Refining research Topic and Formulating Proper Questions

Assignment: Refining Your Topic and Formulating Proper Questions

Read Turabian, Manual for Writers, chap. 1, “What Research Is and How Researchers Think about It,” 5-11.

Refining Your Topic

Shaping the general subject of your paper into a clearly refined topic is one of the most crucial tasks of the research process and should be done in the early stages, whenever possible. Otherwise you run the risk of wasting too much time slogging through boring texts, feeling daunted by the process, and being unproductive in general. While you still may be able to gather a lot of information, it may not be useful enough for you to produce your final project. Ultimately, your paper needs to address a clear question, and your writing has to be clear and convincing to your reader. As a student working on his or her research paper, you, therefore, need to gather useful evidence to help you prove your basic argument and enable you to make a contribution to the fields of art history. Below is an assignment to help you refine your topic, identify one or more useful questions related to your topic, and think about the general purpose or need for your topic.

For this task, you will need to fill in the blanks for the following three statements. You should type up the sentences, following the formula below, and repeat the exercise at least three times to help you generate various thoughts related to your topic. Try to play with your wording, especially in statements 2 and 3.

1. I am working on the topic of _______________________________________

[This section merely identifies your art object, which is not enough. You need to think about the relevance and larger purpose of the topic.]

2. because I want to find out how or why _______________________________

[Identifying the specific question that you want to address related to your topic is crucial and can help guide you in your research and writing.]

3. so that I can help others understand _________________________________

[In other words, you are asking: So what? Or who cares? Addressing the relevance of your topic for others might be the most difficult part of this assignment, especially for students working in the early stages of their papers, but this step is necessary. The process will help you anticipate your reader’s desires and concerns from the beginning. As busy people, we all want to know why a text is worth our time to read. More importantly, this process will help you think about how your project will make a contribution to the fields of art history and/or museum studies, which is crucial to the research process. ]

Parts 1, 2, and 3 must relate to one another in a logical manner shouldn’t be repetitive. After you write your three statements in three different ways, ask yourself which one might be the most useful for you.

Formulating Proper Questions

Read Turabian, Manual for Writers, chap. 2, “Moving from a Topic to a Question to a Working Hypothesis,” 12-23.

You will need to think about all sorts of questions related to your general topic. These questions are useful for your project. They can help you identify specifically where research might still need to be done. They can also help you identify the larger key issues related to your topic.

1. Think about the larger context. How does your topic fit into a larger story? How is your topic a functioning part of a larger system? How does your topic compare and contrast to topics that are similar?

2. Think about the basic nature of your topic. How has the topic changed through time? How many different categories of your topic are there?

Read section 2.1.3 to think about other types of questions related to your topic

As you research your topic and think about your questions, think of questions that other scholars have asked but don’t answer. Look in summaries of bibliographies and conclusions in scholarly literature.

Generate as many questions as possible related to your topic. I want to see at least ten total. Separate the good questions from the bad ones. You can identify the bad questions if they fall into one of these three categories: A. the answer can be found too easily, B. no good evidence exists to support the answer, C. the answer is too self-evident. As you dismiss your questions, try to determine if they could be reworded to be more effective.

After you categorize your questions, think about your questions in general and then think about the stronger ones that might be most useful for you to answer. Come up with plausible answers, or hypotheses. You may not be correct, but a plausible answer can be useful to you for many reasons. Your research will be more focused because you’ll choose to read texts that you hope will prove your hypothesis. That means you will be an active, as opposed to a passive, researcher, and you will be less likely to waste time slogging through boring texts, feeling daunted by the process in general, and being unproductive.

Bibliography

Prepare a correctly formatted initial research bibliography with annotations for each item that you have read.  Separate primary and secondary source materials.  But here’s one twist that is designed help you out:  while most bibliographies are alphabetized by the last name of the author or institution that published the text, I would like this version of your bibliography to be chronological.

The purposes of the assignment are as follows:

(1) to produce a clear bibliography that examines various databases and accesses all types of materials,

(2) to encourage you to think about trends in scholarship. This exercise will be useful for the development of your thesis statement and your review of literature, both of which are required for your final research paper.