 Greetings and welcome to this video on how to do the article analysis. This is an assignment in my popular culture in the US course, and this is just going to give you the bare bones of what you should be doing. There are guidelines, written guidelines that you can find within the course, but maybe this might help clarify things as you go through it. So the value of this assignment is 130 points, and it should be at least 1,000 words, and there's two steps to this assignment. The first is going to be the article selection, which you're going to post to the discussion board labeled article selection in the appropriate folder once you find an appropriate article to write your essay on. The second part is actually writing the article analysis, and when you finish with that, it should be posted in assignment article analysis in the appropriate folder, and that should be in the module in which it is due. So there's three major parts to this assignment. The first is to find an academic article. The second is to thoroughly read the academic article, and the third is to write a thoughtful paper discussing the academic article and how it relates to course material. So the big emphasis there is academic. We're looking at journals that are peer reviewed. We're looking at material that is made for other scholars in the field. You generally shouldn't be looking at things like the Wall Street Journal or National Geographic. Those are more popular publications, informative publications, but not academic. All right. So what is an academic article? We're looking at something that's written by a knowledgeable person within the field of study, published in a journal whose focus is on knowledge building, not entertaining in or closely connected to the course's discipline. So this means that the content of the journal should be related to popular culture in some way. Now, there's some journals that are specifically have popular culture in their name. There's others that are close or others that may be relevant. So like a journal on television studies or a journal on film studies, those are likely to fit within this realm. And then usually subjected to the peer review process. This is almost always the case in which these articles are peer reviewed. That means another person in that field or discipline will actually look at this article and provide feedback. Several people usually do. Give it a critique before it's ready for publish. So where do you find such journals? Well, of course, there's the library databases. The library has tons of academic journals that you can access through their databases. This is why it was so important to get your library card in the first week of class. Some recommended databases, I would say Academic Search Premier, Expanded Academic Search ASAP and JSTOR are your best bets to go and to explore and make sure that you get your, you have your campus ID because you will need those, especially if you're off campus in order to access the digital resources here. So selecting the article, which you want to look for the requirements are that there's at least 12 pages of text. So I'm not talking about that's 12 pages regardless of bibliography. So you don't want to include that if there's lots of images. You want to think, well, then it needs to be much bigger than just, you know, a set of 12 pages. But it really should be 12 pages of analysis. I would recommend 20 because 20 is a good range you're usually dealing with. You see the person will provide more explanation and not assume the reader knows more. The shorter the article, often the more the writer assumes the audience knows. And that might make it more challenging. I've seen people go through 20 pages of text much quickly than 12 pages. As I said, published in academic journals, published after 1970. So I want somewhat contemporary research. You shouldn't be grabbing an article from 1940. It might not have the relevance that is needed, especially within the realm of popular culture. It must be an actual article. You want to make sure you don't end up with a book review or, you know, some other type of writing that may be 12 pages or longer. So make sure you're looking at something that is an actual, you know, analytical, argumentative article. And then it needs to be directly related to American popular culture. So it really does have to be connected to what we're talking about in the course. It doesn't have to be connected to the topics we cover, but it should be focused on American popular culture. You generally shouldn't be looking at or finding it, you know, focusing on an article about soccer in the UK. You want to focus on American popular culture. All right, so some recommendations. Please use the school library databases. That's what they're there for. They will make this much easier. Be sure to use the advanced search feature to limit to limit to relevant results, because one of the things that you can do is you can set the parameters of your search to be articles after 1970 to be articles that are 12 or 14 pages or longer. So use those features to really, you know, refine and make make your results more relevant so you can more quickly find that article. Use keywords that link topics with concepts. So you want to think about some of the concepts we explore in this class and, you know, do a key do a keyword search with those with a concept and a topic that you're interested in. Maybe you're interested in roadsters. So you do roadsters and you do mass mass culture theory, whatever you want to do. Just try to link those and see what the search results give you. I always read the first three to four pages of the article to make sure you're comfortable with it. You understand it. You feel that you can make sense of it. And I generally don't recommend picking the first. I would say get three articles and then look at each of them and see which one feels most natural to you. And then finally, save that article to your computer, your thumb drive, email it to yourself. Make sure you've saved it several times so that you have it. So when it comes time to actually write about it, you don't have to go back into the database and try to find it. I've had several students do this to usually much frustration because the article might not be there or they might not remember exactly how they found it. You really want to make sure you save that article and you have it for when it's time to read it and to write it. So once you get that article, what do you do? You need to post this information to the discussion board. So you should and I believe it's called article selection. You should be providing the title, the authors, the journal name, publication, the year of publication rather, the volume number, issue number, page numberings, and then your page count. And that's without the bibliography in the images. So that stuff needs to be posted there in order for me to approve it and then in order for you to move forward and actually write the essay. And it's a first come, first serve basis. So nobody can do the same article. So the sooner you get this in, the better chance you have of making sure that it's your article that you can do and not any nobody else has gone in there and already claimed that article. All right, so next you want to thoroughly read that article. And that entails reading it more than once. Even for me, I have to read articles two, sometimes three times in order to fully understand what's being said. You want to write notes while reading it. So, you know, using highlights, you really want to annotate. You really want to make this an active process. Be sure to identify the author's thesis and purpose. This will help you again as you're writing your paper. If you've highlighted it, squared it, started, whatever, you can quickly go to that and think about how well the author handles that thesis and delivers on that purpose. And then explore how the author uses the particular writing that is from class. So if there's any writings that are that the author references that are from class, you really want to look at how they use that. You really want to be aware of how that is done. Or if it's not the writing that any particular concepts, ideas that you've seen in the course, if the author addresses that, you really want to pay close attention to that and see what they do with it. And then finally, you want to read the footnotes, the endnotes as you move through the article. You don't necessarily have to, you know, understand all of them or pay close attention to all of them. But you want to be aware of them and you want to understand what the author is trying to do with them because that'll be another part of the actual writing. All right, so you go, you read it thoroughly, and now it's time to write it. The things you want to cover is you want an explanation of the article's main points. So really what it is that the author is trying to argue and how does that author argue the points? Your opinion about the piece as a whole, along with your justification for such an opinion, you really want to focus here on what you thought about the argument. Students sometimes fall into the trap of saying, oh, it was boring, or oh, it was this. That's not really what we're talking about here as your opinion. This is more about your opinion around the argument that's been laid, how you make sense of it, how you correlate that with what you understand about the subject. And then you also want to compare the ideas and thoughts that you've been exposed to in the course with what you see in the article. And this is really challenging for students. This is one of the hardest parts of this assignment is you need to make connections with what you're learning in the course. It may not always make sense, but you really want to think about how this author constructs or delivers the argument, the kind of approach he or she takes to popular culture, and the kinds of approaches you've seen taken with popular culture in the course thus far. This is, we're about a third into the course by the time this is due, and you really should be paying attention to what other articles have done, how they've influenced your thoughts on popular culture, and be able to look at that and compare it with what this article does. Then you should also assess the author's notes in bibliography. You don't have to do this substantially, but you should look at what kind of resources, what kind of primary sources, what kind of secondary sources does this author use? What is the research that he or she is using to actually make this argument of theirs powerful? Also, what's the author's background? Why is he or she qualified to actually write this article? So this will require a little bit of research. You need to go out onto the internet and really look for this information. Who is this person? Where do they work? What have they written? What do they teach? What is their degrees? And you want to find some basic information to see whether this person seems qualified to write this article. And don't forget, that's research. So you're going to have to cite that. That should be in your work cited. You should have citations in your paper. And then a discussion of how this particular article fits into this publication's theme and overall content. Students sometimes mess up on this. How does this article fit into the journal that it's been published in? How do those go together? Does it make sense that this article is in this publication and why? And just to note, parts one through three should really be about 80% of your paper while parts four through six should only be about 20. Parts one through three are really the meat of the paper and you really want to make sure you focus on that. The other thing is, I have six points here, numbered out. This isn't how you have to tackle them in your paper. You can lay out the paper however you want. These are just the six things you really need to address. All right, you got questions? Probably at this point. Be sure to check out the guidelines. If you still have questions, post them to the questions forum and I'll answer them as soon as possible. Thank you for watching.