This substantial document should correspond to your Annotated Bibliography by providing a more informal, chronological narrative of your inquiry into your research questions as you pursue your Exploratory Plan. Because this document provides a narrative of your having dwelled with and worked through the items summarized in your Annotated Bibliography, this document will likely equal and even exceed it in length: approaching at least 20 pages single-spaced, and very likely exceeding 20 pages.
You will need to keep a log of your process of inquiry, discovery, evaluations, and reflections while you aggregate sources and write summaries for your Annotated Bibliography. In effect, this document will serve as a narrative review of your research (also known as a "literature review"), which will allow you to explore the prejudices exposed in your Inventory and how your research challenges and brings you to reflect critically on your project as it develops.
You may also use this research journal to explore "lines of flight" in your thinking, experiments with craft, and reflective inquiry in directions that may appear to take you far from your "plan." Share in this journal what you are discovering and also share connections with other artifacts you have or are currently researching. That is what the research journal is for.
During the semester, you will work with me and your group to share portions of your progress from your research journal, and so may be included in the final research journal, but will not count toward the total page count as they will include comments from and discussion with me and others from the class.
Methodological steps to be taken when writing about each source:
While your customary approach to responding to any items of research is valuable and to be included, it is not sufficient. Therefore, you need to interact with each item using the following steps to help deepen and expand your response to each item.
Preliminary Step:
Acknowledge your inventory (what is your already always way of seeing/listening/projecting as it filters what you encounter while researching a given artifact?). Notice how your inventory interferes with your ethical engagement with the artifact, which will be given in your written responses as your work through the following steps.
Step 1:
Distinguish and articulate the research question the rhetorical artifact you are researching is a response to (the "premise"), and what relationship this question has to your research question(s). This question ought to articulate the "disharmony" the artifact is responding to in some way (see Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus: Disclosing New Worlds). To what degree does this research question reflect your research question(s)? How does it contribute to, challenge, or even disrupt your research project?
Step 2:
Distinguish at least one controlling idea and counter idea, that is, the purpose and context of the value that appears to control the text and its significances. Does the artifact's values and the discoveries it guides you to make reinforce your inherited inventory? In what ways is your inventory and research project challenged? [Note that if everything you are researching appears to reinforce your inventory, then you may have succeeded--probably once again--in avoiding having a significant encounter with research that impacts who you are in the world]
Step 3:
Discover and share surprising details the dominant reading of the rhetorical artifact might normally overlook, and distinguish and share opposing controlling topics (each with its context and purpose), as any value will find many values opposed to it.
Step 4:
Having submitted to the expectations anticipated in the text, having become the reader (with the appropriate controlling topic) the text would have its reader be, having undergone the dialogic, polyphonic play between virtual readers, wherein the submissive reader is but one of many roles to play in relation to the text: explore what it takes to become the narrative and authorial audiences of the artifact. In what direction will you go in your research having encountered this artifact?