GEO 3001: Research Assignment Proposal and Research
Assignment Instructions
The purpose
of this assignment is not to write a semester paper, but to learn how
geographers undertake research on a topic.
The techniques and sources which will be part of this project would be
used regardless of whether you were working as a GIS professional, urban
planner, locational analyst or academic researcher.
What you
submit to me at the end of the semester will be what is known as an annotated
bibliography. What this means is that
the project will consist of you
finding a variety sources (including geography reference, newspapers, journal
articles, books, etc.) that relate to your chosen topic and instead of writing
a coherent paper, write one or two paragraphs on each source summarizing it’s
topic, arguments, literature it is speaking to, methods and its use to
you. Again, the goal is to have you do
research using geographical sources, so you get used to working as a geographer
does.
There
are two stages to this assignment: the proposal and the full assignment.
Proposal: Due Wednesday, February 22
The
process will begin the following way: you need to find 1) three research
articles (not book reviews or commentary) published in an academic journal
of geography that are at least 10 pages long 2) that relate to global change
and 3) that interest you. You must find them in one of the following
journals (which are also available in electronic form through the library’s
website). You cannot just pick a
random journal – it must be one of the following. Of the journals, the Annals and Transactions have
the widest array of topics. Also, life
is much easier if you pick an article that was published in 2002 or later. Most of these journals are available online –
which makes things easy. Go the
library’s main page. In the search area, select the “E-journals” tab, and cut
and paste the title of one of the below journals. If you are connecting to online journal
articles from home, it will take you through the ezproxy process, for which you
will need your fiu email ID or the number on the back of your ID card. If you still cannot figure out how to
access these online – ASK A LIBRARIAN, not Prof. Smith.
Annals
of the Association of American Geographers G3.A7
Transactions
(Institute of British Geographers) G7.I6
Antipode
G1 .A67
Environment and Planning. D, Society &
Space. H1 .E58
Geoforum (Online
Only)
Social and Cultural
Geography GF1.S6
Economic Geography
HF1021.E4
Cultural Geographies
GE170 .E376
Gender, Place and Culture G70 .G4
Political Geography JC319 .P65 (Biscayne
Bay)
Again,
this project works better if you do not come with some preconceived notion of a
topic you want to study – instead, see what is out there and then choose an
article that interests of you by
browsing the table of contents of individual issues of the journal instead of
searching. Life gets hard when you
have a topic in mind and then have to go finding something written about it in
a geography journal.
NOTE: DOUBLE CHECK THE TITLE OF JOURNAL YOUR
ARTICLE IS COMING FROM! IF IT IS NOT FROM
THE ABOVE, IT DOES NOT COUNT!
PLEASE NOTE: FOR THE PROPOSAL
STAGE, THE THREE ARTICLES DO NOT HAVE TO BE ALL ON THE SAME TOPIC, JUST PICK
THREE ARTICLES ON GLOBAL CHANGE YOU LIKE.
What I want you to do for the “proposal” – which is due on Wed. Feb. 22 – is to provide a citation (see below
for examples, but you will need author, article title, journal title, volume,
issue, pages and year in some order) for each of your three articles (in a
style of your choosing – luckily there are plenty of web programs that do the
work for you). Then, after each
citation, tell me (in a few sentences)
1) what the subject of the article is 2) what larger literature or
debate within geography you think it is speaking to 3) what the author is
arguing 4) why it relates to global change, and 5) why the topic it addresses
interests you. I prefer you do this in
outline form, but you can do paragraphs if you wish.
Also, please arrange the articles in order of preference since no
two people in the class will be starting with the same article – thus it is
worth your time to look beyond the current issue to find an article you really
like. Also please put your name and
panther ID on the paper (which has to be typed, printed, and possibly stapled).
Keep in mind when choosing articles, choose ones on topics that
are of interest to you (and that you can more or less understand), because the
rest of assignment will involve learning more about the larger “literature”
that article belongs to.
The Full Research Assignment: Due, Friday, April 13
YOU are responsible for reading and understanding
these directions. If you turn in an
assignment that does not follow directions, you cannot say I didn’t warn you.
Once you
have your article selected and approved (which will happen once I return your
proposal), you can begin the research assignment. Again, the point of this assignment is for
you to better appreciate (and begin to critically analyze) current research in
geography and become familiar with the arenas in which it is published.
This
will require you to find and summarize 15 sources relating to your article
(including the article itself), according to the guidelines below. Considering that the bibliography from your
article probably contains 30 or more sources (which by definition are related
to your article), this should not be hard.
The
sources have to fall into the following categories, with a certain number of
sources required for each category. When
you hand in the final write-up of your research assignment, you need to use
these as subheadings so I know what is what.
Cover
Page
I will
explain each of these in turn. But first…
Plagiarism
This is
an easy assignment that is worth 80 points (the proposal is worth 10). Provided you follow these instructions,
proofread, and do your best, most/all of these points should be yours.
The goal
of this assignment is for you to learn how to do and synthesize geographic
research on your own, in case you are ever called upon to do so in the
future. Thus it is vitally important
you get practice putting things in your own words, as best you can. In fact, even if you come to a wrong
conclusion in your summaries, provided you made a solid effort to get there, I
will consider the effort a success (and will reward points accordingly).
However,
what I do not want you do is plagiarize.
If you plagiarize, those are not your own thoughts. Thus you cheated. Thus you do not deserve a grade, and you have
failed to perform a basic task any BA in Geography should be able to do. In fact, if you plagiarize on this assignment, I will give you an F for the
course, because you are not yet deserving of a BA or minor in Geography.
How do
you avoid plagiarism? As I said, the
easiest thing to do is put things in your own words, which means going beyond
changing a few words in someone else’s paragraph, and writing your own
paragraphs from scratch. If you really
think the source said something perfectly, put quotes around a sentence (or two
at most), and give a citation in whatever style you choose (just be
consistent). Simply throwing quotes
around whole paragraphs of other’s work is not original thinking, it is
plagiarism. Even worse is changing a
few words from the abstract instead of reading the article and giving your own
opinion. This is plagiarism as well – so make sure your summaries are
substantially different from the abstracts (or reviews on Amazon).
I have
built in several requirements to the assignment, most especially the use of
turnitin.com and you having to hand in copies of the abstracts to discourage
cheating.
Please,
put things in your own words. You will
be better for it.
Citation Style,
Font/Spacing, Length, Writing Style and Organization
I do not
care what citation style you use, the only requirement is that you are
consistent. Obviously, you do not need
a works cited page. If you quote the
text you are currently summarizing (which is the only text you should quote),
you need to give the page number either in parentheses (pg. 3) or in a
footnote.[1]
You
should use 12 pt Times New Roman or Garamond, with double spacing and 1 inch
margins. Please do not use Arial for
your text font (though it is O.K. for headings), because it is really hard to
read in bulk.
As for
length, I am pretty sure I will not accept anything over 25 pages (this total
excludes “Materials Used in the Project).
Part of this task is learning to summarize effectively, and you should
be able to do that in less than a page per source. Most of you should use less than that. As for minimum length – I cannot imagine
doing it in less than seven pages. I do
not care about length; I care about you completing the assignment thoughtfully,
according to instructions.
You must
write in complete sentences. I prefer
you arrange each of the 15 individual source summaries as a lettered outline
where in the letters correspond to a lettered task from the instructions. You can also, if you want, write each
individual summary as a paragraph, but be really careful about clearly
completing all parts of the summary. I
recommend the outline style – it keeps you more focused, and is clearer for me
to grade.
As for
organization, below is roughly how I want each section to look (again citation
style is up to you):
------ Example of Outline Style -----
II. Geography
Reference Summaries
1. Naylor, Simon. “Historical
geography: natures, landscapes, environments” Progress in Human Geography, Volume 30, Number 6, December
2006, pp. 792-802.
A. This article is a summary of contemporary
approaches to historical geography of the environment which rely on discursive
analysis concerning the construction of nature, and how they differ from
earlier approaches.
B. Naylor’s primary argument is that….
------- End Example -----
------ Example of Paragraph Style -----
II. Geography
Reference Summaries
1. Naylor, Simon. “Historical
geography: natures, landscapes, environments” Progress in Human Geography, Volume 30, Number 6, December
2006, pp. 792-802.
This article is a summary of contemporary
approaches to historical geography of the environment which rely on discursive
analysis concerning the construction of nature, and how they differ from
earlier approaches. Naylor’s primary
argument is that….
------- End Example -----
Finding Sources
This is about finding the best
sources possible. Sometimes these,
especially books, are not available in the FIU library. Which means you might have to use
Interlibrary Loan. Learn more about it
from the “Borrow Materials from Other Libraries” link on the library’s homepage
which is http://library.fiu.edu/AboutUs/DepartmentsServices/AccessServices/ILLiadBorrowMaterialsfromOtherLibraries/tabid/66/Default.aspx
The Sections: What To Include
Title Page – Include
Your Name, Panther ID#, and the following: “Research Assignment, GEO 3001,
Spring 2011, Prof. Smith”
A. Starter
Article Summary – This
essentially is a more elegant, slightly expanded, version of what you wrote in
the proposal stage. In this section, after
you give the citation, I want you to A) give me a one or
two sentence description of what this article is about (e.g. comic books and nationalism; multiplier
effects of internet search industries; women and subsistence farming in
Tanzania; etc) B) one to three
sentences about what the author is arguing
(that the medium of comic books was a way to reproduce might as right;
that search companies do not have strong multiplier effects; that small women
farmers conserve land better than Western owned industrial farms) C) explain
what data/other authors the author(s) of this article used to back up this
claim D) explain what larger literature or debate within geography this
argument is speaking to (political geography and spaces of nationalism; economic
geography, transnational corporations and industrial location; nature society
relationships and gender). I also want
you to E) explain why you think it relates to global change and F) why the
article interested you in the first place. NOTE: You are only doing this for the one
article approved by me from your proposal – you no longer need to worry about
the other two.
B. Geography
Reference – There are two sources
human geographers go to when they want to learn what other geographers are thinking
about a topic: The Dictionary of Human
Geography and the journal Progress in
Human Geography. These sources are
where experts on various subfields of geography go to publish their thoughts
about the direction of current research.
Luckily our library has both: The Dictionary of Human Geography
(Green Library
-- Reference
Collection - 2nd Fl. -- GF4 .D52 2000-In-Library Use Only) and Progress in Human Geography (available
online through the library website and at Green Library -- Periodicals - 3rd
Fl. -- GF1 .P76). What
I want you to do is find two articles
– preferably one in Progress and one in the Dictionary, although you can
get both from the same source – that
talk about Part D of Section A – the larger debate/topic within geography your
article is speaking to. The Dictionary of Human Geography has a
handy index; you can search Progress in
Human Geography by either browsing through the table of contents, or , even
better, searching the online edition by going to it, using “Advanced Search”
and under journal name put “Progress in Human Geography.” Or, best of all, check to see if your
article cited any Progress in Human
Geography articles in its bibliography.
For each article you find I want you to give the full citation, and then
A) summarize, in a paragraph or two, what the article says about the direction
of the debate/topic B) if the author
gives an opinion about that direction, summarize what it is in one to three
sentences C) in a few sentences explain why/how your starter article relates to
the summary of the topic/debate as discussed in this geography reference
article (does it basically agree or does it say something different). Remember, topic/debates often involve key
words like economic geography, urban geography, political geography, tourism,
landscape, environment, nature, development, gender, media, etc. NOTE:
Very rarely is the larger topic/debate about a particular place. So, for example, if the article was about
poor care of the elderly women in
C. Other Geography Articles – You need to find seven academic articles on relatively the same debate/topic as your
article from geography journals (words like Geography, Space, Place, Urban, and
Environment in the journal title are usually giveaways) that are not Progress in Human Geography. The easiest way to find these is to look in
the bibliography of your starter article and the bibliographies of your
reference articles. You can also use up
to three stand alone book chapters in edited collection books (ie books with
each chapter written by a different author), if you want. For each article, give the citation and A) give me a one or two sentence answer for what this article is
about B) one to three sentences about
what the author is arguing C) what data/other authors the author(s) of
this article used to back up this claim D) one to three sentences about how it
agrees/disagrees with and/or what it adds to the larger literature or debate
within geography you have been focusing
on and E) how this article relates to your starter article. Again,
book reviews DO NOT COUNT.
D. Books – You need to find two books related to the topic/debate in your article. You
MUST find at least one (hopefully both) in a bibliography of one of the articles/reference
sources you looked at. Hopefully
they are geography books, but since this is harder for someone not familiar
with the authors to tell, it is not a requirement. You cannot count an edited collection book
here if you counted some of its chapters in Section C. You do need to get a hold of the books – even if you have to use
E. Newspaper or Magazine Articles – You need to find three newspaper/magazine articles
concerning your starter articles topic. These
are the only non-geography sources I want you to find. However, they should match the subject of
your article as closely as possible. If
the starter article is about the care of elderly women in
F. Materials Used in
Project – So I can judge how well
you did your assignment/check for original thought, I will need photocopies of
the following things: 1) the entire “starter article” 2) the
title/abstract/first page from any articles/chapters you used (including ones
from Progress in Human Geography) 3)
title/citation page from the books 4)
the page in the bibliography in which you found the book (if applicable), with the
book’s citation either circled or highlighted and 5) the first page of the
newspaper/magazine articles you found .
Please staple all these together separately from your main assignment,
along with a cover page with your name and Panther ID # and the words
“Materials Used in Project.” SO THRE IS NO CONFUSION – YOU ONLY GIVE ME
THE STARTER ARTICLE IN ITS ENTIRITY – FOR EVERYTHING ELSE, I ONLY NEED THE
FIRST PAGE.
Submitting the Assignment
On Friday, April 13, you must hand in to me at the beginning of
class: 1) A-E stapled together, with cover page and 2) F with its cover page,
stapled together. Also, you will need
to submit A-E as single word document to turnitin.com (instructions to follow).
Grading
My grading will be based on the
following factors: 1) Did the person follow directions fully for each section?
2) Did they make strong effort to understand what they saw and demonstrate to
me that they read it? 3) Do the subsequent sources selected fit with the
starter article or are they just thrown together with little effort? 4) Are
summaries coherent and well thought out, or do they meander and contain too
much editorializing (ie saying “this article is stupid)”? 5) Does the person
bring up new information in each section or do they simply repeat themselves?
6) Did the person proofread and edit so that the assignment is easy to read and
relatively free of typographical errors?