│By Jessica Crawley, Gale Ambassador at the University of Lancaster│
So, you’re a humanities undergraduate writing a dissertation, are you? If you’re anything like me, then you’re already finding this process as overwhelming as it is exciting. You have likely never taken on a research project this vast before, and that’s okay! You’re already on the right track by clicking this blog, and by the end of your dissertation process you’ll be a pro. Most of these skills are transferrable to essays too so, even if you aren’t writing a dissertation, this blog will still be of use to you.
This is the blog that I WISH someone had written when I first started researching for my dissertation: I was clueless, directionless, and – honestly – a little bit scared to start. If you’re having any of these feelings too, then after this blog they will hopefully start to melt away. I’ll be mainly referencing Gale’s Digital Resources, but if you don’t have access to any of these then speak to your library about any similar resources they may have to offer.
Researching Exploratively
If you are clicking this blog, you have likely already submitted your dissertation proposal and have a rough idea of what area of research you are interested in. If you’re not quite here yet, don’t worry! Take some time to reflect on the topics that interest you the most, talk through your ideas with lecturers, peers, friends, and family, and check out these two blogs about some of Gale’s Digital Resources that can help you cast your net wider and see what sticks:
How Gale Primary Sources Helped Me with My Dissertation – and Can Help You Too!
How Gale Literature Provided Vital Support for My Dissertation
Once you know what topic you want your dissertation to focus on, you can start exploring the different types of related resources. It is a good idea to get an idea of the field’s general terrain to see if there are any research gaps your dissertation can fill. To conduct an explorative search, I like using Gale’s Topic Finder Tool to get a birds-eye-view of a particular topic, but you can always just conduct a basic search in your library’s database and take note of the different topics that come up.
Reading Intentionally
After you have found some texts that you would like to read, make sure you read them intentionally. This takes a bit more time and energy, but it will be significantly better for you and your dissertation in the long run. Highlight sections that you think may be helpful for your dissertation and annotate the text with your own related ideas. Below is an example of what this may look like, taken from my own intentional reading of ‘Melville’s Environmental Vision in Moby-Dick’, which can be found in Gale’s Literature Criticism database.
Collating and Keeping Track of Research
I used a software called Workflowy to collate and keep track of my research for my dissertation and essays – and, it was an absolute game changer. It’s a free notetaking app that operates as an endless flow diagram, so you can keep adding notes within notes. With the free version, you only get 100 notes per month to start off with, but if you recommend Workflowy to a friend then you both get an extra 100 notes per month – I managed to get so many of my friends hooked that I was able to use the free version throughout my entire dissertation process.
After conducting an intentional reading, I would revisit my notes and highlighted sections from the reading and input the important parts into Workflowy. I’d start off by simply putting the title of the work in my ‘Books and Articles’ section, then categorising the work based on whether it contends with or supports my thesis – or somehow both.
I would then copy the highlighted sections of the text that I thought may be of some use to my dissertation, and pasted them into Workflowy, making sure to take note of the page number. Then, I added some of my own thoughts to other ideas in bold. Input quotations as text where possible so that you can easily find them using Workflowy’s search function. This can be tricky in cases where you’re reading from an image but if you get these resources from any Gale Primary Sources archive then you can use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) (right of below image), which converts the image to plain text, to copy and paste from.
If you don’t have access to any of Gale’s archives, you can either manually type passages out or take screengrabs of the passages you want to input into Workflowy and attach an additional note of key terms so that the quote will hopefully still show up in a related Workflowy search. This search function is useful when trying to find quotes that fit a particular theme, or just if you are looking for a certain quotation but can’t quite remember what text it was from.
Finally, make sure you are including citations in your Workflowy notes. Trust me, you do NOT want to leave finding and formatting your references until the end – unless you want your very soul to be sucked from your body. I just used Gale’s citation function to copy and paste them into Workflowy.
So, there you have it, now you know how to keep track of and get the most out of your research (and avoid a headache or two in the process)!
Related blogs
If you enjoyed reading about Dissertation research, check out these posts:
Taking Your Master’s Dissertation to the Next Level: Using Gale Digital Scholar Lab for Research
My Top 10 Tips to Ace Your Dissertation
How State Papers Online Can Support an Undergraduate History Dissertation
Blog post cover image citation: Microsoft stock image
