INTRODUCTION

The Purpose of this Module

In general, research skills help us to navigate in and use the masses of information that are out there in the infosphere, waiting for our touch to turn them into knowledge. The purpose of this module is to add research skills particular to English studies to the ones you already have. It assumes you have had some experience with finding information sources and using them in essays, and that you may have had experience reading, analyzing and presenting competing interpretations of literary works. What you will learn in this module will build on your present skills and introduce some others that are equally important to research in English studies.

These techniques are specialized and use specialized resources. They provide the foundation, however, for all research in English studies and are essential to the work done by your English professors in their research areas. They also provide a model of how to work with large, specialized resources for any field of enquiry.

Traditionally, this kind of training is reserved for graduate studies in English. This exclusivity is not because the techniques are more difficult – in some respects they are easier than the kind of theoretical and interpretive work you already have experience with. It is rather because the materials for advanced research in English studies used to be hard to get at. Now, digital forms of dissemination and communication have made it easy for us to work together on projects that used to be reserved for graduate studies and professional scholars.