Let Your Camera Carry the Burden
Writing a research paper can be as daunting as it is educational and enriching. The pre-writing stage requires an outline and extensive reading. Reading ensures that your blind spots are covered. Reading creates a conversation with other scholars rather than a monologue.
But the kind of reading that is required of researchers is often cursory at best. The writer may simply need a quote, or another scholar to back up a hypothesis. So the researcher rarely reads an entire book or article in order to complete a research paper. Snippets or references will suffice most of the time, unless the paper concerns the oeuvre of a writer or scholar.
So instead of checking out all of those books and accumulating monster late fees, why not have your camera carry the burden? Your back will thank you and your chiropractor will start sending you postcards wondering where you’ve been recently.
I would start with taking a picture of the quote and then the bibliographic information. You may want to take a picture of the cover too just for your records.
I shared my annotations on the first page of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian with a friend of mine recently:
Blood Meridian page 3 notes
Blood Meridian bibliographic information
Now my friend has some notes to get him on his way to the impossible: deciphering McCarthy.
Your camera (a smaller one might be more convenient than the canon I used above) can carry the burden of everyday textbooks too. Students can take a picture of their homework and upload the photos on Facebook. Teachers can post pictures of the homework on their webpage or Facebook too. I think this would be especially convenient for math teachers who assign daily homework. In this way, students will have an option to complete the homework when their textbook is sitting in their locker at school.
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I can’t imagine how much of my time has been spent thumbing back and forth through books that I had pulled quotes out of trying to find the true citation.
A trick I used, not as clever as your digital camera was the google book search. I could almost always remember enough of the quote to put it into a book search and that was great help to me.
Casey,
I like your idea as well. I think that is the best way to find the original source for a quote. When I hear something quoted offhand in a lecture or on NPR I check it on Google books. As a bonus, you may even get a context!
Ben