Bibliography & Annotations

Working Bibliography and Annotations

Working Bibliography

Your working bibliography is a running list of any sources with which you think you will need to familiarize yourself in order to complete your project. As you gather bibliography, try to find a method that works best for you: note cards, loose-leaf paper, note books, e-mail messages from electronic bibliographic sources, print-outs of downloaded bibliography from electronic sources, post-it notes--whatever permutations and combinations of these and other techniques work for you. This stage may be handwritten.

The final working bibliography you submit with your project must be typed according to MLA form, properly arranged in some kind of logical order to indicate the bibliographic, primary, secondary, collateral, and theoretical texts you think you need to read or consult in your study. Use section headings to indicate the texts from each category of research you need to investigate.

Generally, the most successful research projects I've seen in this course have had final, typed working bibliographies of about 8 pages. Please see the description of the research project and self-assessment criteria for a more detailed account of what quality of work constitutes each grade range. The working bibliography must reflect careful thought and selection, not just random scatter-shot listing or "cannibalizing" of other scholar's bibliographies. You will, of course, find other people's bibliographies helpful, but you will also have to consult indexes and bibliographic sources to gather your own bibliography tailored precisely to your own study.

Gathering the Bibliography

If you are researching a literary text or author, your first step should be to do a thorough MLA search, using the MLA Bibliography on Ovid in McConnel Library, to analyze everything that has been written about your subject. You can download and print selected bibliography entries as you do your MLA Bibliography search. To avoid reinventing the wheel, be sure you find out what has already been done on your subject by doing an MLA search. A review of all MLA entries will help you begin analyzing the state of the scholarship on your subject, even though you cannot possibly read all the entries.

Your bibliography should offer a generous listing of each of the areas of research you need to investigate in order to ask and answer the kinds of questions you are interested in: all primary sources (literary or primary theoretical texts by the authors under study); all secondary criticism (articles or books about your primary texts--the MLA Bibliography is the tool to use for this); texts from all collateral areas of research necessary to complete your study (contextual historical, political, philosophical, theological, cultural, scientific, psychoanalytic studies, etc.); any literary theory pertinent to your study.

Initially you will be much less focused as you gather this bibliography than when you begin to get a sharper sense of the questions you will ask, leading to your final question and an hypothesis about that question. As you get more focused in your thinking, you can add more texts to your working bibliography to reflect the refinement in your thinking. You will probably find yourself adding items to your working bibliography throughout your project.

Annotations

Your annotations include all your notes on all the texts that you are able to consult during your project. I will collect and evaluate all such notes. As you research, try to develop a method that works best for you (handouts on annotated bibliography suggest a couple of options). These may be handwritten or you may wish to use a word processor, especially if you own a laptop that you can bring to the library. You may annotate primary as well as secondary texts and texts from each of the collateral and theoretical areas of research you investigate. Your notes should reflect careful reading and analysis of each text.

I strongly suggest that some of your notes use freewriting in which you ruminate on how the text you are examining may be of some use to your project, or on how this text has some bearing on your question or hypothesis. Your freewriting annotations could also be used simply to make sense out of what you are reading. The more of this kind of writing you do in order to "dialogue" with yourself and the books you read, the more likely you will be to arrive at a creative synthesis of all the reading you're doing, I believe. Research can lead you into an impassible bog of other people's ideas. The periodic freewriting you do can help you keep your own thinking fresh and can help you "invent" your own, new ideas out of the old, often by synthesizing them in an original way. You may not invent anything "new under the sun," but you will be able to put things together in new ways, to invent your own creative synthesis.

Generally, the A-level projects I've seen have annotated about 30 sources (and read many others that the writer chose not to annotate because they ended up not being of any use to the project). The sources you choose to annotate should be over and above those you looked at and decided were not of any use at all and so you rejected.

Please see description of the research project and the criteria for self-assessment for more detailed information on how to contract for a grade and what quality of work constitutes each grade range.

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