Hello and welcome back to my channel, my name's Lucy and I'm a PhD student at the University
of
Birmingham and today I'm going to show you, and talk you through, how I make notes for
my PhD.
How I do my research and makes you take you from first discovering an article all the
the way through to outlining my first chapter.
So I hope you enjoy this!
So the first thing I do when
I find an article I'm interested in, for example this one on hegemonic masculinity by R.W.
Connell
and James W Messerschmitt is I put it into this software called Zotero, I think that's
how you
pronounce it.
So the reason I do this is because basically it means I don't have to worry later
on about finding the right the bibliographic information or making sure I've cited something
correctly.
You can download this.
I've actually created a library called Queer Romances and then as you can
see I've split it up into Misc, Primary Texts, Queer Theory, Romance Scholarship and the
reason
I've done that is just so that when I'm looking through, I can kind of, more easily find things
because those are, kind of, the three I suppose main categories and then misc is obviously
anything that doesn't fit into those categories.
So this one on Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept I'm going to put in Queer Theory.
So it is a journal article.
So the title Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept and it's obviously by Connell,
R.W.
and then I need to add another author Messerschmidt, James W. It was published by the Gender and
Society Volume so that
is it's publication.
Gender and Society Volume number 19, I can see that down here in this section.
Issue number 6.
and it is pages 829 - 869.
The date was,
I don't tend to put the month I just put the year.
I don't know if that's correct,
but I've never seen a bibliography that puts the months normally they just ask for the
year, so I keep a record
of the year.
If I need the month for whatever reason I can always go back and have a look.
And then I
And then I just put in the DOI, which I normally try and copy if it let's because I don't want
to get things wrong
but sometimes, depending on where you're getting the information you can't always copy it.
I think in
this case I can.
Okay, so that is all loaded into Zotero.
So the next step I do is I have a word document with all my notes in it.
Now this document is already 166 pages and over 62 thousand words, so it is very long
and that is an issue.
Obviously control+Find is really great.
So although I make my notes here I will show you something later that I do to kind of help
me more easily see what I've taken notes on see what's useful.
But for now we're just going to put in a title.
I will probably just call this, and I always bold my titles so again I can
more easily see them as I'm scrolling through.
Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.
I don't always copy the title exactly word for word and I'll show you why in a minute
but in this case because it's short enough I will and I'll just put by Connell and Messerschmitt
and then what I actually do is I go to my Zotero tab on Word.
I add a citation and I add the citation directly in here just a general one and that means
that I know exactly what that article's referring to so I don't have to be exact with what I've
called it because I've got the notes at the bottom I've got Zotero to keep track of everything.
So then I go back to the article and I just start making notes on it.
So I don't do any kind of highlighting, I know some people do.
Let's have a look through here and see we can find an interesting quote.
So this article is basically looking at the concept of hegemonic masculinity, which Connell
thought up and basically now with help Messerschmidt they are trying to modernize the concept because
it has only been a few years since they first created it they're talking about how it's
been adopted by a lot of people but they think it needs to be rethought to bring it into
the contemporary period.
I don't feel the need to make notes on any of that because while it's obviously context
for the article it isn't something I'm gonna quote so while it's interesting information
and I understand why they've put it in the article I don't personally feel the need to
make notes of any of that.
You might find this with some articles, you're not necessarily going to take notes on every
single page because some of it will be background information that either you'll already know
or you find interesting and is useful to know but isn't worthy of note-taking.
So this is a section I think is quite interesting, so this is one the criticism,
so: 'the concept of masculinity is criticised for being framed within a heternormative conception
of gender that
essentializes male-female difference and ignores difference and exclusion within the gender
categories'
So all I do is I've written out the quote use
spell check to make any changes and then I just need to find the page number.
So this is on page 836 and that is how I would write down a quote.
Now if that was a quote that had been quoted by someone else I would also note down who
it quoted it and I would add it or note it in another document I have.
So I have a whole scholarship to read document.
We can see that Whitehead 2002 has been quoted, if I'd find that an interesting quote I would
have been like Oh Whitehead is someone to check, I'd have made a note of it and then
at the end of the article, always check the bibliographies of articles you read or books.
Particularly if they've been very useful because often they will quote other people or reference
other people that could also be interesting to your project.
You can see that this article alone has a good four or five pages of references so what
I would do is I would go to 'White' because that's the one I'm interested in and we can
see here Whitehead was quoted.
In 2002 Whitehead they got that quote from Man & Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions.
so I'm like oh that could be an interesting book for me to look at considering
I'm looking at hegemonic masculinity and how it has been queered and how it's been portrayed
in queer romance novels.
so what I would then do is I would add this to the list of scholarship that I want to
read.
you may have noticed as this document So let's just take that exact quotation
So Whitehead, S.M. 2002.
Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions, Cambridge, UK: Polity
You may have noticed this document is color coded and I basically have a color coded system
where I'll say it's not
at UoB.
So it's not available at the University I study at so I'll
either have to do an interlibrary loa or potentially get it privately.
Is it an online work?
Meaning can I, kind of, get access to really easily.
Have I already downloaded it?
So sometimes when there online works I will then go and download them and I save them
in a file in my computer.
So I have a whole secondary sources and again it's split up into queer scholarship and romance
scholarship.
This is my romance scholarship and then the ones I've read I put in there, so I keep them
in case I want to refer back to them but just separate them out so I don't get overloaded.
Blue is for library books so that lets me know that it is at my library and this kind
of darker almost blacky-blue is I already own it.
So those have books I own, maybe I want to reread them, maybe I just hadn't noticed there
was something interesting.
So some of these I do already own.
Not many of them because most of the ones I already owned I have read, but sometimes
something pops up and maybe I do need to reread that article, I need to reread that book.
I mean it'd be quite easy to find out where this is from.
So I copy the name I go to UoB library that's always the first place I start.
So I can see straight away that this is a book, it looks like it is only available as
a physical book because normally the book and ebook will pop up quite near each other.
So then I know that a) I can color code this as that blue color and
then another step I'm doing at the moment is I am actually creating a list of books
that I don't have access to due to the library being closed at the moment.
So I've called it my coronavirus list, which is very dramatic but I just put
in Men and Masculinities.
I don't bother putting the title like the full title or the full name and then all I
do is I put the library code and this is basically so that when I can get access to library again
I can just go in with this list and grab all the books that are going to be useful to me.
So those are kind of the first steps I go through when I'm taking notes, so I take my
notes I look through the bibliography and then I cross-reference the bibliography with
scholarship to read.
Sometimes I will already have stuff, so I'll note, I'll be like 'oh yeah
okay that's already on my scholarship to read' and then I find out where it is from.
If it's a physical text I add it to that list if it's
one I can download instantly I do that, but obviously I would make normal notes in this
but I'm just gonna speed it up for this process.
So once I finish making notes what I would do is within this document, within this Word
document I actually then for each book or article or documentary that I quote stuff
from I create at 'My Notes' section for and this is my notes on what I've just read.
So as well as having direct quotes, which are obviously
super useful when you come to do your writing.
I want to sometimes make notes on what I've just read.
So I'm not as good doing this, I'm not gonna lie.
It kind of comes in waves, but if we go up to...
Okay so here I've got notes!
So this is an article 'Queers Read This!
LGBTQ Literature Now' and I've just made some notes on it, so I briefly summarize what they're
talking about maybe we pick out any like really interesting things.
I found some interesting stuff and it looks like I've mainly highlighted articles that
I think will be interesting for me to look at but ultimately I've decided this isn't
very useful.
Now obviously sometimes that will be all I do with an article, but then is I have a document
here called PhD research and I put it into useful and not useful.
So I have useful misc, useful romance scholarship, useful queer theory and I have not useful
and I literally just put a little thing so I will know what I'm talking about and then
I add my notes.
So can you see if I hover over this I've put why I find it useful.
A mindmap is basically just a quick way for me to see a glance 'oh I found Compulsory
Heterosexuality by Rich useful' and then I'm like 'Oh this is the notes I took on it',
so that when I'm writing a section I don't have to scroll through that 166 page Word
document.
I'd just have to look at this and then I can control find on this Word document Rich.
So I found the article straightway I can look at my notes, I can look at like the quotes
I made, I can even look at then the notes I made on the quotes and it basically just
helps me keep track of everything.
Because you're gonna read so much for your PhD research, especially if you're doing like
an English Literature, History of, Politics a humanities one where there's a lot of reading.
You need a quick-fire way to look it up because you're not going to hold all that information
in your head.
If I find a piece of work particularly useful, so this was Trans* by Jack Halberstam, they
have arguably written one of the most seminal works on transgender studies, which is a topic
I'm looking at because I'm looking at how transgender bodies/ characters have been portrayed
in queer romances.
That is a very important piece of work for me, so I made a mind map just on that piece
of text.
So again when I'm coming to write on that topic I can instantly look at this and clearly
see 'okay in this book they discuss the history of trans as a word of identity, the transgenerational
experience, other trans scholarship and what that's saying and then the history of transexuality'.
So it's just a quick way for me to look at it; I've got quotes in here, I've got some
my own comments and I've done this for a few things.
I've also done this for Bodies That Matter, kind of picking up the key themes that they
looked at that I thought were relevant to my research.
I like using this software because, this is the SimpleLite
software, because basically I just - if I had to hand draw these mind maps they'd get
so messy and it would drive me crazy but whereas this I can move stuff around and I can change
things if I think it looks bad.
Once I've started to get a body of scholarship together, and now them a little bit further
on in the process, what I started doing is I have mindmaps
for each of my chapters.
And this is my mindmap on the queer body, as you can see it's quite large and it's not
finished yet.
But here I've basically pulled together all the sources that I think relate to this topic
in some way or are useful for this topic in some way and then I tried to just put the
three key points because I didn't want it to get overloaded.
I broke the rules a little bit here, but in general I've tried to keep o three key points
and these I've tried to make it so these aren't quotes.
Some of them are, but I've tried to keep it two more my thoughts or how I'm engaging with
it.
These are the ways I can see, when I come to start writing a chapter what are the topics
that could be used or what are the things that I need to - the key critics what are
they saying?
What area's am I missing?
This has actually helped me again put together a outline!
So this is my queer body chapter outline and on here you can see I've got introduction,
topics and sections I want to talk about, I've got the key scholarship I think for that
section.
So a lot of these ones in the instruction are kind of the key text that will help define
this as a topic and then I go into my section.
So I'm going to do a section on queer hegemonic masculinity, which we've seen here and these
are the three topics I want to cover.
This is the kind of scholarship and the I've got genre observations.
So this is things I picked up from my secondary reading that I think could relate back to
this topic and could be engage with in this scholarship.
So I hope that has helped people as you can see there is a lot of different steps and
obviously those don't all happen at once and they are things I've learned and built up
over time.
But I would say the key takeaways I find is using Zotero to keep my bibliography and citations
in track, colour-coding things, I think it's really important whenever you find scholarship
to see how easy you can access that scholarship and just keep a note of everything because
you'll think you'll remember but you won't and then also of course I find mindmaps super
helpful because I love things kind of coded, I love things where visually I can see it.
So I use mindmaps a lot to help me keep track of work, but I also like the
big long Word document obviously for the details.
So
that when I need quotes I don't have a limit on the quotes I can use, but yeah that's obviously
just how I do it, everyone will do it slightly differently.
Let me know how you do it down in the comments and as always give this a like and a subscribe
and I'll see you next Sunday.
Byyyeee!