Introduction
The Research Project is your capstone project this year, incorporating the critical reading, writing, and research skills you have developed. You now have an opportunity to apply your skills to an independent project of your own design that relates to the course theme of war. You will choose as your object of analysis and critical interpretation some artifact of human culture—a primary source such as a political manifesto, novel, poem, diary, document, newspaper article, work of visual art, film or video, stage drama, piece of music, advertising campaign, clothing, recipes for food or drink—and you will interpret that artifact through the lens of a humanistic discipline such as history, literature, philosophy, or visual studies.
The crux of such a project is to read, understand, and write about how and why your artifact creates meaning for one or more audiences. Unlike 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, your challenge is to scrutinize a particular aspect 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. You should consult your Writer’s Handbook chapters “What are the Humanities?” and “Developing Your Research Project” for more information about defining a humanities research project.
Getting Started
To start your own project, you will need to find a particular object of study related to our course themes, an artifact that serves as an anchor for broader research. The artifact that you end up choosing may be suggested to you by lectures that interested you in fall, winter, or spring quarters. It may (but is not required to) come from the interview project you completed in Assignment 7. Perhaps your interview subject mentioned a book she read about the effects of war, a film she identified with, a political document, or a journal she wrote that piqued your interest. This is your opportunity to follow up on that exchange. You may choose to write on a war-related artifact that belongs to any genre or time frame, and you may take any disciplinary approach that is humanistic in its mode of inquiry. But 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.
Just as important as selecting an artifact, is the formulation of research questions that place your analysis of an artifact within a specific discipline. Consider the kinds of questions asked by Professors Izenberg, Newman, van den Abbeele, Fahs, Lazo, Szalay, Burke, Hart, and Herbert. These research questions will develop over the course of your project, often changing in relation to your artifact.
Skills and Methods
You already bring many skills to this project—defining terms; integrating secondary sources; identifying and evaluating claims, evidence, and assumptions. You also bring experience of literary, comparative, philosophical, historical, and media analysis. You will be engaging in extensive thought, discussion, and reading with secondary sources, your section leader, your peers, and other members of the community. In the process of developing your project, your project will include a clear prospectus and an annotated bibliography. (Your instructor will determine whether the prospectus should be an oral presentation, a written prospectus, or both.) The drafting process may also include some or all of the following, depending on 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. Your Writer’s Handbook chapter “Developing Your Research Project” offers you examples of these genres.
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 your E-Learning Quizzes: assessing strengths and weaknesses in online reference sources; using library databases; and, most of all, familiarizing yourself with a wide range of resources available to you through our libraries and beyond.
You will brainstorm ideas, abandon ideas, and explore suggestions; you will have false starts and accidents and wonderful discoveries. 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; and develop 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 will 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 simplistic 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: to work at length in a self-directed, relatively independent fashion and to bring all of the skills of humanistic analysis you have learned this year to fruition in the development of a project that excites and interests you and your readers alike.
Assignment
The final draft of your project should be roughly 9-12 pages and will count for 60% of your total writing grade for the quarter. At a minimum, your final draft must engage critically with the following: 1-2 primary sources, 1-2 scholarly monographs, 2-4 scholarly, peer-reviewed articles.
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 annotated bibliography, oral presentation, prospectus, and all other elements of the drafting process defined by your instructor are required components of this assignment. 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 responsibility is yours to take what you have 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.
Past prizewinning student research papers