Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

39
topics, issues, and positions are more complicated than they appeared when you skimmed
through them, but it’s much easier to make a simple structure more complicated than to
try to construct a complicated structure all at once from the full set of details. Like many
other parts of the senior project research process, understanding, organizing, and
evaluating the topics, issues, and positions don’t scale up well. Trying to absorb that
information all at once works on a smaller scale, but not on a project of this magnitude.
There are too many topics, issues, and positions to keep in your head all at once, much
less sort them out, evaluate them, and organize all those details into an argument that
draws on several different disciplines.
Reading for the chapter. After doing more skimming than reading for your
annotated bibliography and literature review, you now get a chance to dig into the books
that pertain to this chapter and then pursue those ideas further into journal articles. Even
now, however, you should not be reading books cover-to-cover. Be strategic in choosing
what and how much to read. Remind yourself before you open a book why you are
reading it and what you expect it to contribute to your chapter. Then find the sections of
the book that contain what you need and read only those sections. Keep in mind what you
are looking for as you read. In short, read for your purposes not the author’s purposes.
Authors want you to see the section you read as embedded in their overall argument, but
you should see it as embedded in your argument. Remember that you do not have time in
two semesters, not even in two five-credit courses, to read completely the 45 books in
your original annotated bibliography, much less the hundred or more books and journal
articles you will probably end up using in your project.
Journal articles give you the cutting edge of the professional debates revealed in
books. They are much more focused, however, concentrating on individual mini-debates.
They deal with a specific aspect of an issue, not the whole issue (even as perceived
narrowly by that discipline), with a sub-topic not the whole topic. The analysis is less
synoptic and comprehensive, more fine-grained and focused. Journal articles give you
greater detail, they fill in gaps, and they bring the arguments up to date. If you were to
start with journal articles instead of books, you would get lost in an intellectual thicket;
but once you have used books to survey the intellectual landscape you can appreciate the
nuance, detail, and depth that the journal literature provides. The journal literature is
useful for most projects only after you learn through books what the larger conversations
are about and you figured out through the literature review how to situation your project
relative to those conversations. The exceptions are projects on topics so recent—dealing
with breakthroughs in computing, for example—that there has not been time for books to
be written on those topics, or projects on topics such as the Web where many authors
prefer another medium to books.
It is easy to be captured by the materials from which you draw. If you are drawing
from a number of sources that all treat your topic the same way or put it in a certain light,
it’s easy to be swept up by group think and unconsciously assume that you have to write
about it that way too. Again, you need to remind yourself that you are writing for a
different purpose that any one else who has written on your topic. Ask yourself what
treatment of your topic makes sense for an interdisciplinary approach—make problematic
the way the rest of literature treats your topic, instead of accepting their way uncritically.
It becomes harder and harder to find something new as you examine more and
more books on a topic. After a while, you don’t need to read a book to know what’s in it;