Digital Paper

Andrew Abbott , a master teacher, has often taught a course on how to acquire research skills and how to use them in library work and on the internet.  That course, like this book, has immediate appeal across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.  His readers, like his students, are often frustrated by an information world where everything is equally accessible and equally inviting.  They hunger for a vision of excellence in research, and for skills and rules that enable them to tell wheat from chaff.  Here’s the perfect how-to book.  Throughout, Abbott argues that the core of library/digital research is not finding things but figuring out what to look for (also, figuring out what to ignore).  Reading it will give students (and any researcher) a way into the many activities involved in research, but, more importantly, it will give them a way to manage those activities:  Abbott says it’s all about project management.  The chapters take up the elements of how to do research projects: how to design them, control them, shift them in midstream, decide what to look for, and how to tell good work from junk when you don’t know anything about a field, and, as vital as any of the elements, how to turn an amorphous mass of research material into an effective paper or thesis.  He brings in real-life examples from his own experiences and those of his students throughout.  Along the way, students will learn why it is that good scholars shift back and forth between physical and electronic tools all the time, and they will see how the core skills of research--rigor, discipline, care, and imagination--can be brought to focus on the ultimate research skill (or "intuition”), which consists of knowing, when you have randomly found something, whether or not you ought to have wanted to look for it.