Learning Goals
- Familiarize yourself with the main parts of an academic article and create a précis of one of an article.
- Use digital tools to get information about the author’s academic conversation partners
- Explore the different ways that Coggle allows you to visualize trends in academic conversations or networks.
- Understand how scholars in American Jewish History build arguments by placing themselves in a conversation with earlier scholarship.
Time Required:
One 3-hour block or two 80-minute class sessions.
Items Needed:
- Each students has a computer with internet access.
- Access to Coggle (free).
- Access to or pdfs of the 3-4 required articles. Access to Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Academic Journal Article in 12 Weeks (2nd edition), or pdfs of the following pages: 175, 182, 185
Assignment
Today [or this week] you will build a diagram of an academic conversation/network.
Steps
1. During the first half of class you will work in a team of 3-4 people and write a précis of one of the following articles:
- Moore, Deborah Dash. “Signposts: Reflections on Articles from the Journal’s Archive How a Kosher Meat Boycott brought Jewish Women’s History into the Mainstream: A Historical Appreciation.” American Jewish History 99, no. 1 (2015): 79-91. doi:10.1353/ajh.2015.0001.
- Hyman, Paula E. “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902.” American Jewish History 70, no. 1 (1980): 91-105. www.jstor.org/stable/23881992.
- Liebman, Seymour B. “The Jews of Colonial Mexico.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 43, no. 1 (1963): 95-108. doi:10.2307/2510438.
- Ronnie Perelis. “Dialectics of Travel: Reading the Journey in Antonio De Montezinos’s Relación (1644).” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) 33, no. 1 (2014): 13-34. doi:10.5325/studamerjewilite.33.1.0013.
[PLEASE NOTE you can substitute four articles you are assigning anyway or that you think form an interesting conversation with one another]:
Your précis should include two paragraphs and be about 1 page (single spaced) in length.
The first paragraph of the précis should include
- Common Ground [“Literature Review”]: what people have said before
- But: what did they miss? How will this article add to the conversation? What type of entry point is this? (See Belcher p. 175 for the three main types)
- So What: what is the significance of the article’s contribution?
- Thesis: what did the author argue?
Here is a handout that explains the four parts of the academic argument more, or you can watch this video:
The second paragraph of the précis should include the main strengths and weaknesses of the author’s argument.
Understanding how they place themselves in a conversation with other scholars can help you determine some of these strengths and weaknesses. This is your chance to express your opinion about what you have read and to show off your analytical abilities. In your response you might consider some of the following. Remember to use specifics to back your claims:
- What did you find particularly interesting or useful about the critique?
- Is the author’s argument logically sound?
- Did the author use evidence persuasively to support this argument?
- Is there any information or evidence that you wish had been included in the article that wasn’t there?
- Did the author include all four parts of the academic argument (common ground, but, so what, thesis)? If not, this is a problem.
- What academic conversations they are contributing to? What do the authorities they cite reveal about the author’s values?
Much of the rest of this assignment will help you understand what academic conversations the author is part of and the author’s values.
The first place to get started on this is by analyzing the bibliography or footnotes. Fill out Wendy Belcher’s Citation Evaluation Form (p. 182)
Now annotate the bibliography/works cited by
- Crossing out the primary texts
- Highlighting all of the scholars (vs. primary texts) quoted by name in the article
- Indicating next to each scholar’s name in the works cited how many times they were cited (parenthetically or in foot or endnotes) even if their name wasn’t mentioned in the text of the article
- Circle the five most cited conversation partners. Note for yourself if the works cited are journal articles or from books.
- Email your précis and a brief synopsis of what you discovered about the author’s citation practices to your teacher OR post it on a page in your online portfolio. It is fine if your précis is the same as that of other members of your group, but you will want to list them as co-authors and put in links to their pages (or cc’ them on the email).
2. During the second half of class (or the second class session), you will learn how to use digital tools that can help you further analyze and visualize academic conversations [20-30 minutes]
Using the same article as before, use the following digital tools to dig deeper into the academic conversations of which the author partakes (you may want to delegate these to different people in your group):
i. Investigate Your Author and their 5 most cited conversation partners by looking them up in https://academictree.org
Run the works cited through the Gender Balance Assessment Tool (GBAT). If you have time, you may also want to manually do the Belcher Citation Values Form for the article (p. 185). How do the results compare?
ii. Investigate the Journal:
what is the journal’s H-index? What are they known for?
Look at the table of contents for the five years surrounding when the article was published (year published + w years before + two years after) what is the gender ratio for authors?
Look up the most cited articles for this journal by going to the Web of Science (despite the name it includes humanities journals).
Click on “Cited Reference Search” tab.
In the “Cited Work” box, enter the journal abbreviation for a specific journal title. Use the journal abbreviation list, linked below the search box (View abbreviation list), to find the correct abbreviation of the journal name you are searching.
Example: enter SCAND J SOC WELFARE for Scandinavian Journal of Social Welfare
Click on the “Search” button. Once the results are posted, click on “Select All” and then on “Finish Search.”
Sort the results by clicking the down arrow next to “Citing Articles”
The results number should indicate how many articles in Web of Science cited the journal. Please note: The citation count will only include the number of times the publication was cited by specific articles from the journals that Web of Science covers. Web of Science does not count citations from every journal published around the world, nor does it count citations from books, conference proceedings, dissertations/theses, patents, technical reports or other types of publications.
Which articles are the most cited in the journal and how many times were they cited? How does your article compare? What rank is it out of the total number of articles cited at least once?
iii. Investigate the Article and Author’s Impact by looking it up in Google Scholar. Who has cited the article and also been the most times themselves? Who cites the works that cite the article?
iv. Discuss with the people in your group the most interesting trends you found. Decide what patterns you would like to map.
3. [40-50 minutes] Create a Coggle network to help others visualize the conversations had in the article.
i. Go to Coggle and create a free “Personal” account.
ii. Create a mind map that illuminates the academic conversations taking place in your article or around it. You should at least include the five most cited secondary works in your article and the top five works that cite your article. Make sure that your links go in the appropriate direction (or are at least consistent).
iii. Right click on any item to Add value to your mind map by changing the colors or size of the labels to indicate things such as gender, ethnicity, academic genealogy, country of origin, or number of citations. If you are interested in the impact of journals on citation patterns, add items or branches for the journal and the other articles that appear.
iv. 10 minutes before we leave. Save your work! Embed your coggle into your WordPress portfolio and create a link to your project. Add 3-4 sentences to your WordPress page explaining what your Coggle demonstrates and what it adds to your previous precis. Make sure to include a link to the article itself. [NOTE: if you don’t have students creating a WordPress portfolio, you can have them do this last step on a Moodle, your LMS, or by emailing you a link and the information]
Resources