This week’s class was mainly about research and referencing. A lot of it was quite practical, and honestly a bit overwhelming at first.
We talked about how sources should be used in writing. Not just books and articles, but also images and visual material. I didn’t really think about images as something that also needs referencing before, especially film stills or animation frames. It made me realise that visual research needs to be treated more carefully.
Another thing that came up was citation and paraphrasing. It was clear that simply repeating what an author says does not really count as analysis. The idea is to use sources to support what I want to argue, not to let them speak for me. This is something I still need to practice, because it’s easy to rely too much on other people’s words.
We also looked at literature reviews. Instead of listing texts one by one, the focus was on grouping them by themes or ideas. This made more sense to me, especially for my own topic, because some texts talk about similar issues from different angles.
After this class, I started to see research as something more structured. It’s not just about collecting material, but about deciding what is actually useful and how it fits into the overall direction of the project.