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.