Critical Studies Essay December 08 - Reflections

Critical Studies Essay December 08
A belated reflection on the essay. At the time of writing I have not had my marks for the essay. I will have to reflect further on this post when I have.

The essay proved to be a marathon. Mainly due to my lack of initial planning. I quickly realised that in my panic to grab as much reference material as possible I became overloaded with information. Much of which I did not reference sufficiently well that I could go back to the source. Result was I lost focus, could not see the wood for the trees. I pulled myself together by reaffirming that although this was a research based essay, it was essentially a technical exercise and it was probably more important at this stage to get the structure and presentation right as come up with an earth shattering academic work. I am sure that is what Steve said!

I made the notes that in future I should stay more focussed, produce my thesis statement at an early stage, make sure my notes were clear and well referenced, make sure reading is relevant. Avoid being side tracked. Start the bibliography and reference collection from day one. I discovered a brilliant Word plug-in for collating citations, called Zotero.

As for the essay, I think my technical structure is OK but I am not so sure about the actual essay structure. I feel my conclusion may prove to be a major weakness, too short! Time will tell.

Just need to wait and see if my thoughts prove to be correct. Grade ? C+?????



Jackson Pollock at work - the main focus of my essay

13 photographs that changed the world

"Omaha Beach, Normandy, France" Robert Capa, 1944

This post may be a little late for some. I would assume that many of these images could have been the subject of the last essay assignment, for the photographers anyway.

The photographs are aggregated and commented on on Neatorama's blog.

Possibly the most interesting part of the post are the comments suggesting other images which could have been included.

How many more could you add to the list?

Zotero - Citation Organisation

Being of a lazy disposition I have been looking for ways to organise my growing list of references and bibliographies. I currently run Word XP, inevitably Microsoft do not have a means of organising citations in this ancient version. I believe there is an option in Word 2007, although it can not cope with Harvard (Author:Date) citations. I tried a third party option Documentit. Downloaded the Trial version and typed in some 20 bibliography citations. Only to discover that the trial version of Documentit will only allow you to download the first 3 citations in your list, bummer! Having just spent 30 mins typing all that in and not to be able to extract the info again is not amusing. Nowhere in the information regarding the trial version is this limitation mentioned. A cheap trick to make me cough up £14.99 for the full version, I think not, why can they not be upfront about the limitations?

Not to be thwarted, I discovered that I could auto transfer the first 3 citations in my the list into my Word document. Then deleted them from DocumentS*it and transferred again. Yes, it worked the next three citations were transferred and adinfinitum until I had copied over all my bibliography citations into a Word document for future use. Not a completely wasted effort but not quite what I was expecting.

What next, well another session with Google dug up an interesting extension for Firefox, Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] claims that it can "help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources" Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps to gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. Interestingly Zotero seems to be in dispute with the owners of Endnote a proprietary citation manager.

The easiest way to collect your bibliography is to find the book in question in Amazon click the Zotera icon in the bottom right hand corner of your browser window and Bingo the full citation is added to your library. I have since found a more useful location for Zotero friendly citations at Worldcat an aggregation site for over 10,000 libraries worldwide. The beauty of this site is you can find the details of out of print books.

Zotero integrates with Microsoft Word or Open Office via a plugin. This places icons in the Word toolbar. To add a citation to a document or essay, place the cursor at the point in the document where you want to add the citation, click add citation icon in the toolbar, the first time you will be asked for the format, choose Harvard, select your citation from the list and click add. The citation will be added thus - (Anfam 1998). at the same time Zotero adds the full citation at the end of the document as an alphabetical list. It has worked for me and saved loads of tedious typing.