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This book is about the variable and changing ways that geographers | ||
have answered the question "what is geography?," and the contextual | ||
factors that help explain those answers. It is about the | ||
back-and-forth between world, and a changing discipline. Perhaps most | ||
importantly, it is about *you*: learning how to place yourself in | ||
this evolving world of ideas. | ||
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# Disciplines and the Modern Academy | ||
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# Geography of Empire | ||
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# A Modern Discipline | ||
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# Heterodox Geography | ||
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% Tools for Academic Literature Review and Analysis | ||
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# Tools | ||
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Keeping track, and making sense of, one or more academic literatures | ||
is a difficult task greatly helped up electronic tools: most notably | ||
research databases and bibliographic managers. I present here how to use | ||
both of them here, with a particular focus on my tool of choice: | ||
Zotero. Feel free to use any tool you like, but I choose to | ||
demonstrate Zotero because it: | ||
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1. has all the features we need | ||
2. allows your data to be synced to the cloud, and so available on | ||
different computers | ||
3. is completely free; no cost and open source | ||
4. is cross-platform and application, and so works equally well | ||
whether you use Windows, Mac OS, or Linux for an operating system, or | ||
OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Word for your word-processing. | ||
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We have already reviewed that the task of analyzing a little consists | ||
of the following steps: | ||
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1. identifying relevant keywords | ||
2. gathering references | ||
3. reading sources and categorizing them | ||
4. describing the connections among the different groupings | ||
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We will thus operationalize these steps using Zotero. | ||
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# Identifying Keywords | ||
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Here we first have to figure out what it is we are trying to describe. | ||
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# Gathering References | ||
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Here we will use two journal databases, and Google Scholar, to find as | ||
many relevant references as we can. | ||
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Once we find these references, we want to quickly suck the relevant | ||
metadata into Zotero for later reuse. we thus simply click the button | ||
in the toolbar, and Zotero will save the information. | ||
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Once we are done collecting the references we can make a quick first | ||
pass by tagging each item consistently based on what we can tell from | ||
the abstract and a quick glance at the article. | ||
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Now that we have everything properly tagged, we want to identify key | ||
readings for further analysis. We might want to prioritize those | ||
readings that have two characteristics: | ||
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1. roughly 3-7 years old | ||
2. relatively high citation counts (greater | ||
than 20 or so in Google Scholar is good; more than 50 is ideal) | ||
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More recent articles (or books) have often not been out long enough to become | ||
established in the literature, but older articles by definition | ||
exclude more recent work. So this is a good sweet spot. | ||
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You can then work backward from there, observing how each article | ||
builds on previous work. As you read more, you will start to recognize | ||
pattens of citation: this article gets cited when an author wants to | ||
make X point, and another article when they want to make Y | ||
point. Recognizing these patterns is essential to understanding a | ||
literature. | ||
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In the end, we want a handful of collections that describe different | ||
areas of our literature. We want each collection to have roughly ten | ||
examples, and for each of them to have a clear statement about why | ||
they are there, and what their significance is. At this point, we can | ||
ask Zotero to generate a report for us. | ||
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Once we have this, we can start work on our papers. Each collection | ||
should ideally map onto a section heading, and each article should get | ||
cited in that section. |