When Journalism Reminds Me of University
This may be one of the few times where I get to write a news story and be totally nostalgic of University all at the same time. I just finished writing this story on the Cambridge study on DRM. I really hope no one get’s the impression that the researchers actually concluded that DRM makes us pirates given that, after reading through the researchers conslusions, I found no such observations. This conclusion was mainly Ars Technica’s conclusions that I’ve personally noticed.
Still, it’s not that often when I’m reminded of the endless number of essays I have to write for University. That need for pagination (albeit, a bit of a retro-fitted style that only loosely resembles MLA - it’s freaking internet journalism after all, there’s no real universal citation style for web journalism!) while quoting from a research paper was mainly what did it for me. Though I usually go through more than three per paper that are actually about 20-40 pages long. Still, I admittedly was more comfortable with researching this story than usual because I’ve gotten formal training to research this. I’m not a straight ‘A’ student, but I do happen to know a thing or two about researching these things.
For those who haven’t had to research like me, you might be wondering how I managed to read through over 100 pages in, like, two days. Well, the answer is simple - I didn’t. I actually did what virtually every English major student I’m aware of has done to make it through final essays - speed research. Why do students resort to speed researching? The answer is simple - we are given effectively a few weeks (even though assignments are handed out months in advance, professors tend to give you critical information about the final project closer to the due date, thus defeating the purpose of handing them out so early)
What I personally do when I have to go through a library to find information is, of course, learn how to figure out where the heck the required books are, but more importantly, when I do find those books, is go through the table of contents. Unless you can go through a whole (dry) novel in a day, there’s absolutely no way you can read 7 or 8 400 page books in a week or two. So, table of contents is most likely your first line of attack. When you find something in that table of contents that seems relevant, go to that section of the book and read the first few sentences. If it seems related, keep going, if it’s not, go to the next paragraph. If the first few paragraphs seem irrelevant, then chances are, the whole chapter isn’t going to be helpful.
You get an advantage on digital sources with the godsend feature of a word search. This makes research so much easier, faster and accurate all at the same time (provided you have a little bit of persistence) Can you miss something in this? Probably, but it beats going through line-by-line and reading the whole thing - an endeavor that would take me probably almost a month to do.
Anyway, it was kind of cool in a way to be reminded of the old ivory towers - even though those ivory towers provided me with quite a lot of stress.