Hey! Do you like music? Have you listened to the music I made with my band(s)? If you liked that music it’s probably because Dani, my bandmate from P.I.T. and Traumfieber, writes really good music!
Dani has released an alt country (goth country?) EP that rules and that you should check out!
chekhovsgunshow asked:
vis a vis the post where you mention programmable mouse buttons - i have a data entry heavy job and having crtl+c and crtrl+shift+v on my mouse buttons was life changing (and wrist saving). some of the logitech gamer mice have onboard memory so you can bake that shit in
This is so funny because i posted that a while back and literally yesterday my redragon gaming mouse showed up. I wanted one with a few programmable buttons but not a 12-button grid on the side, and that was an inexpensive one to prove the concept with. I got assigned several tasks that will involve spreadsheets so the need for more efficiency became pressing.
I don’t do a tooooooon of data entry so at the moment I’ve just set the “back” button to be shift+ctrl+v, but depending on how well this works I’m thinking that ctrl+c, ctrl+z, and delete will end up on there as well.
But really do most girls not want to have their own dick sometimes? Really?
And not in like a “this would be so much more convenient for peeing outdoors” way but, like. Like I am *so* fucking frustrated that there’s no sensation in a strap-on or a packer.
David Ferrando Giraut: The series Natural Scenes.
“The series Natural Scenes deals with a contemporary perception of the landscape, deeply influenced by mass media but linked in some way to the tragic spirit of the romantic vision of nature.
By playing popular horror movies in real, familiar landscapes I deal with the way in which mass media images come to be a part of our own personal memories, influencing the perception of our environments. Within this tension there is an interplay between tragic – and fictional – events such that, even though they are not an actual part of the history of these landscapes, they nevertheless appear implicit in them.
I believe this coalescence is engendered through the combination of ancestral fears and cultural references.”
letterbird asked:
I've seen you say a few times that it's a good idea to have a password manager; could you explain why? I always feel like I'm missing something when it's mentioned because it's phrased as if there's an obvious danger that password managers protect you from, but I'm honestly not sure how they help keep passwords secure.
ms-demeanor answered:
The obvious danger is human nature. Humans are bad at creating passwords; your passwords are almost certainly easy to guess, repeated across different accounts, or both, because that is just how the vast VAST majority of people create passwords, because humans are bad at creating passwords. Everybody knows “the rules” for creating passwords (don’t use the same password on multiple websites, don’t include personal details in your passwords, don’t use very common words or letter or number sequences in your passwords, don’t tell other people your password) and people break all of those rules anyway.
A standalone (not in-browser like firefox or chrome password manager, though those are better than nothing) password manager stores your passwords, generates complex passwords for you, and can also be used for things like storing notes on passwords (like “did I put my MFA on my email or my cellphone or an app for this password?” or “here are the made-up answers to the security questions I used for this website because I definitely didn’t use real answers or answers I’d used on previous websites” or “these are the bills associated with this credit card”).
With the way the current security landscape works, there are two things that are extremely important when you are creating a password:
The overwhelmingly prevalent way that people get “hacked” these days is through credential stuffing.
Let’s say that your private data was revealed in the Experian breach a decade ago. It revealed your name, email address, and phone number. Now let’s also say that your private data was revealed in one of the many breaches from social media sites; that one revealed your name, email address, phone number, password, and security questions.
If someone wants to try to gain access to one of your accounts - let’s say your bank account - if they have your name and phone number (usually extremely easy to find online), they can cross-reference that information with data that has been revealed in previous breaches - now they’ve got your name and your email address (which you probably used to sign up for your online banking and have ABSOLUTELY used as your login for accounts all over the place) and at least one password that you’ve used somewhere.
But the thing is, they don’t have one password. They have every password associated with that email address that has ever been revealed in a breach. If you go to the site haveibeenpwned.com you can enter your email and see how many times your email address has appeared in a breach. You can compare that with the number of passwords that were revealed in those breaches and you can ask yourself “what did those passwords have in common?”
Because I can tell you, my Tumblr password from 2013, my Kickstarter password from 2014, and my Disqus password from 2017 (all revealed in various breaches) probably had a lot in common.
So, now the hacker has: your name, your email (which is probably your username), and various passwords they can try to use to log in. Did you use the same password for Facebook and Twitter eight years ago? Did you use parts of that password for creating your bank password? If you heard that twitter passwords were exposed in a breach you probably changed that password, but did you change the bank password that you built on the same structure? Probably not.
So what people will do is gather up all of this information and guess. They’ll try your 2017 Disqus password to see if it will get access to your bank account. They’ll try your 2020 Gravatar password. They’ll try your 2024 Internet Archive Password.
And the reason they do this is because it works.
And the reason that it works is because we are all fucking garbage at remembering unique, complex passwords so instead of creating actually unique, complex passwords most people pick one memorable word or phrase, one memorable number, one unusual character, and *MAYBE* one feature of the site they’re creating the login for and they use that template forever (1988Tumblrmacabre!, 1988Facebookmacabre!, 1988Ticketmastermacabre!) OR they create one password that they think is complex enough and use it across multiple sites with minor tweaks ($n0h0mi$hRu13z, sn0h0mishRul13z!, $n0h0mi$hWA) as needed for the sites’ password requirements.
So most of what password managers do that is a drastic security improvement over people creating and memorizing passwords is that they create passwords that are functionally impossible to guess and functionally impossible to memorize. The problem with memorizing passwords (which is what you’re doing if you’re creating a bunch of passwords that you type in all the time) is that you can’t actually remember all that many passwords so you’ll repeat those passwords. The problem with creating passwords on your own is that passwords that humans create are pretty guessable. Even if you’re doing a passphrase that’s a long string of words you’re probably working with common words (“correct horse battery staple” as opposed to “truculent zygote onomatopoeia frangible”) and your password is more guessable than you’d really want it to be. Password managers don’t do that, they generate gibberish.
Perhaps you are that rare person who gets out a set of dice and a notepad and rolls up every character for your password and memorizes it and never repeats, and if that’s you, you could still benefit from a password manager because a password manager makes it easier to change that unique complex password when it is inevitably revealed in a breach.
So, okay, let’s check in with where we’re at:
There are, however, advantages beyond that.
One major, MAJOR advantage of a properly-used standalone password manager is that it makes you safer from various kinds of phishing attempts and link hijacking. When you are setting up a password in your password manager (PWM from here on), you should be on the website that you want to log in to. The PWM will give you the option to save the domain that you’re logging in to. That means the PWM will remember the correct URL for your Tumblr login so when you go to the tumblr login screen in the future, it will offer to fill those fields. What it will NOT do is offer to fill those fields if someone sends you an email that spoofs tumblr support and wants you to log in at “tumblr.co” or “tumblr-support.com.” Knowing this, and knowing that you should be putting your credentials in through the PWM fill option rather than copy/paste, is a GREAT way to protect against phishing that is often overlooked and definitely under-discussed.
Another advantage is that a standalone PWM will let you store secure notes with your passwords so that you can do things like keep track of recovery codes for the website, or generate gibberish answers to security questions. Security questions and answers are often revealed in breaches, can’t be reset by the user as easily as a password, are repeated across websites MUCH more than passwords, and can be used to take over an account and reset the password. You shouldn’t be giving real security answers, or even fake-but-repeated security answers; you should treat each of those like a password that needs to be complex and unique, which means that they need to be stored someplace (like a password manager).
I also personally use my password manager to store my car insurance information, my driver’s license info, and payment details for easy entry, making it convenient for a lot of thing beyond password storage. (Bitwarden. My password manager is bitwarden. I recommend Bitwarden. go to ms-demeanor.com and search “bitwarden” to learn more.)
As to how they keep your passwords safe, aside from ensuring that you don’t enter your credentials into a skimming site, a good password manager is well encrypted. Your password safe should be functionally impossible to crack and what people tend to not realize is that a proper password manager (like bitwarden) doesn’t keep all your passwords in one encrypted safe, each one of your passwords is in its own encrypted safe. If someone hacks Bitwarden it’s not like using a huge amount of effort breaking into a bank vault and finding a big pile of money, it’s like using a huge amount of effort breaking into a bank vault and finding a big pile of bank vaults. Each password within your vault requires decryption that is functionally impossible to crack (at least with a good password manager, like bitwarden, the password manager I recommend and think that people should use).
Additionally, just as, like, a side note: password managers never accidentally leave caps lock on or forget which characters are capital or lower case and don’t require the use of two hands and focused attention on the keyboard. You’re never going to mistype your password if the password manager is filling it, and you would not believe the number of people we support at work who require password resets because they are typing their password wrong and don’t realize it.
Password managers make better passwords than you can and they make it possible to instantly create, store, and enter complex passwords, which prevents password cracking and makes people less likely to reuse passwords. They are heavily encrypted and should be functionally impossible to access, and each individual password within the manager should also be encrypted if you use a good password manager. Password managers also prevent people from entering their credentials on scam sites by only filling on matched domains. Standalone password managers (not browser password managers) also allow users to create and store unique security questions and account details to prevent bad actors from gaining access with stolen security answers. The password manager I recommend is Bitwarden.
If people used password managers to create, store, and use unique and complex passwords, and if they did regular backups of their system I think that probably about half of the InfoSec field would be out of a job.
Please use a password manager!
Using a browser or device based password manager is better than not using any password manager at all, but is not as good as using standalone password manager (standalone password managers have apps and extensions that let you use them on a browser or device, but aren’t tied to one browser or one operating system).
I’m not sure about whether Apple’s is fully featured, but let’s step aside from that and I’ll explain what I don’t like about these for ANY manufacturer (Apple, Samsung, Firefox, Chrome, etc.)
Again, these kinds of password managers are better than nothing, but I something more portable than a browser or device based password manager, and I *really* like it when there’s a web access option that doesn’t require any kind of persistent login, and I REALLY REALLY like it when you can set a very short timeout for the password manager. Which is part of why I recommend bitwarden.
Anybody want an exhaustively in-depth, step-by-step breakdown of how to write a research paper for a college literature class?
Okay, so you start by identifying the work that you're going to write the paper on. Most lit classes will announce in the syllabus that you'll have a paper due at the end of the term, and usually it will be a text that was covered in the class. The FIRST thing you should do is skim the wikipeda pages of all the assigned readings. One of the BEST things that you can find on a wikipedia page about a work you're considering for a research paper is a section discussing debated meanings or controversy about the text - this means that there is a LOT of material on the work you're going to break down.
The reason to do this at the start of the class is twofold: One, it gives you more time to prepare for the paper, Two, you should know what the readings assigned at the end of the term look like before you panic and choose a work that the class has already covered. I have been in twenty English classes where pretty much no one went over the works assigned for the last couple weeks of the term. This is a mistake! Those works are usually assigned late in the term because they're what the rest of the term has been building to in terms of complexity and meaning, which, again, probably means that there's a metric fuckton of research on those readings.
The next step is to read the work. If you have already read the work earlier in the class, now is the time to go back through and skim it to re-familiarize yourself with the text. You are making very big, very general notes. The notes that I made on this read-through were things like "baited," "performance of empire," "the ugliness of empire," and "performance to one another." You're just getting the biggest, vaguest ideas out, because now it's time to do your precis, which is not as precise as that name would imply.
The way that I approach a precis is as a very, very, very broad statement about what I think the work is saying and what I want to say about it. In this case I think Orwell is saying that imperialism is both cruel and pointless, that it is mutually degrading to those subject to empire and enforcing empire, and that it makes the world worse. Cool. Orwell doesn't like empire, that's not a surprise.
At this point I have a general idea of where I think I'm going to go with this paper (in the direction of performance; i'm going to talk about the way that Orwell fixates on empire as performative) and it is time to go dig up research.
*nineteen articles later*
The reason you do your precis before you do research but that you do not write a thesis statement before you do research is because you need to guide your search, but you don't want to box yourself into a corner by only looking at one specific argument. For instance, for my Austen project I am examining radical politics in Austen's work but I have bought books written by biographers who understand her as a conservative as well as a whole book of marxist criticism of Austen that considers her a conservative; that is not totally in line with my reading of her work or her politics, but it's important to see what arguments people who *aren't* totally in line with my view of the matter make.
So what I have done for this Orwell paper is searched my school library's database for terms like "Orwell and Empire," "Orwell and Violence," "Orwell and Authority," "Orwell and Policing," and "Shooting an Elephant."
I went through the results from most to least relevant for each search, and opened them all in other tabs. I didn't read them, or even skim them, I just opened the database link to the articles in another tab. You DO NOT need to read every single one of these that you open, you do NOT need to read them one at a time before choosing to open another.
Okay, so, now that you've got a bunch of articles to sift through, you start an annotated bibliography. The way that I *personally* do this is to start by putting the info I will need to cite each of these articles/books/etc, into a document. I also create a new folder and download everything that I possibly can.
Two of my sources were books that I have institutional permission to view but not to download, so I have those open in my browser.
Downloading is an important step. Download, download, download. Don't just leave these up in the browser and close them after you've skimmed them and decided they aren't necessary - download them because you could get a third of the way into your paper and realize that, actually, that WAS a necessary part of your paper and downloading will save you the hassle of trying to go find the paper online again (this is also why you START this process by getting the citation/publication info into a document).
At this stage you have STILL not read any of these documents. You are still NOT going to actually read them for at least one more step, you are going to start by skimming.
Your next step is to just skim each of these documents to see if they are *at all* relevant to your research paper.
So, for instance, that paper on "Landscape and the mask of self" is actually a paper on *geography,* not a paper on literary criticism. There's a good chance that it is not going to have anything to do with my topic, so I am going to skim it [pause for skimming] and after skimming it, it's an intertextual exploration of geography and Orwell's story, history, and other writings on empire. This text *IS* relevant to my paper, which I now need to note in my bibliography document.
I'm not going to completely read this paper, yet, or pull any quotes out of it, I just make a note in my document that it touches on themes that will show up in my paper.
Then I move on to another document and skim it [pause for skimming] and it appears that "This Side of the Barricades" is okayish background on Orwell that I might use if I really need to justify a statement, but is more journalistic than literary and is not really on the subject of the work that I'm discussing. It is not useful to my paper, so I make a note of *why* it is not useful in my document.
What I also start doing at this point is sorting out "useful" and "not useful" with visual cues. I use a highlighter in my document, and I also change the titles of the PDFs so that they will be sorted in my file explorer with useful stuff at the top and less useful stuff at the bottom:
And that is all for the moment. I'll write more once I've skimmed all my possible sources but I'm getting worried that tumblr is going to crash and eat this post.
If you need to skim a BOOK rather than an article, that is also a multi-step process.
First, you read the table of contents to see if the ToC has any direct references to the subject you're exploring or has any chapter titles that touch on the issues you're looking at. "Doubleness and the Value of Decency" has a section titled "learning how to write about Orwell" and includes an exploration of Burmese Days, which means there's at least a bit of material that is in the correct ballpark for what I want to talk about in this book.
After you read the table of contents, skip to the end and read the index. Look for your subject.
The story I'm writing about is referenced three times, so I can hang on to this book and move on to skimming other works, but there is not going to be a ton of material for me to work with here.
The other book that came up in my search has a whole chapter that plays off the title of the story I'm researching:
But the book as a whole doesn't seem useful, since it's about politics in post-9/11 America. So Just in case, I'm going to skim by checking the first sentence of the first few paragraphs of this chapter.
These are all the first sentences of the introductory part of the chapter. This is not useful for my assignment, I don't have to look at this book anymore. But I WILL make a note of why it's not useful in my bibliography document, and I will note how and where the other book might be useful.
PRO TIP: as you are skimming and checking, check the bibliographies and works cited sections of what you are skimming. One of the papers I've downloaded is referenced in one of the books I skimmed and in the bibliography of another paper. That likely means that it is VERY relevant and means that I'm going to pay more attention to it when I do my first full reading of it.
ALSO PRO TIP: As I'm selecting what sources to skim I typically work backwards from the sources I think I'm less likely to use to the sources that I'm more likely to use. I'll typically check the things from the geography journals, ethics journals, and political books first before I move on to articles from books with Orwell as their sole topic, articles that directly address what I want to cover in the title of the article, etc.
I find that it saves time to first narrow down the field of what you'll be looking at, instead of immediately diving into things you want to take a lot of notes or pull a lot of quotes from. It's really easy to end up spending an hour looking at a twenty page paper, get a lot of good info out, then step back and realize you have another fourteen papers to go through and lose some steam. Knock seven less useful papers out of the way first, THEN dive into the good shit.
For the record, here's how to skim a paper:
1 - Read all the titles of all the sections
2 - Read the first paragraph, then the first three sentences of the next three paragraphs.
3 - Read the conclusion.
4 - Either text search or just look through the text for words relating to your area of focus (in this case I'd probably be looking for "white" "empire" and "imperialism").
5 - If you're still not sure if the paper is a good source for you or not, read the first and last sentence of a few paragraphs.
This *should* be enough to give you the general idea of what a paper is about, if the author is in the same ballpark as you are in their interpretation of the text, and if it's going to be a text that you can work with.
For instance, skimming the geography paper didn't mean that I read the whole thing, but I read the headers and some of the pullquotes and the conclusion, and in handling the text I almost put it aside because it uses the kind of academic language that drives me up the wall and that seems particularly ironic when applied to Orwell. I decided to keep it because it has some very pertinent-seeming sections, but I know that when I deal with it, it is going to be frustrating to read.
One of the papers that I've got in the "maybe" pile is there because its analysis is from a feminist lens instead of a postcolonial lens and so it focuses on patriarchy instead of on imperialism.
One of the papers in the "no" pile is there because its tone is too unacademic and it reads like something out of Time Magazine.
This is what you're looking for in your skimming. "Does it address the topic I'm researching?" "Is this a paper that *I* can understand?" "Does the paper explore the topic that I'm researching in a way that is relevant to my approach to the work?" You're *still* not reading these papers. That still comes later.
Okay, you (I) have completed your first skim of all of your potential sources. You have pared down your field considerably - now it must be time to read the papers, right?
Wrong!
Probably at this point in your research, the plan you had in your precis has changed. I am still interested on writing about Orwell and Empire, but skimming has made me more attentive of stuff that I had been overlooking before. There *IS* an element of performance that is important to the story, but now I think that's maybe a paragraph or two of something that's a larger point. So I rework my approach a bit: George Orwell doesn't like empire, sure, fine. That's not a surprise. However, for someone who doesn't like empire and is talking about how evil it is, the narrator of this work sure does hate the Burmese people a lot and there is, in fact, a lot of racism going on here.
Four of the papers that I looked through discuss this, and two of them discuss it in depth. So, okay, now I'm writing about Orwell and Empire and Race and the performance of whiteness. Cool. Keep your new approach in mind, and then organize your sources in a new document in order of most to least pertinent to the argument that is taking shape in your head.
As I do my first skim, I have a 4-tier system, Good, Okay, Okay I guess, and Nope. I started with 19 sources I was looking at, immediately dropped that to 17, and now my "good" and "okay" list have a total of ten sources, so I only move the top ten over to my new document. If you have fewer than ten "good" sources keep some of your "okay I guess" sources on the new document.
The 4 Tiers of Supporting Material are something like:
Good - Talks about the work that I'm exploring extensively OR another work by the same author on the same subject; explores the work through the analytical lens that I'm using to approach the topic; explores the same concepts that I'm looking at, but also makes me consider new concepts about the work.
Okay - Talks about the work I'm exploring and/or other works by the same author on the topic. May explore the author in question as part of a larger conversation comparing other authors (Kipling and Forster were common in this, all three being English authors who had written about the British in India). Perhaps uses a different analytic lens, or is slightly off-topic in terms of approach (cross discipline geography paper and paper from the utopian studies journal aren't Lit papers per se, but they'll do).
Okay I Guess - Mentions the work you're researching as a footnote in a larger discussion, uses an analytical framework in the same neighborhood as your approach (a marxist approach to a work you're examining through a postcolonial lens is probably going to have one or two lines you can use; a psychoanalytic paper might not).
Nope - Off topic, irrelevant. The name of your subject might come up but is not discussed. Using this paper in your assignment would be a disingenuous grab for sources because you couldn't find enough pertinent information and your professor WILL notice this.
So you have sorted all your papers into a different document and you have ordered them from most to least helpful, surely now is the time that you actually read them, right?
Wrong! Open your two best sources and look in their bibliographies.
These weren't in my initial searches, now I need to see if I can go find them. [pause for searching] I don't have institutional access to Stephen Ingle's paper, but I was able to just find Mohammad Sawar Alam's paper online and download it. After a quick skim, it gets added to my bibliography.
So now, surely, it must be time to read these papers?
Nope!
Now it's time for you to re-read your primary document, this time you're making more notes. And I'll be back later when I've got more notes.
At this point in your writing process you should be miserable and doubting yourself. Don't worry! That's normal!
The tension and doubt that you are experiencing are because you are changing how you thought about the work in the first place.
Personally, I'm torn between the feeling that Orwell intentionally made the speaker of "Shooting an Elephant" exceptionally racist in order to underscore the idea that the Raj was specifically structured to amplify and widen racial divisions and the feeling that Orwell was just pretty racist.
I'm not personally familiar with enough of Orwell's works from this era or specifically about empire to say, and this is something on which my sources are conflicted.
This is made more difficult by the fact that this work is alternately described as an essay and as a story; whether it is a work of pure fiction or if it is supposed to recount an actual incident is debatable, and that makes a difference because that would clear up if Orwell is narrating his own thoughts or if he is narrating the thoughts of an unnamed speaker who shares exaggerated versions of Orwell's opinions.
I can't make up my mind yet, and I don't have to, because now it is time to read my sources.
Please note, I am now several hours into working on this paper, I have read the work that I'm analyzing at least four times, and I do not yet have a specific thesis.
When you are writing a paper like this you *DO NOT* settle into a thesis that you're going to argue for until you are DEEP into the process.
So now, let's go through the steps of reading some literary criticism together. This is an active process even on the first read, and this is part of why your annotated bibliography is going to be *annotated.*
I'm going to start with Alan Blackstock's "Narrative Hysteria" essay, which I am delighted to have found under a digital commons license, so I can link it here for you to read along. Blackstocks' essay approaches the work of three English writers discussing the British Raj. Blackstock is examining these authors through a feminist lens. His discussion of Orwell is largely limited to the novel Burmese Days, which I have not read, but Blackstock is discussing empire in Orwell, so this is fairly relevant to my research. This is one of my "okay" sources. I have already done a quick skim of the essay once, so I know the discussion of Orwell is limited to pages 193-199, and that there is some talk of empire in the conclusion; I noted this in my annotated bibliography when I was doing my first fast survey.
This is one of sub-optimal sources, so I am not going to read it multiple times.
Start by carefully reading the first few hundred words of the essay. You want to know what the paper is talking about to know how relevant it is to your research, but you don't want to waste time reading a few thousand words about a book you're not familiar with by an author who you're not reading. I don't need to read Blackstock's analysis of Kipling to parse his thoughts on Orwell. So read the introduction. [pause for reading] Having read the introduction, I see strong parallels between the portrayal of empire in Burmese Days and "Shooting an Elephant." I'm going to need to be somewhat familiar with Burmese Days to get more out of this, so I am going to read the Wikipedia plot summary of the novel; the novel comes up in other sources I have so now is a good time to get a basic handle on the story.
Now that I've read the introduction and a summary of the work that this essay is primarily discussing, I am going to skim the discussion of Kipling and then start reading the section on Orwell. (Even if Kipling isn't relevant to my research, essays are often internally referential so likely the section I care about will refer to the section on Kipling).
Because I am only going to read this once, I am going to do it with my annotated bibliography open in another window, and I'm going to copy potentially relevant sections of text into the annotated bibliography as I go.
When I started today my annotated bibliography had 438 words just for the citations of the 10 collected sources. After reading the Orwell section of Blackstock's essay I now have 788 words. I'm going to skim the section on Forster and then read the conclusion closely.
I am now laughing because the entire conclusion is relevant to my paper and I have added another 400 words to my document, including two citations made by Blackstock that I may need to cite if I cite this section of his conclusion.
However, the whole purpose of reading this source was to mine it for resources and close the document and never have to open it again. I have a brief note about what Blackstock's essay is about, four long sections of the text copied into my bibliography that I may quote in my paper, brief notes about each of those sections explaining why they're relevant to my research.
The point of reading Blackstock's paper in this way and collecting the quotes in an annotated bibliography is to close the paper and never need to open it again. All of the sections of this paper that are useful to me are now in one place with my notes about my thoughts on in. When I sit down to put my arguments in an organized essay I do not want to have to flip back and forth between ten documents and page through them looking for the quote that I need and struggle to remember if it was in the essay on empire written by the Iranian sociologist or if it was the one written by the American geologist.
Your annotated bibliography is the most work that you will do on any research paper. It is where you transcribe or copy relevant text quotations, it is where you make your arguments to yourself, it is where you will eventually copy or transcribe the sections of your primary text to figure out what in-text evidence there is for the argument you are making.
Okay. We have read one paper. I have two papers listed that I've determined I need to read twice and nine other sources that need a reading similar to this one. I'll see you when I'm done with the other sources like this and it's time to go through a close-read paper.
Depending on what kind of obsessive weirdo you are and how prolific the author you're researching is, please be ready for your "fast reads of mediocre sources" to involve reading a minimum of four more essays from the author that you will have to incorporate into your paper. (I am currently less convinced of Orwell's racism than I was this morning and it has a lot to do with several essays and one book discussing Orwell's repeated use of animals as representatives for oppressed people because he was aware of and disgusted by the fact that the English - himself included - could forgive racism but drew the line at animal abuse).
So I'm not precisely back to the drawing board, but as I read further I am continuing to adjust my expectations for how my paper is going to come together and how many sources I'm going to include.
This part of the process is IMPORTANT. It is REALLY important if you're later in your college career and are writing about a subject that you ostensibly know well, but it is still important even if you are just supposed to be writing for a low-level class. Part of why you cast a wide net with your research is to broadly familiarize yourself with the state of the research on your subject. I mentioned earlier that I wasn't personally familiar with enough of Orwell's work to comment on the combined topics of racism and imperialism, but the scholars who have written about this have written a lot about it and conveniently discuss the same works a lot - my "okay" sources on Orwellian Comedy and Doubleness and Decency both heavily referenced the essay that I just linked and the introduction to Doubleness and Decency has a whole section on race in Orwell. Now I know that instead of searching that book for "Shooting an Elephant," I need to search it for "Marrakech" to get the information that is pertinent to my topic. I'm going to continue reading the introduction and once I'm done with that I will repeat my process of searching the index for references to the texts I'm now adding to my pile-o-references.
Okay. So.
This is a hard thing you may encounter if you are researching a compelling subject that you are personally interested in that has a significant amount of controversy.
I have now read three more essays by my original author because I found myself profoundly disagreeing with one of the sources I was looking at. I have now also found two more external sources, one of which is a full length book of criticism that I'm 28 pages into reading.
If you are experiencing this, you are experiencing scope creep.
What you do at this point is open a new window, put the new essays and sources into that new window, minimize it, and go back to your annotated bibliography. You have to put on blinders. You will get through those other sources eventually, but if you just keep indiscriminately researching you're going to fail to write your five page essay because you got engaged in writing a fifty page thesis. If it's REALLY that interesting you'll still be interested in writing about it later, and if it was REALLY that pertinent to your paper it would have showed up in your first search of the subject.
This is another place where your annotated bibliography can come in handy: I found myself profoundly disagreeing with a specific postcolonial interpretation of Orwell that I don't think is just poorly argued, I think it's a willful misinterpretation. Now is a good time for me to prioritize reading other papers that use a similar lens to see if they seem similarly disingenuous to me.
(There is a difference between disagreeing with an essay's conclusions based on different readings of a text and disagreeing because you think that an essay's premise is based on a blatantly incorrect or uncharitable interpretation of a work; the first can still be helpful in making and shaping your argument, the second is more troubling and less useful.)
BUT! As you go, if you find that something is totally useless and you have not added any text extracts or notes to your annotated bibliography, remove the citation! As it turns out the geography paper had a citation on nearly every line and was extremely up its own ass, and the ethics paper was a fine ethics paper with nothing to say about literature. I don't have to worry about those anymore, so I'm removing sources as I'm collecting more sources to look into.
Okay, so of the original 19 sources that I found, five have survived my reading and weeding process and are alive and well in my annotated bibliography.
The document has gone from under 500 words of pure source listings to over 3300 words of notes and copy/pasted citations.
For the record: I will likely use significantly fewer than a thousand words of direct quotation in my final paper. I will probably use under 200 words of direct quotation. What I have done is I have pulled significant, multi-paragraph chunks out that will give *me* the context I need to ensure that I'm using the quote appropriately to inform the reader and make my argument. The reader will see very little of this actual work, but an experienced reader reading an experienced writer will know to assume that this is the level of effort going on in the background.
So, enough about that, now on to my four new sources. We're going to explore the exciting world of readmores today, because first we're talking about how to read your subject-author's further writings and chuck those in your bibliography as supporting evidence.
So this is going to be "how to read a short story or essay by your subject author to include as supporting evidence for your argument"
In particular, I will be looking at Orwell's "The Lion and the Unicorn," which is linked so that you can play along if you'd like.
The next piece that I'm reading is another work of Orwell's that is set in Burma; it is just under 2000 words long and it has been mentioned by at least five of the authors who I have been reading for my research project, so it is important to include. Because it is so short I am actually going to *read* the thing, so here are the instructions for reading a short work of fiction/personal experience essay/letter that you will be citing in your research paper.
This particular work is George Orwell's "A Hanging," and is linked if you'd like to read along.
By now you should have looked away from your assignment for a moment then looked back to realize that it's due in about 72 hours.
Now is time to do what I call "brute forcing your source." This is how to "read" an entire book on a tight deadline.
Okay, so I've now read several academic essays, several works by the author I'm studying, and have read four chapters in two books about this guy, as well as dug out old newspaper columns and letters.
Now I sit down and hammer out a thesis, right?
Nope! Now you pare down your research!
My annotated bibliography is now almost nine thousand words long. That is MUCH more material than I'm going to be able to effectively use, so it is time for me to make a new document.
THIS document is going to be getting close to the bibliography/works cited page that I'm going to be using in my final paper, so I'm going to make sure that each citation is in proper MLA format, and, because I'm going to try to do this correctly, I'm going to go in alphabetical order.
So this:
Becomes this:
Which isn't a huge change but formatting is a really silly thing to get dinged on, so modern MLA specs it is.
At this point, my annotated bibliography is a mess. It's full of random notes and some of the quotations that I have copy-pasted are a mess. It's fifteen pages, and scrolling back and forth to look for quotes is going to be a nightmare, especially because I've got chunks of text that are hundreds of words long. So what I'm going to do is pull out the highly-quotable segments of the text that I've copied and copy that into my new document, which I'm calling my works cited page.
So this:
Becomes this:
and I end with a document that is five pages long and just over 2500 words and there will be no last-minute panic about whether my works cited page is properly formatted.
Now, finally, I've done a ton of research and found a whole pile of references and read all these articles and BOOKS for this one assignment, now, surely, I sit down and write a paper, right?
You fool.
Now I read the original work one more time and begin transcribing pertinent passages that I will reference in my essay.
Last One (until I get the essay back and republish this mess as a single document that you can link to instead of a scrolling nightmare; i’ll put it in my pinned post when it’s done)
