Notes on your five sources
Look for sources for your research project.
Use the CRAAP test and/or the SIFT test to make sure they are reliable.
Write up your evaluation. Why is it a good source?
Find five good sources.
Read/watch each source.
Take notes on each source – you can take notes on another piece of paper, create an outline, print them out and annotate them, create a graphic organizer to keep track of the information, or do whatever else works for you.
Bring your notes to class with you. Don’t forget to include the bibliographic information, too (the title, author, date of publication, etc)
Annotated Bibliography Instructions:
What is an Annotated Bibliography?
“Bibliography” – a list of sources referenced in a scholarly work.
“Annotated” – adding notes, comments, observations, evaluations.
An Annotated Bibliography (AB) is a document that helps you keep track of your sources and reflect on them in the context of your research. Each entry in your (AB) will include four components: an evaluation of the credibility of the source, a citation, a summary of the source, and a reflection on how the source is helpful to your research. Please see below for a template showing the components of an Annotated Bibliography entry. Flip this paper over for an example.
Keep in mind that you’ll be doing an entry for each of the sources you plan to use. You are required to use a minimum of five sources.
Components of an Annotated Bibliography:
Evaluation
In this section, you will provide a rationale for using this source in your research. Use the CRAAP test and/or the SIFT test to explain why this is a credible and reliable source. Imagine someone is arguing that it is not appropriate for your action project research. Prove that it is. You want to do this first so that you don’t spend time on a source that isn’t credible.
Citation
Create an MLA-formatted citation for each source. This citation might include the title, author, publisher, date of publication, and more. What goes in the citation will depend on the source. Don’t forget about Purdue Owl and CAS if you need help with this!
Summary
For the summary section you’ll explain what type of source it is (a blog, a newspaper article, a journal article, a video, a website, etc.) and then summarize the article in your own words and include the author’s main arguments, being sure to mention key information and topics covered. Include a discussion of the evidence used by the author.
Reflection
Once you’ve summarized your source, reflect on how the information fits into your research. Write about how relevant this source is, how it answers your inquiry questions, how it connects to your other sources, how it confirms or contradicts information in your other sources, and how it leads to further questions or areas of interest. You’ll want to save this step for last because you won’t know for sure how a source fits into your research until you’ve read/watched/listened to it.
Annotated Bibliography Entry #1 example
My Topic: I am researching how Native Americans are portrayed in current TV and films.
“An Examination of Native Americans in Film and Rise of Native Filmmakers” by Julia Boyd
Evaluation
I find this source credible for my research. Published in 2015, it is not as current as I would like, but it will help me show a progression of how representation has changed over the years. It is definitely relevant to my topic, and it is an appropriate level for my level of expertise. It is from a reliable educational institution, and the author cites her many sources. The author is a student, but for my purposes, that is okay. She clearly did her work and the article was chosen to be included in the journal. It is safe to say that she knows more than I do about the subject. There are no links since it is a print article, but I was able to find numerous other helpful sources in the works cited list. The purpose of the article is to inform.
Citation
Boyd, Julia. “An Examination of Native Americans in Film and Rise of Native Filmmakers.” The Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, vol. 6, no. 1, 2015, pp. 105-113.
Summary
This short article traces the portrayal of Native Americans in film from the 1930s to 2014. It shows a connection between earlier portrayals in popular literature, like James Fennimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, to modern films, like The Lone Ranger. The article highlights multiple issues with the portrayal of Native Americans in film First, Natives have been portrayed as either the “blood-thirsty savage” or the “noble savage,” neither of which is an accurate view. Secondly, they have been stereotyped and simplified into one mass community rather than being portrayed as individual and unique tribes. Thirdly, they have been played by white actors, such as Raquel Welch and Johnny Depp, furthering a Eurocentric standard of beauty. In recent decades, indigenous people have started telling their own stories, so there has been improvement in the area of representation and portrayal, but there is still a long way to go.
Reflection
This was a good first article for me to read because it gives an overview, and it provides plenty of sources in the works cited list. It connects to some of my other sources because I have a couple of radio interviews that are about two of the movies mentioned here: Smoke Signals and The Lone Ranger. It was helpful because it laid out the issues surrounding Native American in the film industry so that when I analyze portrayals, I can more clearly understand an articulate how a particular film is doing with representing Natives. Since it is an older article, it doesn’t include more recent films, such as Wild Indian or the newest Predator film Prey, but I plan to use this as a baseline for the rest of my research and will come back to it for information and resources.
Topic is The Urgent Need to Redesign Education for the 21st Century
