Reading an academic article is not like ‘regular’ reading. You don’t start at the beginning and wait for the big reveal at the end. (You don’t write like that either.)
Read Like A Predator
Read like a predator. You’re after something. Each time your read the paper, you’re after something different.
- First time: just the abstract, maybe the intro
- Second time: intro, conclusion
- Third time: discussion, conclusion
- Fourth time: methods
What you’re doing is a kind of triage. You don’t need AI to ‘summarize’ a paper because a) ChatGPT just shortens it, which means nuance and important materials get dropped because it was trained on things that looked like summaries, not things that were summaries b) the flippin’ author has already summarized it for you. This is what the abstract does.
When we do research, we find far more than we can ever read. So we read the abstracts first to decide what to put our energy into. That’s the first step in deciding what is useful, what to read, what to give care and energy to.
Once you have a body of material that you intend to read more carefully, we’re on to step 2. Now you read the introduction and then jump straight to the conclusion. The introduction expands on the promise of the abstract and gives you more background on the big ticket issues the paper addresses. The conclusion functions as a kind of summary of the findings: how do these stack up against what was signalled in the intro?
Again, this is triage. Having looked at the abstract, intro, and conclusion (making notes all the way, more on that in a bit), you might decide that these papers require deeper investigation, and those papers can be set aside for now. At this point, you do your third reading by diving into the ‘discussion’ section. This is the meat of a paper; it’s where all of the caveats and interesting findings get pulled apart, contextualized, and explored. Re-reading the conclusion in the light of the discussion will clarify for you the importance of the findings and allow you to think about them in the context of other things you’ve read.
Finally, you might find that this paper, this one right here is so meaningful for you, you’ll read it a fourth time and dive deeply into its methods.
Annotating Scholarly Work
As you read, you annotate the work. Academic ‘reading’ is not a passive activity where your eyes slide over the page! And I’m not talking about highlighting things, either. Academic reading counts as writing (because we write in order to understand what we think: ‘writing’ means, ‘making sense of’.) You need a system for marking up the text, for making sense of it.
For the purposes of this course, I want you to use the Hypothes.is web app to mark up texts while being logged into our reading group. Your annotations will be visible to the rest of the class. Reading is a social activity. I will suggest the following tags should be used:
#important // for an important finding as a result of the research
#question // a question that YOU have upon reading this piece of text
#idea // an important or interesting idea raised by the author. Why is it important/interesting?
#connection // where you make a direct connection to something else you've read.
#quote // a very pithy phrase that beautifully captures the idea
As you mark up the text, use these tags to categorize your observation. You can assign more than one tag to an annotation. Since every annotation has its own permalink, you can even provide a direct link to another observation as part of your annotation. Since this is a social reading experience, pay attention to the parts no one else touches. Ask yourself, ‘why is no one touching this part?’ That’s often because there are complicated ideas there that others are afraid to explore.
(nb Sometimes, Hypothes.is won’t work on a page; these are usually pages with a lot of layers of user interface on them. I’ll try to avoid giving you such things, but if you come across a page where Hypothes.is won’t work, you can make notes on a piece of paper etc.)
Then what?
Periodically, in class, I will ask you to make a précis/research memo based on one of the assigned readings, from memory. Here’s how to make a précis/research memo. These will be assessed; your best 3 out of 4 will count towards your grade.