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Writing With Substance: You Can Haz it! SRSLY!

Using Research Databases to Find Something to Read

Here are three examples of how we can use our library databases to find information on a broad topic.

In the first of them, I show you where to find Education Full Text and how to conduct and narrow a simple search.

I also show you one of the items that is not available online and tell you how to cope with the very disheartening news that you have to visit the library itself occasionally. (But it's fine! Nice, even. You might even like it, and if you don't, perhaps you can console yourself with a muffin on the way out. Or, if you really can not get to the library, we have this wonderful service, which will deliver you a PDF file for something we own in print journals.)

In the second, I show you examples of the items you'll find in adjacent databases and how easy it is to order an item that is only available through Interlibrary Loan.

In the third, I show you examples of what small adjustments in your searches--and searching in a different database (in this case JSTOR)--can enable.

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Finding Substance Through History In literary studies, the broad discipline to which I owe my training, we often repeat Fredric Jameson's instruction to "Always historicize!" Whether you feel equipped to live out this command on the grounds Jameson articulates in his book The Political Unconscious (he describes it therein as a "slogan") I can think of at least one good reason to engage with the past that doesn't involve being "destined to repeat it."

Put briefly, learning about the history of something--whether it's a cultural phenomenon or political issue or subject of personal interest––is, to my mind, the surest way to write with substance. When you engage with the past, you can gain a deeper sense of how something works in its current manifestations. Everything has a past.

I should be clear here in noting that I don't mean that history itself is a monolith, or that it ever works in a clear, linear fashion; the past does not lead neatly into the present and future, and historians and other scholars who help us construct what has transpired do not always agree upon the details. Moreover, if you're thinking that we always need to contextualize what's wrong now with how bad it used to be, stop right there. We shouldn't think the past was always worse, nor should we assume it was always better. In fact, writing with substance requires that you not only look at what something was like in the past, but also ask questions about the perspectives from which those accounts are written. You may conclude that a current version of something is superior to previous days, but you must always contextualize that assessment by asking "superior for whom?" As you can see from these apparent digressions, grappling with the messiness of it all is the means by which we can find the substance for our writing.

The essay I mentioned in your Assignment 1, Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations," offers one example of how historical research can provide substance for what we write and support for ideas we have about the present and future.

The search techniques I showed you in the video on using JSTOR afford another example of how you can gain insight into the way our current thinking about privacy and data online is indebted to long-standing interests in privacy, even if the objects and contexts of these inquiries have shifted over time.

You and I will discuss together how historical research can

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