3/25: Advancing Theses, Using Sources

No video element today, since Monday's class was longer than usual. Instead, today's class collects up some tips and suggestions, suggests a strategy or two, and previews some later lessons that might be helpful to think about now. There's also a bonus side-discussion.

Resources: Citation Styles and Library Stuff

You can find comprehensive guides to a variety of citation styles here.

You can access the library’s better-than-google levels of research access here.

To recap what’s required in a proposal and annotated bibliography, the class post detailing it can be found here.

If you need to contact me, email me. You don’t need a link for that.

Pro-Tips: Advanced Ideas

So, here’s how to tell if your topic is too vague. In other words, here’s how to diagnose your topic with New-To-You Syndrome. This happens when you approach an issue for the first time--you don't have a good grasp on its complexities yet, and so you're asking a slightly wrong question.

A topic suffers from NTYS when it does any of the following:

It is about a global issue. All of it. (You can’t do this in a paper--you either end up writing a whole book or a very crappy paper).
You find a lot of sources already saying exactly what you were going to say.
When asked “what do you want the reader to do with this information,” your answer is “I want them to know it.” That’s not enough. Think of something you want your readers to change in their lives.
The topic is controversial because it is circular or un-endable.

Below is a table of common NTYS topics, and how you might refine them into better, more interesting or more do-able topics for a research paper:

In the above table, those "woke" suggestions are not the only way of refining a topic, but suggest complicating questions or circumstances that might make your approach more interesting and complete.

Good practices for defeating NTYS: Narrow the application (like in the first example in the table), turn the issue around (like the third one), or reorganize your question so the answer is “and here’s something we can practically do about this issue.”

If you can’t think of what the audience should do with the information you want to give them, it’s probably because you haven’t really thought about the target audience. Or you’re trying to keep the topic vague and big so the writing will be “easier.”

Spoilers: it will not be easier, it will just sound like an encyclopedia entry and you will hate writing every second of it.

Pro-Tips: Things to Look for in the Proposal

Let's jump forward to after our one-on-one Zoom appointments. On April 5, we'll have peer review for your P2 proposal and annotated bibliography. While I'll post these suggestions on the class Slack on that day, here’s a list of things to look for in your own proposal, and the proposals of your peers:

Do they have a specific topic? Is it not super-vague, like the ones in the example table above?
Do they have the four ingredients of the proposal: thesis, context, plan, and stakes?
Can you reasonably skim their two paragraphs in a minute and get all the main points? Proposals are supposed to be speed-readable, because in real life that’s how people read them.
Does it have a good title?
If they have sources and annotations at this stage, are they correct?
Can they reasonably do this project this semester?

If any of the above answers are “no” on April 5, help your peers out by noting this, and help them brainstorm some solutions.

Pro-Tips: Using Sources in the Future Paper

Looking even further ahead to the research paper (P3) can help you understand why this preliminary research is important. While you’re in the early stage of research and thinking about your topic right now, eventually you’ll need to identify how research sources help you. There are four basic roles that sources take on in a research paper, and identifying what role a source will have now, while you’re still forming the project can help you figure out your future research needs.

Here’s the four roles, with my names for them:

Forwarding: a source that you “forward” is one that is about a topic related to yours, and whose approach or strategy you think will work well with your own. For example: “Dr. X published a study on how YouTube enhances the educational experience of middle-school students, so I can think of this source as a model for my own study on how YouTube helps in college.”
Backup: the “classic” source use–a backup source is a source that backs up or reinforces one of the steps or claims of your argument. For example: “I can include Professor Y’s statistic on how many college professors use YouTube to set up my claim that it’s not being used enough.”
Background: these are sources you use to get up-to-speed on an issue, and that you might cite or quote in order to give your audience some basics. Background sources are often included in a proposal and annotated bibliography, but may not actually get quoted in the future research paper.
Warding: these are sources that you use specifically to discuss and shut-down future counterarguments or opposing arguments to your own. For example: “Rather than taking the time to refute Dr. B’s study on how YouTube sucks myself, I can refer my readers to (and maybe paraphrase or quote) Dr. A’s study on how Dr. B is wrong.”

In addition to these four roles, there’s also two basic varieties of evidence: consistent evidence and comparable evidence.

Consistent evidence is a source that comments on some aspect of your topic directly. For instance, if you want to establish that something is an issue, a series of statistics from a few sources that display how it’s a widespread issue is consistent evidence.

Comparable evidence is a source that says something similar or analogous to your point. Comparable evidence is usually forwarded evidence–it’s something that’s parallel to your own point that suggests that you’re right without proving it exactly. For example, since you could reasonably assume that college students are similar to (but not the same as) high school students, a study on how high school classes should start later can still help your point that colleges should start classes later.

Comparable evidence often needs a little more explanation or discussion in a paper, in order to explain how it relates to your point, but this is often a good opportunity to impress the audience with your smarts. In addition, comparable evidence is often easier to find, especially if your topic is unique or cutting-edge. Consistent evidence is nice, but comparable evidence is a good sign that you're doing something new and valuable.

We'll circle back to this in two weeks, but these categories might help you think about your research, so I thought I'd preview it here.

Side Lecture: Quiz Results and Conspiracy Theories

In the quiz for the last class (3/22), there was an extra credit question about which large, abstract group was typically the coded target of more vague references. This question was not just an extra credit question, but attempted to verify some sociological data about your age group. I did a little science at you.

Many of you got this question wrong in the expected way. That's a very odd sentence, so let me explain: the correct answer was that Jewish people were most often the target of those vague, conspiratorial references, even in the 20th and 21st centuries, because of complicated historical prejudices that you can learn about elsewhere. Many of you answered "communists"--in fact, nearly 75% of all your classmates did. This answer is almost correct--weirdly enough, in Cold War America (and the USSR too), older prejudices often got reinterpreted into contemporary terms. Basically, groups that were already discriminated against got associated with the new problematic group.

(It's also worth remembering how many Americans were sympathetic to Nazi Germany's overt antisemitism until the US entered the war [about a third, yikes]. Wikipedia-search Charles Lindbergh or the Silvershirts or the "America First Party" and you'll learn some mildly unpleasant things about how people project conspiracies and minority-blaming onto any complicated reality. People in powerful groups also blame less powerful people any time there's consequences to their behavior, which is why your racist uncle blames "cancel culture" on young minorities.)

But what does this have to do with the quiz, you ask? Ah. So, in addition to highlighting a known gap in your high school historical education (the 20th century's rapid-fire awfulness tends to blur together, not your fault, you probably weren't there), it also highlights a nice thing: your age group is statistically less likely to be racist, and is more likely to judge people by their chosen political or social values, or lifestyle decisions, rather than some inherent thing they didn't choose. Thus, it makes sense that many of you would believe people in the past did this too (and thus, many of you chose "communists," a political choice and an answer which is true but ignores a racist layer that you're conditioned to treat as "no, that's too stupid"). Unfortunately, many people in the past were, in fact, that stupid. As many of you observed in early January, many people are still vulnerable to that sort of really dumb conspiracy stuff with racist overtones.

Some of you had already learned this, and got the question right (congrats, but also sorry you have to carry that knowledge.) Some of you may have friends or family members who, in the aftermath of this January, went from "less serious" conspiracy theories into radical, dangerous stuff. Here's how:

Conspiracy theories and unscrupulous rabble-rousing politicians have to be more subtle in how they catch you with their goofy ideas, since being overtly racist (or coding it obviously using vague terms, or dogwhistle-racism/sexism/etc.) won't really work on most people, hopefully. However, strategies have evolved with our media environment, and once you let your guard down on the antisemitism or some other flavor of -ism (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia etc.), it's easy to slide into really bad stuff, because stigmatized groups are often shaped to overlap by the people doing the -ism. So once they scapegoat one group as the source of all problems, that group can expand to be everyone that isn't you.

A viral TikTok from last autumn illustrates this concept well. It tries to codify some things about conspiracy theories and actually lines up with the existing science on this area (the creator makes a neat upside-down pyramid chart showing how conspiracies escalate from "weird idea" to "absolutely dangerous"). Apparently they've made follow-up videos, but this one is still a good encapsulation.

So when doing research (and also in real life), watch out for unscrupulous sources or arguments that offer simple solutions to complicated problems. If a source answers all your questions forever, there's something shady with it, guaranteed.

Anyway, that's really heavy stuff, so back to proposals:

Homework

Jump into this week's Slack discussion if you haven't already (or even if you have--help your peers out!)

Over the weekend, draft the 2 paragraph part of your proposal so we can talk about it in our meeting.

If you're still not decided on a single topic, try to do a 2-paragraph treatment for each one. Often, writing this can tell you which idea you find the most interesting. If you're stretched for time or brainpower, just answer the 4 steps of the proposal (thesis/question, context, plan, stakes) in a list--it'll still help you decide.

Don't forget to sign up for a Zoom appointment here and to do today's participation quiz.