Get background information and Gather sources

Choose and Define Your Topic

Spend some time thinking about how to formulate a reasonable topic from an area of general interest. Be sure you understand the assignment before you begin. If you have any doubts, write down what you think you need to do and discuss it with your instructor to confirm that you're on target.

Get Background Information

Become familiar with the ideas, major concepts and basic vocabulary in your chosen research area. Such background knowledge places your topic in a wider context, deepens your understanding and helps you feel more comfortable with it.
• Encyclopedias are a great place to get an overview of a topic that is new to you.
Encyclopedias often identify narrower areas within the broad subject, which may suggest a focus for your research. Many encyclopedia article entries also provide a list of references that can help you locate further, more in-depth and scholarly information sources.
• Work from general to specific.
If a general encyclopedia doesn't provide enough background information, continue your research with focused subject encyclopedias.
• Subject dictionaries can help define any unfamiliar words and specialized terminology when researching a new subject in specific disciplines.

Gather sources

Sources are generally categorized as being either records of what happened (primary), or reports and commentary compiled after the fact (secondary).
Primary sources include eyewitness accounts published in newspapers, thoughts and feelings recorded in diaries and letters, documented interviews or oral histories, and data collected in the census.

• Published material by prominent people, such as The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln or The Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., are also considered primary material.
Secondary sources offer commentary written about events "after the fact." Most published information (such as standard books and articles) falls into the secondary source category.
• Additional sources of information may complement what you find in books and articles, and include biographical sources, book reviews, statistics, geographical sources, essays, government publications and video documentaries. Statistical, geographical and other factual materials can really help to "make your case" by substantiating your points and arguments.

Tips for finding sources:

• During your research, pursue any useful footnotes, references, subject headings and keywords you find along the way. A good bibliography will suggest additional sources; conducting a search using the subject headings and keywords from one helpful item may lead you to others.
• Search for other works written by the same author(s). Scholars often become experts in a field and continue publishing on that topic.
• Look at the book shelves nearby for related works as you gather your information. Selective browsing often reveals materials that your systematic searches may have missed.
• Evaluate your source material at every point during the research process. Make sure that it adequately addresses your topic.

http://www.unca.edu/

Choose and define a topic

Process Summary

Research Strategy - checklist

1.Think of keywords or concepts to define your topic.

2.Find background information by looking up concepts in dictionaries, encyclopaedias, bibliographies, catalogues, etc.

3.Searc by Author, Title, Keyword(s), and Subjects for books, journals, audio-visual materials, exhibition catalogues, theses, government documents.

4.Search Art-related Indexes & Databases for appropriate journal articles.

5.Search for journal articles in interdisciplinary databases related to your topic.

6Analyze, and evaluate your sources, write and edit your paper, and not least, document your sources as you find them in order to compile your bibliography.

What is a Research Strategy?

A plan or scheme by which the activity of searching for and assessing information found is carried out. It gives direction to your efforts, enabling you to conduct research systematically rather than haphazardly, also can help you stay focused, reduce frustration, enhance the quality of your reserch and save your time in the long run.

Research is about discovering new ideas, actively thinking about and working with them. You may use existing information, but should draw your own conclusions, synthesize and integrate your own original ideas into the finished product.

Source_ Book 4

"In "Siteless: 1001 Building Forms," French architect Francois Blanciak surrenders the usual anchors of function and site for an exercise in pure form. His astoundingly imaginative 1,001 designs could challenge architects and engineers for decades." -- ""Santa Fe New Mexican""

This book offers an attempt to free architecture from site and program constraints and to counter the profusion of ever bigger architecture books with ever smaller content.Some may call it the first manifesto of the 21st century, for it lays down a new way to think about architecture. Others may think of it as the last architectural treatise, for it provides a discursive container for ideas that would otherwise be lost. Whatever genre it belongs to, "Siteless" is a new kind of architecture book that seems to have come out of nowhere. Its author, a young French architect practicing in Tokyo, admits he "didn't do this out of reverence toward architecture, but rather out of a profound boredom with the discipline, as a sort of compulsive reaction." What would happen if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site, program, and budget? he asks. The result is a book that is saturated with forms, and as free of words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published.The 1001 building forms in "Siteless" include structural parasites, chain link towers, ball bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housing - and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. "Siteless" presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from.The forms, drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) but from a constant viewing angle, are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order, or end to the series. After setting down 1001 forms in siteless conditions and embryonic stages, Blanciak takes one of the forms and performs a "scale test," showing what happens when one of these fantastic ideas is subjected to the actual constraints of a site in central Tokyo. The book ends by illustrating the potential of these shapes to morph into actual building proportions.

Source_ Book3

In this long-awaited follow-up to the best seller Folding Architecture, Sofia Vyzoviti continues to expand her unique design method which uses folding as a playful means to open up the design process to spontaneity and surprise. This is a funny and inspiring pocket-sized book for design students and professionals who are keen to experiment. It is applicable not only to architecture but many aspects of design.

Source_Book 2

The term "process art" describes a moment of radical, aformal experimentation in postwar American sculpture. Through the medium of drawing, Afterimage revisits process art in terms of the artists who defined the movement and suggests a transitional moment when many of its practitioners anticipated the feminist and postminimalist art of the 1970s. Nancy Grossman's use of language, for example, suggests a kind of material abstraction, and Nancy Holt's earth works and related drawings introduced content into a minimalist vocabulary. The book also explores the drawing as a residual object in works in which the process of making dictates the form of the drawing. Examples include Gordon Matta-Clark's stacked cuttings, Robert Morris' "blind time" drawings, and Sol Lewitt's folded construction drawings. Other works, such as those by Bruce Nauman and Robert Smithson, record a particular approach to body-based and process-oriented sculpture. The book, which accompanies an exhibition, contains an essay by Cornelia H. Butler on the historical ambiguity surrounding process art and one by Pamela M. Lee on temporality in work of the late 1960s. The artists included in the book are William Anastasi, Richard Artschwager, Mel Bochner, Agnes Denes, Nancy Grossman, Robert Grosvenor, Marcia Hafif, Eva Hesse, Nancy Holt, Barry LeVa, Sol Lewitt, Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, Dorothea Rockburne, Alan Saret, Joel Shapiro, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tuttle, and Jack Whitten. Copublished with The Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles. EXHIBITION SCHEDULE: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California April 11-August 22, 1999 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas May-July 2000 Henry Art Gallery Seattle, Washington July-September 2000