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Hi, one of the best ways to learn about a topic
is to follow a chain of ideas or information as you read.
Let's say you're reading in an online newspaper. In this case we'll use the New York Times
an article in the Science section
titled 'Neanderthals and the Dead'. This article discusses the recent finding
nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton
found in Southern France. It raised the interesting possibility that these
evolution relatives
who born about 50,000 years ago, may have intentionally
buried their dead. So there is a scientific controversy
about whether or not it was an intentional burial or whether it just
ended up there and what might it mean for modern humans
to have this in common: that we bury our dead and that they may have buried their dead.
Some research questions that are starting to emerge are,
what does it mean if it was intentional? Why might this similarity
to our modern culture be significant?
Why do people care about this? What does it mean?
I think that's interesting. We might want to learn more about it.
If you keep reading
or start reading the article - one nice thing about the New York Times
is they link to things throughout.
In the third paragraph there is
a link to the word Reporting
So it's saying "Now an international team of scientists is reporting
that a 13-year re-examination of the burial supports the idea that it was intentional.
So that's really interesting. This controversy is showing up again and people
are coming up
with more evidence, or at least opinions, on whether
or not this burial was intentional. This was a great article
to give us an idea of what's going on. it's easy to read
is newsy and now we can click and see the actual report
Now we're looking at the more technical report written by
you can see thirteen names here the actual people who
believed that it was intentional and wrote about it
This would probably be a really good next thing to read to
figure out why they think what they think, and what the significance may be.
In this case, chaining ideas together is literally as easy as clicking on a link
in a webpage. And that's really nice, and often that will be the case.
But sometimes it won't be.
What if you're reading something in print, like a book,
for example let's look at this passage from the book called
'Moonwalking with Einstein.' by Joshua Foer (pg 22):
He writes about memory. About a scientist
who studied a subject he calls S
who was really remarkable in terms of being able to retain lot of information
so let's read this passage.'Luria would go on to study S
for the next thirty years
and would eventually write a book about him, The Mind Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory,
that has become one of the most enduring classics in the literature of abnormal
psychology. S Could memorize complex mathematical formulas
without knowing any math, Italian poetry without speaking
Italian, and even phrases of gobbledygook. But even more remarkable
than the breadth of material he could commit to memory was the fact that his memories seemed never
never to degrade.' So that's pretty fascinating - someone who could remember thousand of things
forever, basically. Let's say you're interested
interested in memory and how people retain it
, this might be something to look at. In this case, we obviously don't have a link
but luckily, in our library databases we have material about
this scientist and his work.
One database that come to mind is probably one that has been recommended to you quite a bit.
So this is the library homepage: library.usu.edu.
I'm going to suggest a database called
Academic Search Premier. You would just go over to the left under
quick links and choose "Articles and Databases."
And then up here on the left is our everything database - thousands of journals with
with information on various topics from science to pop culture to technology.
If you click on it, it takes you to a page that looks like this.
So this is the database. We need some key terms
and if you think about the passage, two obvious ones
that seem to come up
the name of the scientist, Luria,
and the basic concept we're looking into is memory.
You could mess around with those search terms a bit
but this is what I'm going to start with.
Now I have 44 things
things about Luria and his work on memory.
If you wanted just to see
what Luria wrote himself, his actual publications,
you could go up next to Luria where it says "select a field" and choose "Author."
Now rerun your search.
Now you can see that you have seven results written just by Luria.
So that's one way you can chain information together even if it's not online and you can't easily link.
That was pretty easy and now you have lots of information
chaining these ideas of memory together.
If you have any trouble or need more help, please ask a librarian. There's other databases I'd recommend
one is related to psychology, we could show you how to get there,
it's called PsycInfo. Google Scholar also gets you some results.
Please let us know how we can help you and good luck on your research!