DIY Research Process (Blog #8)

    I really have only done one research project in my high school career, and I didn't hate it. It was my junior year and the topic was a word that we researched. We had to go in depth on the word and discuss some aspect of it. It was a broad prompt, so it was up to us to narrow it down. The word I picked was "inspiration" and I decided to try to figure out where it comes from and how different people get motivation. As a procrastinator myself, I thought that it was be an interesting topic to research. Luckily, it was. Part of the paper was that we had to get our sources from different mediums. For example, one of my sources was a book that I had already read, another was a video game, and another was the dictionary, so the sources were all over the place. One that particularly stands out to me is my use of a quote from the song King by Florence and the Machine: "You need to go to war to find material to sing." The quote brings up an interesting point: does inspiration come from hardship and adversity? Can you even be inspired to do anything great if your life is too easy? It was an interesting concept to ponder. In my research paper, I came to the conclusion that suffering was just one source of inspiration. For example, most parents are inspired by their children. While suffering is involved in raising children, I wouldn't call being inspired by your children to be "being inspired by suffering." As I talk about it, I'm surprised how much I remember from that research project. I found it very interesting though.

    As for how my research process will look this time around, I'm not sure quite yet. The non-scholarly sources will be easy to find, whereas the scholarly ones will be quite a bit more difficult to find. I will likely use the advanced search feature of the Dayton library website to find probably all of them. Using keywords, I'll find the sources and then read the abstracts to see if I could apply it to my paper. I don't expect there to be many sources directly talking about The Last of Us, so I'll probably try to find sources that associate with my topic without directly being about even video games in general. Once I find the scholarly sources, I think the paper will be easy to write.

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