North Seattle Community College North Seattle Community College
Library & Media Services

Research Guide for English 102: Media Images in Popular Culture

Prepared by Elinor Appel
NSCC Librarian (contact info.)

These workshops will help you locate the resources you need for your class.

  • Tuesday: evaluating online resources - types of information
  • Wednesday: library resources - identifying scholarly articles & books; Noodlebib for your annotated bibliography (maybe)

To get help:

Email me, come to the library reference desk, or chat online with a reference librarian.

NSCC Library (this will open in a new window)

 

Image licensed under Creative Commons by arimoore

Keywords

Consider your keywords (search terms) in order to retrieve the results you want.

  • Keyword worksheet
  • When you search, remember to use both broad and narrow search terms: sports advertisements (narrow) advertisements (less narrow); media (broader). The information you are looking for may still be in the content you find. (This is especially true when you are searching the library catalog.)

Websites

Primary or Secondary? Popular or Scholarly?

Web-search tips

  • Limit your search by domain, for instance educational sites:

  • Find a good pathfinder page, and mine its links.This guide to Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in Media Advertising was created by the Department of Communication Studes at the University of Iowa.
  • Always analyze your online source for Authority, Bias, and Currency.
    • Authority: who created the content? Does it reference the sources/authors in statements it makes?
    • Bias: what is the bias, mission, or standpoint of the resource? Is its bias clear?
    • Currency: when was the page last updated? Is the information still relevant?

Analyze this: "Second Life, Second Identity"

Web resource smackdown: you have 10 minutes to search for and evaluate (using your ABC Evaluation Guide) an authoritative, academic web resource addressing how women choose to portray themselves in Second Life. Use the keywords we worked on to do your research.

Submissions:

Articles

Looking for full text secondary sources online? Refer to Finding Articles for tips on how to search ProQuest using keywords and Topics. Again: think about your keywords. Experiment with related terms, for instance: women, gender, female.

  • and – for combining concepts/keywords, will narrow the search: women and advertising
  • or – when you are using related terms, will broaden the search: advertising or media
  • * - when you have related terms with the same stem term: ad* for ad, ads, advertisements, advertising, etc.

Recommended periodical databases:

  • Academic Search Premier - a general database with a range of articles
  • eLibrary Academic - an articles database that includes images, transcripts
  • Ethnic NewsWatch - articles from ethnic and minority publications
  • ProQuest Direct - another general database with a range of articles
  • PsycArticles - full-text scholarly psychology articles

To access these databases from off campus, log in with your Student ID Number and last name.

Books

Books - use these for both background information (typically in reference books) and indepth information (typically in books in the circulating collection)..

Examples of reference books(first floor) useful for your research. We did not look at these in class but reference books are important research tools.

  • Encycopedia of Children, Adolescents, and the Media [Ref HQ 784 .M3 E53 2007]
  • Garland Encyclopedia of World Music [Ref ML 100 G16 1998] - see for example Vol. 3, "Music in Social and Cultural Contexts" for a discussion of masculinity in country music
  • Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film [Ref PN 1993.45 .G65 2007] - see for example Vol. 4, "Violence" for a discussion of violence in film

Some books (circulating collection, second floor) we looked at in class. These may have content related to and supporting your argument.

  • Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood [PN 1995.9 .M46 B56 1994]
  • Big Brother: Reality TV in the 21st Century [PN 1992.8 .R43 B54 2005]
  • Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America [PN 1992. A34 H86 2005]
  • Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wanksters, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America [ML .K58 2006]
  • Youth Online: Identity and Literacy in the Digital Age [HQ 799.2 T56 2007]

Refer to Finding Books for tips on searching the catalog using keywords and subjects. Begin with a Keyword Relevance search:

Then find a title that looks good:

Click on the title to open the record. Check location, call number, and availability.

Locate the subjects in the record . . .

These subject links will lead to more on the same topic. You may need to look at several different book titles in order to collect your related subject headings.

A few final points:

  • Can't find a book on your topic? Consider searching more broadly, then check the index of the book for information related to your topic. (Just because your topic isn't in the title doesn't mean it isn't in the book!)
  • For some topics you will find more information in books, for others it will be more useful to search periodical databases for articles. This is especially true of newer information.

Annotated Bibliographies and Noodlebib

Noodlebib can help you cite your sources correctly and will save all your citations for you formatted for a Works Cited page. Click here for an example of a Noodlebib record.

Additional resources:

And two more online guides to writing an annotated bibliography: