Managing a Major Project

Overall trajectory for a big project

You probably want to start with some kind of question in mind, but you should be ready for your thinking to change over time, as you assimilate more and more sources. The question(s) you start with should be relatively broad and allow for answers that are more complicated than just yes/no responses. For example: What can we learn about why the Peasant Revolt occurred in 1381, not fifty years earlier or later? How did satire inform Chaucer's approach to the Franklin's Tale?

Different types of sources you'll want to look for:

• general background on the topic, time period, region, author, philosophical issues, etc.
• "companion to" or "guide to" sources: often geared towards a student audience, to help students understand the state of the field and what have been some of the most important sources or debates
  • "The Cambridge Companion to X"
  • "The Cambridge History of X"
  • (Wiley-)Blackwell "A Companion to X"
  • Brill "A Companion to X"
  • "Oxford Guide(s) to X"
  • "Oxford Handbook of X"
• field-defining sources, which may not be the most recent on your topic, but which have helped to shape the work that others have done more recently - you may start to recognize these by looking at citations in more recent work or by looking at companion-style sources
• recent scholarship, often journal articles

Keeping track of sources

As you're doing your research, you'll want to keep track of your sources somehow. You may not know right away whether or not each source is one that you'll end up using for your annotated bibliography or for the literature review, so you'll want to maintain a set of possible sources somewhere. You can use a document (like my sample annotated bibliography), or else I would recommend Zotero, either online or as a downloaded piece of software. However you decide to track your sources, I'd recommend that you take some notes about the useful parts of the source, including relevant page numbers.

Citations

You can look up a refresher on Chicago Style at the Purdue OWL pages, but you should also feel free to ask questions of me or of your library liaisons, Amy Wainwright and Nevin Mayer.

Annotated Bibliographies

Guidelines

Sample entries

Think about not only what might make a source important in the field in general, but also what makes it useful for your project. The commentary you include for each source should be driven by what you see in the source and what you need from it, which might be very different than what someone else would get from it.

• Don't forget to include page numbers whenever you are referring to a particular idea or passage from the source! In the context of an annotated bibliography, I would probably just give them as parenthetical citations; see my sample document for some examples of this.
• You may not already know your argument, but you need to be thinking about what questions are raised by the sources you're looking at, where you disagree with these sources, where these sources open up your eyes to new ways of approaching the material, etc.
• Where do you see gaps that you might try to fill? That might be because you think there is a flaw in a source you're looking at, but it might just be that you think you can bridge two topics that haven't been studied together very much.

Incorporating sources into your research and writing

• Engaging sources actively: reading for a problem, reading for arguments, or reading for data and support - Booth, 88-94.
• Framing quotations: how to incorporate source material smoothly into the prose of your essay - Graff and Birkenstein, 45-51.
• Ways of responding to a source: disagree (and why), agree (but with a difference), or both agree and disagree - Graff and Birkenstein, 54-66.

Sources:

Booth, Wayne C., et al. The Craft of Research. 4th edition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. 4th edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2018.

Literature Reviews

Guidelines - see the presentation guidelines for more help in formulating your thoughts.

For more guidance on literature reviews, see this page from the University of Guelph.