Digital Humanities: 9/30/19

Literature Reviews:

         The first of two documents on literature reviews, this document explained the most important aspects to consider. A literature review is based on the idea that you want to summarize the key ideas of an article. That is the simplest explanation, although the document also mentions that you can include synthesis, the reorganization of information, to better serve your purpose or reinterpret the document's data. The document also has much to say on the organization of a literature review, stressing that this is one of the most important aspects of writing one, as the bit on synthesis suggested. Lastly, a focus on the relevance of your sources, how current they are, and how many you need is brought up.

Literature Review Workshop:

          This document had more of a practical direction, as it was more concerned with directing students to create a literature review from two abstracts. As the abstracts were provided, it focused less on the finding of sources and more on the synthesis of information. The document also stressed synthesizing information from databases rather than other online sources like web articles. Databases are obviously preferred when available, but a study may not be as applicable to a topic as recent events. In this case, a news report may be more viable. 

Comments:

          Both documents hold incredibly helpful information when it comes to writing literature reviews. Many students I see coming into the writing center don't even know what a literature review is, and much less how to write one. The idea that writing a lit review is as simple as synthesizing the information from the article and explaining how it contributes to the document being written is almost funny. However, it should be noted that the process of synthesizing/organizing information isn't as simple as it might seem at first.

Questions:

          What might be the hardest part of writing a literature review? Is it, as I feel it should be, the synthesizing of information? 

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