Critical Reflection 4

      One goal that I chose to examine was reading. Part of this goal is to understand data, identify controlling idea of a text, grapple with arguments, paraphrase and summarize sources, and analyze the content of an argument. I feel that when writing my annotated bibliography, I succeeded in understanding my articles and paraphrasing their content along with evaluating if it was a good source to use for my research paper. It took me a while to read the articles and pick out what the main arguments were and how can they help me develop my research question, but soon I picked how to precisely read an article and take accurate notes. Unfortunately, it took me a while to gain this skill and my first annotated bibliography suffered because of it. My first bibliography draft was much too lengthy and didn't get to the main points of the article, it had a lot of extra fluff in it that wasn't really needed. For my next annotated bibliography, I found it easier to pick out what was useful and to summarize the article precisely. Understanding and analyzing my articles has really helped me decide what will be useful for my paper and what takes away from the overall quality of my paper. I started off with ordering a large amount of books and articles off the library website and narrowed it down to a few sources that could really help shape my research question and thesis statement. I made sure to read all of the articles and take notes along with flagging certain passages that I found useful or interesting and then from there I had to decide what articles would help and which ones would harm.
       A second goal I worked towards was writing. Writing involves identifying and developing a topic to research, constructing a logical argument, identifying refute counterarguments, distinguishing between reporting on or regurgitating information and taking a position, synthesizing and integrating source material, and supporting a thesis using credible and accurate source material. When I first started this assignment, my research topic was all over the place. I knew that I wanted to research mental institutions, but I didn't know what else I would look into for my paper. I then found a story of a female journalist who faked lunacy to see how insane asylums were like, and her story has really fueled and guided me into what my current draft is now. My very first research proposal only focused on women journalists faking lunacy, but now my paper has changed to look at why there was such a rise of the Victorian madwoman and how they were treated by caretakers and by society. My research question has taken a huge turn, but I still find it difficult to choose a side on my topic. I feel as if there is really no way to choose a side, either you agree with putting innocent women in insane asylums or you don't, and this has really frustrated me when writing my paper. I'm hoping that after I get my current draft back, my professor can help me figure out what argument I should take and how to incorporate it in my paper. Recently, I have started working towards developing a sound thesis, something that seemed so much easier in high school, but is now proving to be very difficult for me. I liked my thesis and still do, but my peers seemed to think it was confusing and non relevant. I have started trying to  change my thesis and make it more precise, it needs to get to the point of what my paper is about, not just some jumbled nonsense to end my introduction.
     The last goal I chose to achieve was processes. This involves demonstrating a command of multiple drafts and completing a successful text, developing strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading, understanding the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes, critiquing their own and other's works, and learning to balance the advantages of relying on others with the responsibility of doing their part. I feel that I have achieved this goal by writing many drafts of my research paper and taking into account my professor's critiques and my peer's critiques. I have always made sure to edit my paper and listen to what others think would be better because the advice of my peers and professor really matter. If they don't like the paper, chances are many others won't like the paper too. I have also learned better peer editing skills in this class by going to my conferences. At first I was hesitant to give others my opinion, but after I while I felt confident in helping others with their paper and bouncing ideas off of them to improve their writing. I have also found that conferences have really led me critique and edit my own paper. I now know what to look for when it involves writing and this has helped me look for that or the absence of that in my paper. Lastly, I have realized that I cannot take every little criticism and fix it in my paper. When writing my current draft, I took much of the criticism I received into account and tried to fix it, but I didn't take everything into account because after all, it is my paper and if I don't agree with some of the critiques, I am not going to change my paper for someone else.

Critical Reflection 3

For my primary research I read the book called Ten Days in a Madhouse by Nellie Bly. The book is all of her accounts while faking lunacy and getting committed into an insane asylum during the 19th century and mentions a great deal of how women were treated back then and reasons as to why no one believed them when they were actually sane. I read the book and took notes by chapter, only jotting down things that described how women were treated, not what she ate for food everyday. Nellie Bly's book and one of the books I read for secondary research called The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter had a lot of the same concepts when it came to looking at how women were viewed during the 19th century. Although Nellie's book didn't explain why there was such a rise of the Victorian madwoman, it stated why each woman Nellie talked to was committed, and most were either cases where the woman didn't know English and couldn't properly communicate or her husband got sick of her and sent her away. This will help me to answer my research question of why was there such a rise in the Victorian madwoman during the 19th century. My primary and secondary research had a lot of the same concepts, like mistreatment of women in insane asylums and how women were viewed as hysterics and why. For structuring my research paper, I plan to look up some more work about the psychological and scientific background to madness in the mind and will most likely read articles by Freud on this. I think when writing my paper, I will start off with explaining Nellie's story and then go into the actual facts about the rise of the Victorian madwoman, referencing to Nellie's account whenever possible.

Annotated Bibliography Feedback

Overall I received good feedback for my annotated bibliography and my professor could see how my research question was evolving and changing by the sources I had used and the articles I had read. I was told that I need to look into the notion of hysteria and its rise as a scientific diagnosis and field of study. My professor recommended looking into some of Freud's work and the feminist critics of Freud to maybe understand the notion of hysteria. One of the source that I used followed a girl's journey in an insane asylum for twenty-eight years. My professor said that it was more along the lines of a primary source and could be used for cultural analysis to look at Victorian gender norms and expectations for women during the 19th century. After getting my feedback I definitely think I will need to do more secondary research and look into the scientific theory behind why there was a rise of the Victorian madwoman. I plan on using scientific journals and medical journals to look at the diagnosis of hysteria and to also look at Freud's work to understand his thoughts on the subject. 

Primary Research

For this research project I decided to do cultural analysis for my primary research. I initially thought I would visit a mental institution about an hour away and interview the director there,but the task seemed almost impossible because there was no way to contact the director to schedule a meeting and I would have to be cleared as a visitor, a process that would take too long for this project. Also, I have shifted my research question to look at the rise of the Victorian madwoman and a modern day mental institution might not have a lot of information on this subject. From the start of my research, I have looked into Nellie Bly, the reporter who faked lunacy to see how conditions at asylums really were and later wrote a book titled, Ten Days In a Madhouse. After much digging around on the Internet and looking at online libraries, I finally found the book and decided to use it as cultural analysis for my primary research. I chose her book because she was put in an insane asylum during the time of the rise of the Victorian madwoman and she had great accounts of how women were actually treated at these asylums. I have already done some secondary research on the treatment of women in mental institutions in the 19th century, but didn't find as much information as I had hoped. After reading Nellie's book, I found out a lot more about the horrors found in these institution and plan to use them to explain how women were treated. I also plan on using Nellie's accounts of how women, especially foreign women, were put in asylums because of the language barrier or they were just too poor to function normally in society. This well help me explain a reason as to why insane asylums became overflowing with "madwomen" in the 19th century. I see many connections within my primary research and my secondary research because most of my secondary research has focused on Nellie Bly and how she came to be in the madhouse and what she endured there, but I could never find any information on it until I read her book. I think that having previous knowledge of Nellie Bly and her story made it easier for me to use her book as my primary research rather than doing an interview or survey. Since I'm doing cultural analysis for my primary research, I got the book online and read it through. The book was very long and it would've been foolish to print off, so I took organized notes by chapter on it because I didn't have the book in front of me to mark up and highlight. Before I read it, I had a few questions, like what does this cultural artifact reveal about gender, race, and sexuality? After reading the book, I was able to see that it revealed the way women were viewed in the 19th century. The male doctors wouldn't give the women who were truly sane the time of day because they assumed all women were crazy, even though some of the patients at the Blackburn's Island Asylum where Nellie was sent were there because their husbands wanted new wives. I think this will help me explain why women were put in insane asylums in the first place and how they were treated there.

Critical Reflection II

Whitney Walters

Professor Halverson

English 102

Critical Reflection II

            For this project, I started my research by looking on a database called Academic Search Premier for scholarly articles and journals. I used search terms like women AND insane asylums or women AND mental institutions. Unfortunately, this didn't give me a lot to work with so I decided to look up the female journalist I have been focusing on, Nellie Bly. I ended up finding a couple articles on her and her start as a girl stunt reporter. Around this time I had run out of good scholarly articles and went on the school’s library website to look up books that could be sent to me from other UW colleges. I used the same search terms and ended up finding four books that have helped immensely with looking at Nellie Bly and the rise of the Victorian madwoman. Shortly after I ordered books, we learned in class to look at other databases so I did a few searches on Project Muse, JSTOR, and PsychArticles using the same search terms and found a few article and journals that had their sources listed at the bottom, making it easy for me to look up some of the books they had used to write on women and insane asylums. On the databases, it is very easy to check a box and request only scholarly texts, but when reading a chapter from a book, it can be difficult to conclude if it’s scholarly or not. I had one book that was like a storybook and told the tale of a woman who was committed and her feelings about being there. After reading a few pages, I realized that this doesn’t help shape my research question at all, if anything it seemed like something a person would leisurely read, a sign that it most likely wasn't scholarly.

            It seemed like I had chosen the longest articles and chapters to read when doing my research. Some of the articles I chose were thirty to forty pages long and I decided to read and take notes in my notebook to keep track of what was important and useful in the article and what wasn't  I did the same for every chapter I read from a book because they were also lengthy and I knew that I wanted to take good notes so I can reference from them later on in the project. Since my articles were so long, I didn't print them out due to excess use of paper and ink, but I wish they had been shorter because I find highlighting to be a very useful tool in researching and figuring out what the main ideas in an article are. I think that my note taking was effective because it helped me sift through the information and figure out what will help shape my research question and what will be completely irrelevant to my question.

            In high school when we were writing research papers, we could simply type our research question into Google and find sources that way that weren't scholarly. Sometimes we would use a data base to find articles, but we were never taught how to look for books and how print texts can be just as useful to things we found on the internet. I've noticed that academic university-level research is definitely more time consuming, but also gives better results than to the way I was taught in high school. Another thing that academic university-level research has taught me was the key importance of search terms and search words and how one has to create Boolean phrases to find scholarly articles that will be useful.

            I was extremely frustrated in the beginning of my research because it seemed that I was running into a brick wall with every search I did. I couldn't find anything, not even a non-scholarly article, causing me to want to give up and change my research question all together. After getting assistance from my professor, I was able to find some articles on Academic Search Premier and she also helped me look for books through the UW colleges’ library system. After doing some research, I have started leaning towards looking into why the 19^th century had such an increase in women in insane asylums and straying away from women journalists and mental institutions. I can still use Nellie Bly’s story because it happened during the 19^th century and it dealed with hysteria, one of the main causes of why women were locked up during the 1800’s. At first I was looking into the mistreatment of women in mental institutions, but now I am focusing more on why women overrun the mental institutions during the 19^th century. I found that women were committed mostly because of the biological processes their bodies went through and lack of health education. This brought up the question, why weren't women properly educated about their bodies to stop the increase of those committed?

            I found writing my annotated bibliography very frustrating because my articles were so long and I felt like I took too much time summarizing the article in my bibliography. To write my bibliography, I used websites that my professor had emailed us like Purdue OWL that outlined how to compose an annotated bibliography. I think that my bibliography will be helpful to many because it is very detailed and looks into the goals of the author. It might also help guide someone who is reading it to research other books that I had mentioned that were found in the articles I read. The only thing I would change would be maybe shortening my summaries, something I found very hard to do because my articles had so much information. In one case, I read an article that was forty-one pages long and was chock-full of useful information, making it very hard to write a summary only a few sentences long.