3 Background Reading
It’s wise to do some more reading about that narrower topic once you have it. For one reason, you probably don’t know much about it yet. For another, such reading will help you learn the terms used by professionals and scholars who have studied your narrower topic. Those terms are certain to be helpful when you’re looking for sources later, so jot them down or otherwise remember them.
For instance, if you were going to do research about the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) kidnapping in 1970 of Deputy Premier Pierre Laporte and British diplomat James Cross, this background reading would teach you that professionals and scholars usually refer to this event at the October Crisis. If you didn’t learn that, you would miss the kinds of sources you’ll eventually need for your assignment.
Most sources other than journal articles are good sources for initial reading on current topics, including the Globe and Mail or other mainstream new outlets, Wikipedia, encyclopedias for the discipline your topic is in, dictionaries for the discipline, and manuals, handbooks, blogs, and web pages that could be relevant. (The reason journal articles from academic sources are less helpful for background reading is that these tend to be more narrow and specific in scope and require more background knowledge in the part of the reader.)
This initial reading could cause you to narrow your topic further, which is fine because narrower topics lead to greater specificity for what you have to find out. After this upfront work, you’re ready to start developing the research question(s) you will try to answer for your assignment.
Tip: Keeping Track of Your Information
While you are in the background reading phase of your research you will come across a lot of sources and won’t know yet if they will prove useful in the long run. A handy type of software to help you keep track of all your findings is called citation management software. It will also be extremely valuable when it comes to using the resources you end up needing. There are many tools available that do this management for you. One example of a citation management tool is Zotero. The free version of Zotero has all the features you will need to save what you have found and even create and format a bibliography.
In addition, it is used by many scholars in Humanities for keeping track of their work.
Fuel Your Inspiration
Fuelling your inspiration is a large part of doing research in the Humanities. What inspires you often comes from what interests you. It’s worth remembering that reading, scanning, looking at, and listening to information resources is very useful during any step of the process to develop research questions. Doing so can jog our memories, give us details that will help us focus, and help us connect disparate information–all of which will help us come up with research questions that we find interesting.
