The Project Parts:
The Project:
The research project is designed to help you become more comfortable with the process of researching, summarizing, and weeding through useful and non-useful texts. Your research project will be research on ONE topic; this will be the same topic as your final research paper, so choose wisely. The reason this project is broken up across the semester and decades is twofold: 1) so you won't do it all the night before and 2) so that you will see how research changes across decades.
The Format:
For each "part" you will find no less than 3 articles and no more than 5. There can be no Internet sources (as in no Internet webpages--you will be using the online library archives to search scholarly journals) for parts #1 and #2 and no more than ONE webpage for part #3. Your research may be reproduced in a modern publication but the original publication date must correspond to the appropriate decade. You must have one article for each decade. Part #1 is the only part excused from this rule; you should be able to find something from the 1950's, other than that do your best to find two other articles covering, as close as possible, pre-1940s. Remember an article doesn't have to speak directly to your chosen topic to be relevant.
With each article you will write an appropriate MLA bibliographic entry. The articles will be arranged by decade and alphabetized within each decade. For example, all articles from 1950, alphabetized, then articles from 1960 and so on.
Under each bibliographic entry you will write a short summary of the article. This summary should be between 150-300 words. It should be complete, proofread, and relevant.
Under the summary you will briefly (200 words or less) explain why you chose this article and how this article is representative of the decade's scholarship. (synthesis)
For example, if studying physics and one source chosen is Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, then you would explain that you chose it based on popularity and that it demonstrates the movement in the 1980s for science to become more "popular" and easily digested. You may have to complete some slight ancillary research in order to successfully write this short section.
Part #3 or the "final project" will also include a short 3-5 page paper that provides a "history" of your topic. This is called a Literature Review. You may borrow any words from previously written summaries/commentaries. This 3-5 page paper will be double spaced and will be placed in front of the complete bibliography completed with parts #1 and #2. There will be further instruction on the "final project" at a later date.