How to find / How to read academic texts
The fifth week was spent by taking the subject material that one of you is working on and using this as an example for finding related material that can be used for a literature review.
The one we picked was Ceren's investigation into Eisenman's holocaust memorial in Berlin. In her diagram Ceren has declared one of her nodes to be "storytelling," and so this was the keyword with which we hit google scholar. And sure enough, even the very first document that came our way proved to be a good one, held inquiries that were relevant to what Ceren actually wants to discuss.
This is not as unexpected as one might think. Although we seldom think of it this way, our thoughts are always founded upon the thoughts of others, or upon the ideological milieu of the "zeitgeist" that we are living in. No idea exists in a vacuum, and once we start looking for authors and researchers who may have things to contribute to our discussion it is startling to see how often one hits the jackpot.
Of course, we may not always be lucky enough to have the very first result suit our needs. However if, like me, you love detective novels you will get a real kick out of taking the investigation further since at the end of the day you are really looking for clues and relationships very much like detectives are looking for clues and relationships whilst they are investigating a case: In some cases the clue may be hidden not in the text you are looking at but is to be found in the bibliography of this text - which means that the search takes you one level deeper. And in some cases the clue may be a composite between the thoughts of two or more authors.The important thing is to be creative while you are searching, and to be open minded - while you are looking for substantiations of your own premises, always bear in mind that what you are reading may also (is in fact very likely to) give you new ideas, new/alternative ways of considering your subject matter, enriching your own thoughts through the thoughts of others.
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And this effectively brings us to how an academic text should be read: Any in-depth inquiry will lead you to a massive amount of data, and there is no way that you can be expected to read all of it. Thus, academic texts, be they books or journal articles, are not meant to be read in their entirety, that is word by word, but rather they are meant to be read quickly, taking in the highlights by "skimming" over the text. Only if the text proves to be enticing enough that you feel compelled to read all of it, sentence by sentence, do you do so.
In order to fast-read an academic text, first of all you read the abstract. In fact, this is what the abstract is there for, to show you whether there is anything worth pursuing in terms of your own purposes in this paper. If the text in question is in a book that is a monograph, then what you do is read the introduction chapter since the essence of the book will be in that chapter. If the book is an anthology, then the individual chapters will also have abstracts, that you read first. After the abstract, the other part that may be relevant, that may hold clues, is the conclusion of the text, so this you should read also.
If the abstract/introduction and conclusion prove themselves to be worthwhile, then you start reading the actual body of the text - but by "skimming" it! If you are screen-reading from a word document or a pdf file, what you can also do at this point is to conduct a keyword search inside the document to find the parts that are most related to what you are looking for. If you are reading from a hard copy, this is of course not possible. In any case, the way you read is as follows: You read the first sentence of each paragraph since this sentence will usually provide a clue as to what the paragraph is talking about. Then you go to the last sentence and if that also looks promising then you read the full paragraph. If there is anything that you want to quote, you make a note of the page number since this is a very important part of the reference, and continue reading.
Also, as already mentioned above, check the references of the text since these may lead you to other texts that may prove to be worth your while - in some cases even more so than the text that you are holding in your hands.
Of course, we may not always be lucky enough to have the very first result suit our needs. However if, like me, you love detective novels you will get a real kick out of taking the investigation further since at the end of the day you are really looking for clues and relationships very much like detectives are looking for clues and relationships whilst they are investigating a case: In some cases the clue may be hidden not in the text you are looking at but is to be found in the bibliography of this text - which means that the search takes you one level deeper. And in some cases the clue may be a composite between the thoughts of two or more authors.The important thing is to be creative while you are searching, and to be open minded - while you are looking for substantiations of your own premises, always bear in mind that what you are reading may also (is in fact very likely to) give you new ideas, new/alternative ways of considering your subject matter, enriching your own thoughts through the thoughts of others.
________________________________________________
And this effectively brings us to how an academic text should be read: Any in-depth inquiry will lead you to a massive amount of data, and there is no way that you can be expected to read all of it. Thus, academic texts, be they books or journal articles, are not meant to be read in their entirety, that is word by word, but rather they are meant to be read quickly, taking in the highlights by "skimming" over the text. Only if the text proves to be enticing enough that you feel compelled to read all of it, sentence by sentence, do you do so.
In order to fast-read an academic text, first of all you read the abstract. In fact, this is what the abstract is there for, to show you whether there is anything worth pursuing in terms of your own purposes in this paper. If the text in question is in a book that is a monograph, then what you do is read the introduction chapter since the essence of the book will be in that chapter. If the book is an anthology, then the individual chapters will also have abstracts, that you read first. After the abstract, the other part that may be relevant, that may hold clues, is the conclusion of the text, so this you should read also.
If the abstract/introduction and conclusion prove themselves to be worthwhile, then you start reading the actual body of the text - but by "skimming" it! If you are screen-reading from a word document or a pdf file, what you can also do at this point is to conduct a keyword search inside the document to find the parts that are most related to what you are looking for. If you are reading from a hard copy, this is of course not possible. In any case, the way you read is as follows: You read the first sentence of each paragraph since this sentence will usually provide a clue as to what the paragraph is talking about. Then you go to the last sentence and if that also looks promising then you read the full paragraph. If there is anything that you want to quote, you make a note of the page number since this is a very important part of the reference, and continue reading.
Also, as already mentioned above, check the references of the text since these may lead you to other texts that may prove to be worth your while - in some cases even more so than the text that you are holding in your hands.