 Hi everyone and greetings from a very sunny and warm main today. My name is Erica. I am one of the librarians at Janks and I was supposed to visit your class in person, your COM 356 class this past week, but instead we're going to do this online. So I'm actually coming to you from one of my offices right now. Behind me is my extensive DVD collection. So I thought what better room to do this in than in a place that houses one of my favorite medias. And some of you actually might be choosing to focus on films or videos or something like that for your particular project. So today this introduction video is meant to just give you some context about how I'm going to set you up and how I want you to start to think about research for your particular topic. And then you'll primarily use the course guide that I've shared with you all and hopefully your professor has sent you a link to that to connect with some other information. You'll watch a few more videos if they're helpful for you, but really it's kind of a self-paced through this research process. But this introduction is meant to help you think about the ways in which I usually guide students through research for this particular paper that you guys are going to be writing. So one of the things that I want to say right off the bat is that there isn't necessarily one database that fits all for the type of research that you guys are doing. And that's because of the nature of the topics that you're exploring in this particular class and the large questions that you're asking about the artifacts that you're analyzing. Some of you are looking at films, others of you might be studying music, some of you might be looking at historical documents or speeches. These are very different topics and will require a different approach to research. So my hope and my goal through the course guide and through some of these videos is to show you the steps that you can transfer no matter what topic you're looking at and the ways in which I start to try to get students to think a little bit differently about how you might approach research for this particular assignment. So this is exciting because there's a lot of flexibility with the types of information that you could be potentially looking at and hopefully I'll help you narrow it down a little bit. So the first thing I want to say is an introduction for our research approach for this class is there are several different ways in which you'll need to work through and explore resources as you work on analyzing that artifact of yours. And I think of research in this class as really fitting into four main categories. The first category is of course the artifact itself. What are you actually analyzing? What's your media? That's easy and you have probably already done that. But some of you this might look a little bit different. You might have one source for this. Maybe it's one TV show or a couple of episodes of a TV show. Others of you might be looking at an entire newspaper or something like that and looking at multiple runs of that. So artifact is number one. The second category of research is research about your chosen methodology of criticism. So what actual lens, critical lens are you applying to that artifact? Most of the time this comes from the textbooks that you've been assigned for this class. But there are other resources that we might find within the library and you can look at the NOVA catalog tab for that information on your course guide. And then the third category of research is research about the artifact itself and what maybe other scholars have been saying about that artifact. So other media critics potentially have been talking about. And we can turn to our library databases for that. For some of you, this is going to be harder than others depending on the topic that you're looking at. So I'll give you some strategies for thinking about that. And then lastly it is research about your big picture question. And this for me is one of the most important aspects of this research that you're entering into and conducting. And this is what I tell almost every student who comes to me asking for help in this particular class. Never forget the big question that you're asking and what your artifact is helping to answer about that big question. This is going to be your best friend when you turn to the library databases for searching because most of you are probably not gonna be able to plug in the name of your artifact or something like that and find information about it. Some of these are just too specific for searching within our databases. But you will be able to find information about your big question that you're asking and maybe the genre or type of media to which your artifact falls. And we'll see an example of that in just a moment. So that's the directions, the lens that we are going to take as we move through some of our resources. So I've gone back and forth a lot with the best way that I think to help you guys set you up for some of this information. And I decided that the best way is to actually think about some different examples from students who have come to ask me for help in the past and we've been successful in finding research. So think of this as a case study if you will as we explore some of these. And I'm gonna use them as examples in other videos and throughout your course guide. So I wanna set up those case studies that we're gonna be taking a look at. So these are real life examples from this class that I've helped with in the past. So student number one who came to me a few years ago, the artifact that she was exploring was the TV show Shameless. And she was looking at a few different episodes within that TV show. And the big picture question that she ultimately decided on was how does mainstream culture portray sexuality? So it took us a little bit. We could not plug in Shameless into the databases. Instead we needed to go to that big picture question. So what I try to get her to think about is instead of focusing in specifically on the TV show Shameless, instead what kind of a TV show is Shameless? Well, it's obviously TV, it's episodic, and it's a comedy. So instead when we go to our databases to actually find critical research about this, we're actually going to use that bigger genre to which the TV show Shameless falls into, TV comedies and sexuality. Those are the two keywords that we use within our databases to go ahead and search. So that's one example. And we were successful in finding research in that area. Student number two who came to me last year for help, she actually wanted to do a research study about Donald Trump's inauguration address. And so her problem was a little bit different because it was very, very soon after the inauguration address that actually happened, she knew that there wasn't gonna be that much research about Trump's inauguration address specifically. So instead we had to get creative. She ended up asking questions about rhetoric in times of division and how that often comes out in presidential speeches. That was a pretty interesting question. So how I advised her was to think broadly about the rhetorical strategies used in presidential speeches, not just President Trump's speech but presidential speeches in general. And then her job was to apply that back to Trump's speech. So how did this translate for actual database searching? We used keywords such as rhetorical strategy and division and president so that we could actually find some critical analysis of these kinds of things. And it's that student to example that we're actually gonna carry with us throughout a couple of these videos that you guys are gonna be searching. So as a kind of a step one in your research, I would encourage you to actually identify your artifact which you should have already done, identify your big research question, your big topic that you're working with and then start to make a list of yourself about all of the different subgroups or subcategories that your question falls into such as what genre or type of media does my object, my artifact fall into. What other types of scholars or disciplines might be researching my topic? Do I need to look at what historians are saying or do I need to look at what maybe even like psychologists are saying about my topic and start to jot that down? So do you have a better idea of what direction you actually need to take for your research? All right, so with all that kind of preamble in mind about the ways in which we can start to think about our topic, we are going to jump in next to some specific ways of searching our library databases and some best tools, best databases to use for searching for information for this project that you guys are gonna be using. So follow me throughout your course guide and then don't forget, I'm always just an email away erica.street.gordon.edu and I'd be happy to help you out. Thanks everyone.