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//************** Secondary Research - January 31st, 2020 ********************//
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- The last day of the first month of a new year...
- Also, OUR TEAM IS MISSING. WHY IS OUR TEAM MISSING.
- Wait, they are now less missing!
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- Okay, we're going to pick up the last leg of your 2.5D sketch - "the due date for that has been moved to MONDAY at 11:59pm"
- Today, though, we're going to talk more about secondary research and how it'll fit into what you've been doing
- Right now, you've got these brainstormed 2.5D sketches
- The 4th part of each sketch should be a "gap analysis:" figuring out what you DON'T know for sure about your users and how knowing that information could help you design the product
- Once you have those questions, you can start doing research to try and answer them!
- When we're dealing with secondary research, there are a few terms we should make sure we've defined:
- PARAPHRASING is using your own words to describe something you've read or heard
- Often this is BETTER than quoting, since you get to keep the point you're making in your own voice and make it fit your paper's flow and style
- "I have a bad habit of skimming over/skipping quotes"
- ATTRIBUTING is giving the author credit by name, even if you're not directly quoting
- e.g. "Jean-Perre Vernant has previously described..."
- QUOTING is when you use an author's EXACT text from another source, enclosed in quotation marks (or block quotes if it's longer than 2-3 lines)
- Generally, this makes sense if the author simply said it better than you, or if you're responding to an author's exact point
- CITING is when we use some convention to indicate our source, e.g. in-text citations like "(Vernant 1983, 16)"
- REFERENCING is when you use some convention to list your sources in a bibliography
- "In this class you'll use Chicago-style references, mostly because I and Professor Stallworth like it; IEEE is also common in engineering professions"
- Some types of resources you might have to cite include (but are not limited to):
- PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES (academic articles that've been reviewed by other experts in your field)
- "For all academics, Reviewer 2 is always the bane of your existence since they always put the negative review 2nd; they don't tell you who reviewed your stuff, and they don't tell the reviewers who wrote the piece, so you just read their criticism and then stew about it"
- INDUSTRY RESEARCH REPORTS ()
- TRADE ASSOCIATION REPORTS ()
- 3RD-PARTY PROFILES ()
- All 3 of these can be great resources, but note that their review processes are ENTIRELY internal, and therefore they can be subject to biases
- FIRST-RATE JOURNALISM (New York Times, etc.; not as rigorous as peer-reviewed articles, but there are professional editors and review processes and generally they attempt to do reliable research)
- PRESS RELEASES (information released by a company about its own actions or news)
- These aren't *bad*, per se, but they're definitely the least rigorous
- So, it sounds like peer-reviewed articles are our gold standard, but keep in mind they are NOT fallible; sometimes questionable stuff can slip through the cracks
- Cue example where the placeholder text "Should we cite the s***ty Gabor paper here?" got through and was published in an issue of "Ethnography"
- So, secondary research - we want to do it. How can we do it?
- For peer reviewed articles, we can use Google Scholar to try and narrow down our search to academic books and papers
- Be aware that sometimes you may not always have access to the papers, and the link itself may not have the full article, but
- "Throw numbers at us! We like numbers! The data, the data!"
- "Personally, I also think Google Scholar's become better in recent years at filtering out poor-quality papers, so it's a good first-stop and can give you some really nice stuff"
- The Georgia Tech Library website can let you search our archives and databases, which can lead you to a bunch of OTHER resources that are helpful
- "Part of your tuition goes towards the hundreds of thousands of dollars Georgia Tech pays to have access to this stuff, and part of inter-university gossip is what databases an institution deems worthy of being subscribed to"
- For the CS program, Alison Valk (our school's CS librarian) has also compiled on the website the databases she thinks are helpful SPECIFICALLY for CS research - that's huge!
- "Don't just limit yourself to computer science, of course; if you're doing a project for a school, maybe look into some education research"
- "Do you know what bibliography rating is? If not, fasten your seatbelts, because this'll help you a ton!"
- Basically, instead of finding all of your own resources, just pull up a recent, well-cited article and look at what THEY cite to see what THEY think are relevant! That can save you time!
- Now a practical question: how do I, Professor Shelley, do research?
- There are a bunch of ways to do it, but:
- If you researcher suggests something, that's GREAT, because you can use that article as a starting point and then see what's happened before and what's happened after
- If you DON'T know where to start, just do a storming phase of searching things you *think* are related and checking what you think are useful and recent; then, once you've found a few helpful things, check their bibligo
- "We're aware you're undergraduates who have other classes and a limited amount of time; I'm not expecting you to do perfect research that doesn't overlap at all with previous stuff, but we are expecting you to have tried to avoid that and to have done quality research to the best of your abilities"
- "...and then, when you get a PhD., you get to be criticized for everything"
- Remember: when you DO cite something, use the CHICAGO citation style. It uses footnotes INSTEAD of only a bibliography at the back
- "The full Chicago manual is stupidly thick and extensive"
- Alright, do your 2.5D sketches and have a wonderful weekend! Watch the Super Bowl ("I'm tentatively rooting for the 49ers"), and see you later!