Psychology Abstraction

Name Topic. Take One Step of Abstraction – from looking at YOUR project, YOUR memory – YOUR Memoir — to looking at your type of project. Your category of project, idea, etc?Say it out loud: 20 Second Stories.Say it – badly. What aspect of your topic/project would you work on if you had the money and the exclusive time to dig into it?Hear it back from a fellow student. What of what you said stuck with them. Take that to heart.Write It Down.Say it again – better. Hear it back/write it down. (What changed?)Research that abstract topic. Google. Wikipedia.What did you find?Note how it helped you refine your topic. You learned vocabulary, framing, names of experts, etc. This dialectic will continue: Articulate your topic. Explain it. Refine it. Research – use research to refine topic. Restart research. Repeat.What is the story of your search – what search terms? How did you refine your search? How did it refine your topic?Then – JSTOR. EbscoHost. Etc.What specialized vocabulary do professionals in that field use to talk about it?List 5 articles you have found: Author, Title, Journal or Book Title, Publisher, Date! Use Stable URL to link them. Must be post 1990!Choose one challenging JSTOR article to gut – Note: To be able to gut a paper is the crucial skill in research. You’re not just reading it through from start to finish – you want the meat! Here’s how you gut an article:Who is the author? What else have they written? Well-received? Google ‘em! Where are they now? Do others cite them? To agree? Disagree?What are the main points of the paper to you? (relevant to your work!). (Note: If it helps you, download topic to Adobe Acrobat, translate it into text – google it if you don’t know how – and search for key terms.)Strip Mine the Footnotes: Go find 5 of the articles listed in the footnotes most relevant to you. List them – with Stable URLs. Annotate in a few sentences: Annotate means — explain why you chose them.