Overview
Summary: Students will complete a visual research project (paper or media project) based on an analysis of a visual media object of their choice. Students will base their analysis on a research practice covered during the course. For this section of the assignment, you'll be producing the final component of the lit review focused on the particular method you plan to use.
Details:
Your full Lit Review will include at least three (3) sources related to the visual artifact, three (3) related to the site or modality, and three (3) related to the method . In other words, this paper should have at least nine (9) outside sources for this project, plus at least one from within the course (10 total). For the final part of this section of the assignment, you'll be focusing on just the last of the three groups of sources: sources related to the method that you are interested in studying.
As a reminder, this resource on how to do a Literature Reviews is very useful: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/conducting_research/writing_a_literature_review.html
Steps
1. Create a Google doc and add me as an Editor.
2. Using one of the library tools learned during our library day, find 4-6 sources that you think might be useful for this project. Like when you completed this for the the site and modality/modalities you're examining, in researching your method you are probably going to have to do some work to make it relevant for your project. On the one hand, doing a google search for just for your method is going to get you a lot of sources that won't be that useful because they are too general. On the other hand, trying to find sources about your method as used to examine the specific types of artifact at the site and modality/modalities you want to examine will be too narrow to yield any results. You'll need to play around with search terms to find something in the middle. List the 4-6 sources that you end up finding in the first section of your google doc under the heading "Search Results."
3. Read the abstracts of these sources or skim through the text. Identify three that you think will be the most useful for your project and read them. Underline important parts of the readings and takes notes in the margins, either on a hard copy or on a pdf, whichever you prefer. You will turn these in (if a hardcopy, I'll get them back to you ASAP so you can keep using them).
4. In the second section of your Google doc, under the heading Introduction, you will start by writing an explanation of why this area of research is important for your project (answer, I'm going to be using this method, so it is important to understand the prior research on how others have used it effectively). Think of this as a mini introduction. As with the last section, this will probably be more involved than the first one, since your sources are a little less obviously relevant, and you have to do some connecting for your reader.
5. Next, under a headline titled after your method (e.g. Audience Interviews or Semiological Analysis of Advertisements), you will get into reviewing what these three articles have to say about the method you are utilizing. For example, if you are interested in using an autoethnography for looking at the technological modality of the site of circulation for a Calvin Klein underwear advertisement that appeared only in print copies of GQ magazine in 2020, you would maybe be able to find some articles about autoethnographies related to media texts, perhaps even magazines or GQ as a specific magazine, and autoethnographies about fashion images or images that are sexualized. You will have to then do some work to explain how these are relevant for your study. Your summary of the sources needs to focus on the research about the the site and modality/modalities, again focusing on describing the current state of the research, rather than the thing itself. As written previously, I have noticed that this is challenging for students, so I recommend starting with something like, "Current research on X agrees on the following three points, a, b, and c, but there is some disagreement on d and e." Use the specific sources to fill in those points, noting where they agree on the topic and where they disagree. There are two key points here. First, you are focused on the research about the topic, not the topic (i.e. discuss the use of autoethnography as a method to research these topics, not the topics themselves). Second, you are looking at these three sources as a group--a body of literature--not individually. Don't give a list of three summaries of three articles. Instead focus on characterizing what they have to say together, where they agree, where they disagree, and pull from them specifically (quotes, citations, etc.) to provide evidence for your points. Again, I recommend reviewing the Purdue link above for strategies on how to organize your Lit Review (Chronologically, Thematically, etc.) and how to synthesize the material.
6. Finally, under the heading Conclusion, you will explain where this leaves you for your project. This if often only a couple of sentences, but you want to say why this prior research is relevant for you and if there are any gaps in that research that you think your own project might help to fill in (even if only a little).
While a lit review is a lot of work as a process (reading and understanding each article and then analyzing them as a group to see where they are similar and different), the product is actually rather short. As with the prior section, this one will probably be about a page or two.
Submit the google doc and pdfs of the three sources (unless turning in hardcopies) via this assignment. No "Chatbot" or "AI" use in this assignment.