Week 5 Discussion Guide: Tuesday--The Hawthorne Project
We will talk with a bibliographic research specialist at the Library about how to find scholarly printed sources for your group research presentations about Hawthorne and other American writers of his generation. The main emphasis will be on using the online catalog to find printed scholarly books and using the search engines and databases linked to peer-reviewed scholarly articles. You are required to use only scholarly sources for this project. The obvious place to find them is in university press books on the library shelves and by using the scholarly search engines like JSTOR and EbscoHost to locate article-length scholarship on your topics. Do not give in to the temptation to use "Google" as your search engine or it will flood your mind with untrustworthy or simply incorrect information, most of which was copied from someone else. You may use sources found using "Google Scholar" or "Google Books," but those searches also may be contaminated with non-scholarly results, and "Google Books" searches usually block out significant portions of books still under copyright (like standard biographies). Try to rise above literary dictionaries and encyclopedias except as background information. For biographical information, you will want the authors' standard scholarly biographies. Avid popular biographies in favor of the work of authors who actually read all their subjects' works, correspondence, journals and diaries, and had their work evaluated by peer reviewers who weeded out errors and misinterpretation.
This is not the same as 104's library session on general advice about research--the library's research experts will provide instruction in tools explicitly designed to help you complete the group research presentation for Thursday and your first draft of the Hawthorne paper, also due Thursday. After the library's instruction session is over, we will discuss how college-trained scholars' writing differs in process and intention from writing that succeeded in high school. If you did not already read "Making the Transition" before this literary analysis project started, be sure to click here to read some very important preliminary advice that will help you write your rough draft.