An account of today’s workshop ( 5 March 2009)
Posted by Julia Hobson on March 5, 2009
What a wonderful range of postgrad students came along today! From honours level to Phd’s ; from chemistry to psychology and from a myriad different places in the world.
Reviewing the material we covered I would say the key point that emerged was the distiction between the product of the document(Lit Review) and the process of achieving that end result.
We covered the importance of building an annotated bibliography and a masters by research student shared the ‘table method’ of keeping track of your readings and notes.
Draw a table and the first box is the authors name, then the title of the article, then methodology, results, key words etc.
Another way to manage the accumalation of data that postgraduate students end up with is to use the endnote soft ware system.
Whatever system is used I think the most important point is to have a system!
As we move from a collection of notes gathered from a range of texts we can also file those notes in a number of different ways.
In folder 1 (F1)
I like the idea of filing 3 paragraphs that I write after I read an article.
Para: 1 is a summary of the article
Para:2 is my critical response to the article
Para 3: is my thinking about how this article might be applied to my research question/topic.
In folder 2 (F2) I can make responses and comments on what I learn about the correct style of writing in my discipline after reading this article.
Folder 3 ( F3) I can file all the paras that are critical response ( c) and group them together. Then I can file all the paras that are about the application of ideas/theories/methods to my research topic and group them together.
This is a way to start to pick out the patterns in the texts and bring to the foreground the themes that are important in the literature. It is also a way to move from a collection of notes that is author dominant to a collection that is theme or issue dominant.
Be careful in F3 that you keep track of which para comes from which text though. You need to cross reference it to F1 to do this.
