ENG 444 - Professor Hartman

This guide will help students gather sources to cite in their Final Research Project assignments for Professor Pamela Hartman's ENG 444 course. It provides links to resources that contain background information, literary criticism, scholarly sources related to education, history, and the social sciences, and primary sources. The resources were chosen ensure the guide will be useful to students no matter which type of project they have chosen. 

Use the links on the left side of the guide to find lists of resources divided into separate pages for different kinds of information. Most of the resources are part of the University Libraries electronic collections; if you are working at a computer off campus, you will likely be prompted to log in them with your Ball State username and password. 

It is often useful, before you begin searching for information, to think of potential search terms.

When looking for information about a literary text - a novel, short story, play, etc. - the title of that work and/or the author's name will often suffice. 

Searching for information about a literary genre, movement, or motif; or a specific aspect of a text; or about historical events, social conditions, or cultural milieus depicted in a text, requires formulating a research question and thinking about its main ideas. The main ideas you will identify will become your search terms. You can then think of synonyms for those main ideas, so that you will be prepared with alternate search terms. 

Imagine a researcher interested in the obstacles the Younger family faces in pursuing their dreams in Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun. They might articulate a question like this one: 

• How does racism hinder the Younger family in achieving their aspirations in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun? 

The researcher might even break the topic into several questions: 

• How did housing segregation affect African Americans in the mid-20th century? 
• Does A Raisin in the Sun accurately portray how African Americans were pulled between their heritage and assimilation? 
• What opportunities were open to African Americans to pursue upward mobility in the mid-20th century? 

If your research topic involves two or more questions, you should not attempt to search for answers to multiple questions at the same time. Rather, you should handle your research questions separately, one question at at time.

Imagine again the researcher taking up the final question of the above. They might identify "opportunities," "African Americans," "upward mobility," and "20th century" as the questions main ideas. They could then list groups of synonyms and other terms they associate with those ideas. For example: 

• Opportunities, economic opportunities, employment, self employment, entrepreneurship, business
• African Americans, people of color, black people
• Upward mobility, affluence, class, wealth
• Mid-20th century, 1950s, 1960s, post war, Civil Rights Era

Alternate search terms do not need to be one-to-one interchangeable with your initial main ideas. They can be more specific, less specific, or just related terms. Thinking of these words ahead of time will let you focus on your searches once you're working in a database, and prevent you from having to pause to think of additional terms.