Hello and welcome back to my channel, my name's
Lucy and I'm a PhD student at the University of Birmingham and today I'm going to show you,
and talk you through, how I make notes for my PhD. How I do my research and makes you take you
from first discovering an article all the the way through to outlining my first chapter. So I hope you enjoy this! So the first thing I do when I find an article I'm interested in, for example
this one on hegemonic masculinity by R.W. Connell and James W Messerschmitt is I put it into
this software called Zotero, I think that's how you pronounce it. So the reason I do this is because basically
it means I don't have to worry later on about finding the right the bibliographic
information or making sure I've cited something correctly. You can download this. I've actually created a library called Queer
Romances and then as you can see I've split it up into Misc, Primary Texts,
Queer Theory, Romance Scholarship and the reason I've done that is just so that when I'm looking
through, I can kind of, more easily find things because those are, kind of, the three I suppose
main categories and then misc is obviously anything that doesn't fit into those categories. So this one on Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking
the Concept I'm going to put in Queer Theory. So it is a journal article. So the title Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking
the Concept and it's obviously by Connell, R.W. and then I need to add another author Messerschmidt,
James W. It was published by the Gender and Society Volume so that is it's publication. Gender and Society Volume number 19, I can
see that down here in this section. Issue number 6. and it is pages 829 - 869. The date was, I don't tend to put the month I just put the
year. I don't know if that's correct, but I've never seen a bibliography that puts
the months normally they just ask for the year, so I keep a record of the year. If I need the month for whatever reason I
can always go back and have a look. And then I And then I just put in the DOI, which I normally
try and copy if it let's because I don't want to get things wrong but sometimes, depending on where you're getting
the information you can't always copy it. I think in this case I can. Okay, so that is all loaded into Zotero. So the next step I do is I have a word document
with all my notes in it. Now this document is already 166 pages and
over 62 thousand words, so it is very long and that is an issue. Obviously control+Find is really great. So although I make my notes here I will show
you something later that I do to kind of help me more easily see what I've taken notes on
see what's useful. But for now we're just going to put in a title. I will probably just call this, and I always
bold my titles so again I can more easily see them as I'm scrolling through. Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept. I don't always copy the title exactly word
for word and I'll show you why in a minute but in this case because it's short enough
I will and I'll just put by Connell and Messerschmitt and then what I actually do is I go to my
Zotero tab on Word. I add a citation and I add the citation directly
in here just a general one and that means that I know exactly what that article's referring
to so I don't have to be exact with what I've called it because I've got the notes at the
bottom I've got Zotero to keep track of everything. So then I go back to the article and I just
start making notes on it. So I don't do any kind of highlighting, I
know some people do. Let's have a look through here and see we
can find an interesting quote. So this article is basically looking at the
concept of hegemonic masculinity, which Connell thought up and basically now with help Messerschmidt
they are trying to modernize the concept because it has only been a few years since they first
created it they're talking about how it's been adopted by a lot of people but they think
it needs to be rethought to bring it into the contemporary period. I don't feel the need to make notes on any
of that because while it's obviously context for the article it isn't something I'm gonna
quote so while it's interesting information and I understand why they've put it in the
article I don't personally feel the need to make notes of any of that. You might find this with some articles, you're
not necessarily going to take notes on every single page because some of it will be background
information that either you'll already know or you find interesting and is useful to know
but isn't worthy of note-taking. So this is a section I think is quite interesting,
so this is one the criticism, so: 'the concept of masculinity is criticised
for being framed within a heternormative conception of gender that essentializes male-female difference and ignores
difference and exclusion within the gender categories' So all I do is I've written out the quote
use spell check to make any changes and then I
just need to find the page number. So this is on page 836 and that is how I would
write down a quote. Now if that was a quote that had been quoted
by someone else I would also note down who it quoted it and I would add it or note it
in another document I have. So I have a whole scholarship to read document. We can see that Whitehead 2002 has been quoted,
if I'd find that an interesting quote I would have been like Oh Whitehead is someone to
check, I'd have made a note of it and then at the end of the article, always check the
bibliographies of articles you read or books. Particularly if they've been very useful because
often they will quote other people or reference other people that could also be interesting
to your project. You can see that this article alone has a
good four or five pages of references so what I would do is I would go to 'White' because
that's the one I'm interested in and we can see here Whitehead was quoted. In 2002 Whitehead they got that quote from
Man & Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions. so I'm like oh that could be an interesting
book for me to look at considering I'm looking at hegemonic masculinity and how
it has been queered and how it's been portrayed in queer romance novels. so what I would then do is I would add this
to the list of scholarship that I want to read. you may have noticed as this document So let's
just take that exact quotation So Whitehead, S.M. 2002. Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New
Directions, Cambridge, UK: Polity You may have noticed this document is color
coded and I basically have a color coded system where I'll say it's not at UoB. So it's not available at the University I
study at so I'll either have to do an interlibrary loa or potentially
get it privately. Is it an online work? Meaning can I, kind of, get access to really
easily. Have I already downloaded it? So sometimes when there online works I will
then go and download them and I save them in a file in my computer. So I have a whole secondary sources and again
it's split up into queer scholarship and romance scholarship. This is my romance scholarship and then the
ones I've read I put in there, so I keep them in case I want to refer back to them but just
separate them out so I don't get overloaded. Blue is for library books so that lets me
know that it is at my library and this kind of darker almost blacky-blue is I already
own it. So those have books I own, maybe I want to
reread them, maybe I just hadn't noticed there was something interesting. So some of these I do already own. Not many of them because most of the ones
I already owned I have read, but sometimes something pops up and maybe I do need to reread
that article, I need to reread that book. I mean it'd be quite easy to find out where
this is from. So I copy the name I go to UoB library that's
always the first place I start. So I can see straight away that this is a
book, it looks like it is only available as a physical book because normally the book
and ebook will pop up quite near each other. So then I know that a) I can color code this
as that blue color and then another step I'm doing at the moment
is I am actually creating a list of books that I don't have access to due to the library
being closed at the moment. So I've called it my coronavirus
list, which is very dramatic but I just put in Men and Masculinities. I don't bother putting the title like the
full title or the full name and then all I do is I put the library code and this is basically
so that when I can get access to library again I can just go in with this list and grab all
the books that are going to be useful to me. So those are kind of the first steps I go
through when I'm taking notes, so I take my notes I look through the bibliography and
then I cross-reference the bibliography with scholarship to read. Sometimes I will already have stuff, so I'll
note, I'll be like 'oh yeah okay that's already on my scholarship to read'
and then I find out where it is from. If it's a
physical text I add it to that list if it's one I can download instantly I do that, but
obviously I would make normal notes in this but I'm just gonna speed it up for this process. So once I finish making notes what I would
do is within this document, within this Word document I actually then for each book or
article or documentary that I quote stuff from I create at 'My Notes' section for and
this is my notes on what I've just read. So as well as having direct quotes, which
are obviously super useful when you come to do your writing. I want to sometimes make notes on what I've
just read. So I'm not as good doing this, I'm not gonna
lie. It kind of comes in waves, but if we go up
to... Okay so here I've got notes! So this is an article 'Queers Read This! LGBTQ Literature Now' and I've just made some
notes on it, so I briefly summarize what they're talking about maybe we pick out any like really
interesting things. I found some interesting stuff and it looks
like I've mainly highlighted articles that I think will be interesting for me to look
at but ultimately I've decided this isn't very useful. Now obviously sometimes that will be all I
do with an article, but then is I have a document here called PhD research and I put it into
useful and not useful. So I have useful misc, useful romance scholarship,
useful queer theory and I have not useful and I literally just put a little thing so
I will know what I'm talking about and then I add my notes. So can you see if I hover over this I've put
why I find it useful. A mindmap is basically just a quick way for
me to see a glance 'oh I found Compulsory Heterosexuality by Rich useful' and then I'm
like 'Oh this is the notes I took on it', so that when I'm writing a section I don't
have to scroll through that 166 page Word document. I'd just have to look at this and then I can
control find on this Word document Rich. So I found the article straightway I can look
at my notes, I can look at like the quotes I made, I can even look at then the notes
I made on the quotes and it basically just helps me keep track of everything. Because you're gonna read so much for your
PhD research, especially if you're doing like an English Literature, History of, Politics
a humanities one where there's a lot of reading. You need a quick-fire way to look it up because
you're not going to hold all that information in your head. If I find a piece of work particularly useful,
so this was Trans* by Jack Halberstam, they have arguably written one of the most seminal
works on transgender studies, which is a topic I'm looking at because I'm looking at how
transgender bodies/ characters have been portrayed in queer romances. That is a very important piece of work for
me, so I made a mind map just on that piece of text. So again when I'm coming to write on that
topic I can instantly look at this and clearly see 'okay in this book they discuss the history
of trans as a word of identity, the transgenerational experience, other trans scholarship and what
that's saying and then the history of transexuality'. So it's just a quick way for me to look at
it; I've got quotes in here, I've got some my own comments and I've done this for a few
things. I've also done this for Bodies That Matter,
kind of picking up the key themes that they looked at that I thought were relevant to
my research. I like using this software because, this is
the SimpleLite software, because basically I just - if I
had to hand draw these mind maps they'd get so messy and it would drive me crazy but whereas
this I can move stuff around and I can change things if I think it looks bad. Once I've started to get a body of scholarship
together, and now them a little bit further on in the process, what I started doing is
I have mindmaps for each of my chapters. And this is my mindmap on the queer body,
as you can see it's quite large and it's not finished yet. But here I've basically pulled together all
the sources that I think relate to this topic in some way or are useful for this topic in
some way and then I tried to just put the three key points because I didn't want it
to get overloaded. I broke the rules a little bit here, but in
general I've tried to keep o three key points and these I've tried to make it so these aren't
quotes. Some of them are, but I've tried to keep it
two more my thoughts or how I'm engaging with it. These are the ways I can see, when I come
to start writing a chapter what are the topics that could be used or what are the things
that I need to - the key critics what are they saying? What area's am I missing? This has actually helped me again put together
a outline! So this is my queer body chapter outline and
on here you can see I've got introduction, topics and sections I want to talk about,
I've got the key scholarship I think for that section. So a lot of these ones in the instruction
are kind of the key text that will help define this as a topic and then I go into my section. So I'm going to do a section on queer hegemonic
masculinity, which we've seen here and these are the three topics I want to cover. This is the kind of scholarship and the I've
got genre observations. So this is things I picked up from my secondary
reading that I think could relate back to this topic and could be engage with in this
scholarship. So I hope that has helped people as you can
see there is a lot of different steps and obviously those don't all happen at once and
they are things I've learned and built up over time. But I would say the key takeaways I find is
using Zotero to keep my bibliography and citations in track, colour-coding things, I think it's
really important whenever you find scholarship to see how easy you can access that scholarship
and just keep a note of everything because you'll think you'll remember but you won't
and then also of course I find mindmaps super helpful because I love things kind of coded,
I love things where visually I can see it. So I use mindmaps a lot to help me keep track
of work, but I also like the big long Word document obviously for the details. So that when I need quotes I don't have a limit
on the quotes I can use, but yeah that's obviously just how I do it, everyone will do it slightly
differently. Let me know how you do it down in the comments
and as always give this a like and a subscribe and I'll see you next Sunday. Byyyeee!
