Research is a distributed dialogue among researchers. To contribute to that dialogue, you must read what other researchers have written. Reading should become a habit. Good researchers do not wait for a convenient block of time to read; they make time to read. Schedule yourself time to read and always take notes about what you’ve read. This will save you a massive amount of time down the road when you are writing (see next assignment category). Each set of notes about a given paper will become an entry into your personal annotated bibliography. Each entry should include the following information:
- A full reference to the text (in whatever format is most relevant to you, e.g. APA)
- A link to the text online (wherever possible; this is particularly valuable for supporting collaborations around research)
- A summary of the main points of the text in your own words. (Not a restatement of the abstract!)
- What was the problem the researchers were trying to solve? Why was this problem important? (Articulating the problem from their perspective can help you to understand where they are coming from, as well as possible biases or blind spots.)
- How did the researchers go about trying to solve the problem? (Articulating this is useful for understanding what parts of the problem they think are most important to solving (first), which usually implies that there were other parts of the problem they haven’t yet addressed.)
- What did the researchers learn? What were their results?
- What are the implications of these results? (May be for other researchers, for designers, etc…)
- A brief discussion of some of the ways this text connects to your own research, life experiences or other things you have read. (This is where you really start thinking like a researcher. If you don’t take time to make connections now, while your head is really in the minutia of the paper, you’ve wasted a big opportunity and likely created more work for yourself down the road. Note: Every time you read a paper, you are likely to make different connections. This is okay… great, actually… it shows that you are growing and evolving as a researcher.)
- A list of references (writ broadly… could be texts, ideas, people, projects, etc…) that you might want to explore further. (In rare instances, you will just not have anything to list here. Not every paper is inspirational. But if you find yourself skipping this section too many times, you need to rethink how creatively you are engaging with what you are reading.)
- Some background about the scholar that you have looked up: what is their disciplinary background; where are they affiliated; with whom have they written? Understanding the scholar’s intellectual context can help you recognize more disciplinary roots to their work, infer the rationale as part of the lineage (including a reaction to the linegage) of thought—and help you remember who they are if you were to ever meet them at a conference, for example.
You will start out reading 3 papers per week and writing bibliography entries for these papers. Over the course of the semester, you will work up to reading and summarizing one paper every day (5 per week). The compilation of these reading summaries will become your own personal annotated bibliography.
You will choose the specific papers (50 over the course of the semester) based on your own interests. This is an opportunity to explore the huge diversity of domains and disciplinary inspiration that are part of the domain of information science and its related disciplines. Following are some sources/strategies for identifying papers to read:
- Revisit the references that you listed in bibliography entries for papers you’ve already read.
- Search by keyword in the ACM Digital Library for topics that interest you. This is where many (but certainly not all) of the highest quality papers are published in HCI. Google Scholar is another useful form of lookup as you get comfortable expanding beyond clearly stated distinctions of scholarly communities.
- Identify papers related to presentations given by faculty, your peers, colloquia speakers.
- Search the websites of other researchers you’ve come to appreciate (many researchers post pdfs of or links to their papers on their websites).
- Ask your advisor for recommendations.
- Ask other students in the program for recommendations.
- Ask me for recommendations.
You should not have to pay to access any conference or journal publications for this course. Most everything you find should be available for free online via university site licenses. You will need to be logged in to the university network or connected via VPN to access these articles for free.
Based on the bibliographic software tutorials (see description of presentations), you should identify some system for managing your bibliography moving forward. This will help you immensely over the course of your Ph.D. For the logistics of this course, however, you will need to copy and paste your bibliography entries into a file bearing your name in the “Bibliography Entries” folder in Google Drive.