authors into an original piece of scholarship. The
overwhelming majority of editors, however, write an introduction that is a mindless
recitation of the main point of each contributor as the contributors saw it; the editors add
little if anything new so you don’t need to waste your time on them. On the other hand, if
there are a dozen chapters of interest to you, it’s likely that the anthology has some
coherence; indeed it’s focused in a way you care about. In that case, you do have some
interest in the volume as a whole, and you should treat it that way in your lit review,
while still making reference to specific contributing authors.
Some of the books in your annotated bibliography may be reference works that
provide basic background on your project but do not address issues raised in the project.
Normally you wouldn’t include them in your lit review, unless you have a creative
portion of your project and those books address the process of carrying it out. For
example, if you’re directing a play, those reference works may address how to set up a
budget, where to find costumes, how to audition the cast, etc. In that case, I suggest
including a section in your lit review in which you list the tasks and identify which books
address each task. List them in the order you’ll need them, so that section of your lit
review then becomes a time line for the creative portion of your project. This is an
example of adapting the lit review so that it becomes as useful a tool as possible for your
project, in this case supporting the creative as well as the analytical portion of your
project.
If you find yourself arguing that you need only one book coming out of a
particular perspective with which you disagree because the others written from that
perspective are ‘all the same’, then a red flag should pop up for you. You need to take
seriously perspectives that you don’t like, such as perspectives that are politically rightof-center,
sexist, or modernist. You don’t need to embrace them uncritically, but you
need to look for the kernel of truth in them, for their insights that ring true to intelligent
people with whom you disagree. Saying they all look alike is reminiscent of Ronald
Reagan who quipped, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all” or of whites in
the 1960s who observed that all blacks looked the same to them. Today we find such
claims abhorrent. Yet when you observe that all adherents of a particular perspective look
alike, that’s because you too are looking through the lens of the opposing perspective.
Like claims about redwoods or blacks, you are betraying an ignorance of the competing
perspective. When you lump together people from a competing perspective and say that
the differences between them are unimportant, you are, in effect, saying ‘all that counts is
what I believe is important’. You can still have convictions, but bracket them, set them to
one side, while you try to understand the other perspective. To do that, you need to take
off the lens of the perspective you prefer so that you can put on the lens of the competing
perspective. Look at those authors in their own terms, so that you understand them as
they see themselves. Then you will discover there are differences among them,