If you're in BYU Writing 150H sections 122, 126, or 129 you're in the right place.


My name is Dr. SWILUA. (Pronounced "Swill-oo-ah") That's short for "She Who Is Like Unto Aphrodite." It's my official title, thanks.

Monday, September 13, 2010

The Bibliography Challenge!

When I was an undergraduate, one of my classes had this super evil library scavenger hunt. It was full of psychotic questions like, “The following quote [insert random bizarre quote] is a line from a book. Find it.”

This was before the internet (yes, I'm that old) and there were 100 questions like this.

Me and my group were working, like, 8 hours a day every day for two weeks. We were so mad about that stupid assignment and the awfulness, etc. And we were having trouble. So we started to get desperate. To try desperate things. For example, we narrowed one question down to four books. But we couldn’t find the answer in any of them.

So we called the authors.

All stalker-like, we got their phone numbers and friggin called them at home and read them the quote and asked them if they wrote the book that had the quote and if so, which book was it?

We did a lot of other things, too. We talked to professors. We broke into email accounts. We pretended to be research assistants for professors that didn’t exist and got librarians to find stuff for us. We were like Veronica Mars, but with more rage.

Well, I wrote nasty things about that horribly hard assignment on the course evaluations. It was the worst assignment EVER, I concluded. And all I learned was how to be MAD.

And then, years later, I was in grad school, doing a research project. Everyone in the class was having trouble finding stuff, but I wasn’t. They all asked me how I was finding stuff. So I told them.

They looked at me like I was crazy.

And it hit me: everything I knew about doing research, I learned from that awful assignment. Everything.

You don't need to call any authors today, but I thought you might enjoy practicing one of our techniques: the technique of the bibliography.

See, one of the things I learned during that assignment is that bibliographies are the most fantastic ways to find sources. Instead of pouring over databases, grab books on topics slightly larger than your topic and turn directly to the bibliography. Don’t even read the book. Just read the bibliographies. You’ll be amazed how much easier it is when someone else has done the research for you. Something I (still!) commonly do is to go to the library, find 20 books, pile them on a table and pour through the bibliographies. (Let someone else put the books away.) So useful.

So, here are the rules of the challenge:

1) Work in your peer review groups

2) You have only the class period. Fifty minutes. After that, time is up.

3) Start with one person’s topic and then work your way through everyone else’s topic. Get through as many people as you can, but don’t exceed the time limit. Rock paper scissors to see who goes in what order.

4) For each topic, find 20 books written on a broader topic. Don’t open the books yet.

5) Once you have ALL 20 books, put them on a table and flip to the bibliographies.

6)Write down peer-reviewed articles that apply to each smaller topic from each bibliography.

7)When you’ve gotten through the 20 bibliographies, it’s time to move to the next person in the group.

8)Repeat for each person until the time limit is up.

9)Bring your lists of applicable peer-reviewed articles to next class. The group with the most articles wins a prize.

37 comments:

  1. This will be intense! I hope I win paper rock siccors. More Peer reviews for muah! :)

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  2. I'm not sure what to think about this yet.

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  3. Am I the only one who groans at the thought of reading bibliographies? It sounds VERY helpful, but so boring... (Though I'm not complaining about the class, so please take no offense. I really like English, but hate research. :P)


    ~Mykell Aidukaitis

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  4. That sounds extremely helpful! I'm sure I think of the assignment in a warmer light after having read what She Who Is Like Unto Aphrodite's assignment was like. Thanks!

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  5. Quick question: once we find all these great peer-reviewed articles in the bibliographies of the books, where do we get the actual articles so we can find info for our paper?

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  6. @Takami - You go to inter-library loan, and they ought to be able to find the articles for you.

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  7. It was helpful but not my favorite thing in the world. oh well what are you going to do... Hakuna matata.

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  8. I'm grateful for your mercy in not making experience the same thing you did.

    Brandon Burkhardt

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  9. I can't even fathom how miserable that would be. I'm so glad we didn't have to do that!

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  10. The bibliography hunt was really helpful. I found some good sources for my research.

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  11. I am also grateful for your mercy in not making us do what you did. I would have been very sad and sobbed myself to sleep tonight. I found some good sources for my paper and am grateful for the boost.

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  12. It was good to finally get to practice HOW to find things in that giant library!!

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  13. Did anyone else feel horrible for taking 20 books off the shelf, just to leave them for some poor library worker to reshelf? I felt quite guilty.

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  14. I definitely felt bad about leaving so many books to reshelf. The assignment did help me learn how to use the bibliographies in the back of reference books for direction.

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  15. Oh what the pressure of time does to you...however, great library knowledge exercise, sometimes you need to find things quick!

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  16. a lot of the comments are true to me- i'm glad for the library practice and i will be eternally grateful i didn't have to do the quote assignment. i actually (since hate is a strong word) unfathomably disliked the assignment while doing it but i plan on using the technique on future papers.

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  17. Wait, how did you break into e-mail accounts if that assignment was before the Internet?
    On a different note, this is a really good way to do research- I don;t know if I ever would have thought of this. Thank you so much.

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  18. Dr. SWILUA, I'm starting to see a theme in the blogs of you working 7-8 hours a day on one assignment. Did you sleep in college?

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  19. I'm hoping the real point of this assignment was to get familiar with the library and the reference desks because that's what happened. I did find where to look for books on my topic though, so it helped me. I wish we had more time for the rest of my group. I ended up going to the library right after class and checking out nine books on my topic.

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  20. That was pure insanity. I think people should make bibliographies HARDER to write down... Oh wait... Thats not possible. Ha it was a good assignment though.

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  21. The best thing it did for me short-term was jump-start me on working on my paper. Although maybe I should change it to What Librarians Do to People Who Leave Books on Tables.

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  22. It was hard trying to find not only peer-reviewed articles, but peer-reviewed articles related to a more specific subject. But it was a good library exercise!

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  23. Super stressful but at least now I know how to get around in the library haha!

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  24. I've found the difficult and frustrating tasks are the ones where I learn a lot. So this assignment did a lot for me(even though it was HARD!)

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  25. That's quite an adventurous story.

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  26. I'm thankful for the internet, but this assignment was hard enough with it's help. I imagine that, without the internet, it was much like retrieving your dog's ball in the yard weeks after an Alaska snow storm (aka: Impossible!)

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  27. Thanks to this assignment, finding sources for papers for other classes has been so much easier!

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  28. Through this assignment, I found the book that I relied on most for my research paper!! All hail the teacher that knows!

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  29. Let's be honest i didn't do that great at this assignment

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  30. This is a great method for finding sources.

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  31. This sounds like it would work really well. But I think that I would absolutely despise having this assignment. Though I did find an amazing book for my topic.

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  32. This was a very helpful assignment, long and monotonous but helpful.

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