Assignment 7: Spring Research Project
Divinity ~ Society ~ Nature
Spring 2013
Introduction
Since the beginning of the year in Humanities Core, you’ve written six essays on a wide array of topics, employing a range of methods. The Spring Research Project is the culmination of the writing you’ve done this year, as well as an opportunity to build on the critical reading, writing, and thinking skills you’ve developed throughout the year in the Core course. It is intended to be a capstone project that allows you to develop, in consultation with your instructor, an independent project of your design that draws on one of the course’s themes (Divinity, Society, and Nature) from a humanistic point of view. It will take as its object of analysis some artifact of human culture that is open to and in need of critical interpretation, since its nature, meanings, and significance may be contested by different people. This is the terrain of philosophy, literature, history, visual studies, and all other humanities disciplines, all of which work from the assumption that the project of understanding human culture in all its forms is complex, critical, contested, and necessary for life.
The crux of such a project is to read, understand, and write about how and why the texts, people, places, or artifacts in question create meaning, and as such it is not at all like the kind of “policy paper” you might write in other courses, where the expectation is to present a social issue and take a position on it. Instead, the burden here is to engage in what the works we’ve studied all year have been engaging in, each in its own way: efforts to scrutinize aspects of human culture in order to understand, to see and think differently, and to place humanistic forms of inquiry front and center in your analysis, as our lecturers have been doing all year long and as you have been doing in class discussions and essays. You should consult Chapter 17 in the Writer’s Handbook (“What Are the Humanities?”) for more information about defining a humanities research project.
Getting Started
In order to do this for your own project, you will need to develop a particular object of study related to one of these themes, an artifact that serves as an anchor for the broader research. The particular artifact that you end up developing a project around may come from one of the genres we’ve worked on throughout the year: philosophical tract, political pamphlet, painting, building, historical document, musical composition, play, or other related genres. For this project you can either a) revisit a text or artifact from fall or winter quarters (i.e. Maimonides, Kleist, Benjamin Britten) and generate a suitable new research project organized around it, or b) develop a suitable project inspired by and clearly related to this quarter’s texts, themes, and definitions of “Nature.”
But what makes some particular artifact a suitable topic for your project? And how do you go about developing that into a workable research project? This is likely to be a long and challenging process, and will happen in a way different from what you probably expected it to be. In your section, your instructor may allow you to develop potential projects from any of the three general themes, or may limit it to one or more of the themes, or may develop clusters of interrelated topics. For starters, it should be something “contested” – the place, event, document, or artifact should be one that touches on one of our three themes in a clear and direct way and must be of such a contested nature that your engagement with the many different ways of reading it will produce opportunities for thoughtful analysis. Beyond this initial challenge (which is likely to take a good deal of time), your project idea must receive formal approval from your instructor and must be of the proper scope and nature to allow you to address the prompt tasks. When it comes to identifying a suitable subject for your project, your instructor will be your single most critical resource, although by no means the only one, as all of the instructors in Core, like our Core lecturers and our research librarians, have firsthand experience in doing this very thing, and will be able to draw on that experience in helping you craft a suitable project.
Questions, not Topics
At the heart of the project are the research questions for which you will set out to discover answers in the process of reading, thinking, and writing. The questions that guide the research project (which will shift and expand as the research continues) should be designed to engage with the contested nature of this artifact in a sophisticated, thought provoking, challenging way. In this sense, you will have a much greater chance of success in the research and writing processes if you think of the central artifact less as a “topic” and more as a set of questions or problems associated with that topic. It must allow for close reading, interpretive argument, engagement with multiple types of sources, and more. When you approach this project as if you were hunting for a mere topic, you’ll be inclined to simplify your analysis and merely regurgitate information; when it’s framed clearly as an analytical problem, you’ll be much more inclined to produce interpretation, analysis, ideas, arguments, and insights. For example: in their lectures, what questions did Prof. Herbert, or Prof. Jarratt, or Prof. Bencivenga ask, and why? What methods did they use to discover answers and explore interpretive possibilities? For more on how to develop good research questions or productive research “problems,” please consult The Craft of Research 31-67.
Skills and Methods
The skills you’ll be bringing to the task are likely to include some or all of the following, all of which should sound familiar to your work in Core this year: 1) defining terms and analyzing narratives; 2)analyzing visual rhetoric; 3) integrating secondary sources; 4) rhetorical analysis; 5) counter-argument; and 6) identifying and evaluating claims, evidence, and assumptions. These are skills you developed in the drafting and writing of your essays in the fall, winter, and spring quarters. You will also be engaging in extensive thought, discussion, and reading; developing a suitable idea and plan for your project in consultation with your instructor and peers; doing wide-ranging and thorough research; using many different kinds of sources; compiling an annotated bibliography, due in Week Six; delivering a clear prospectus, your instructor determining whether it be in oral presentation format, a written prospectus, or both, due in Weeks Seven and Eight; and ultimately crafting your research into a Final Project, due in Week Ten. While the drafting process for the research project will include an annotated bibliography, an oral presentation, and a prospectus, it may also include some or all of the following, depending on emphases in your section: peer review, ideas/working drafts, individual or group conferences with your instructor, and more. Since it is likely that the genres of the annotated bibliography and the prospectus are new to you, your instructor will guide you through the process of crafting them when it is time to do so.
The Craft of Research will be a critical companion text throughout the research process. In truth, the entire book is an invaluable tool for developing your project, but we can break it down into four major phases: developing ideas and plans; conducting thorough and valuable research; putting everything together in a first draft; revising your draft as you gain new insights about your material. Your instructor will provide specific guidelines about these components of the project, and what will need to be read or written or done with various parts of The Craft of Research at various points in the quarter, but you will certainly benefit from returning to the clear advice in this book on your own again and again.
In the early planning and research stages, you should consult a wide and deep range of sources to gain as strong an understanding as possible: primary sources, secondary sources, scholarly articles, journalism and reportage, and analysis and material in a variety of media: books, newspapers, magazines, journal articles, locations, interviews, artifacts, websites. In consulting these sources, you should refer back to the skills you developed in completing the Library Research Tasks and Library Research Module: assessing strengths and weaknesses in online reference sources; using ArtStor and other visual archives to scrutinize and analyze images; learning about how to find and use Course Reserves and UC eLinks, and, most of all, familiarizing yourself with a wide range of resources available to you through our libraries and beyond.
You will have ideas, abandon ideas, and explore; you’ll have false starts and accidents. Your curiosity and diligence will be the two most valuable factors as you read, talk, brainstorm, write, and rewrite. You will need to identify topics, problems, issues, and information in a clear and compelling manner; engage in substantive critical thinking and close reading throughout; developing ideas, interests, and arguments. Ultimately your thoughts, reading, discussion, and drafting must lead you to the formulation of clear theses and arguments that anchor your approach to the questions at the heart of your project.
The most common problems you’ll need to avoid: starting too late; not heeding instructors’ advice; not reading widely and deeply enough; not pushing yourself to work on the project consistently throughout the quarter; and having a simplified or erroneous understanding about what this project demands of you. At the end of the day, what this project is really testing is your ability to do two particularly critical things: work at length in a self-directed, relatively independent fashion; and to bring all of the skills of humanistic analysis you’ve learned this year to fruition in the development of a project that excites and interests you and your readers alike.
Practical Matters
Your project will need to engage critically with the following in the final draft:
1-2 primary sources
1-2 scholarly monographs
2-4 scholarly, peer-reviewed articles
These are suggested minimums, and you will certainly do well to read far more than this, and may find it useful or necessary to incorporate much more into your final project. Your instructor may wish to modify or expand on these, so be sure to follow the specific amendments or revisions adopted by your instructor. The final draft of your project should be roughly 9-10 pages and will count for 60% of your total writing grade for the quarter. The annotated bibliography, oral presentation, prospectus, and all other required elements of the drafting process defined by your instructor are required components of the assignment. Research is a long process of many steps, and that is why it is essential that you complete every component of the drafting process in a thorough, substantive fashion when it is due; otherwise, it is impossible to produce a worthwhile and coherent project. This project is a long process of research, writing, and discovery, and not merely a ten-page product produced at quarter’s end. Failure to submit any of these components of the project when they are due and in a fashion deemed suitable by your instructor may result in a failing grade for the entire Research Project assignment.
Students who get started early, consult often with instructors, librarians, and others, read and think widely and diligently, and find something that can sustain a passionate interest throughout the quarter have the greatest chance of producing a strong, compelling project. The burden is on you to take what you’ve learned all year and demonstrate just how much you’re capable of doing now that you have the time and space and freedom to engage in something of your own design. Good luck!
Some Helpful Links
How to Write an Annotated Bibliography
How to Prepare and Deliver an Oral Presentation
How to Develop a Solid Prospectus
Sample Research Clusters and Topics