SESSION THREE
STRATEGIES FOR RESEARCH IN THE HUMANITIES
Sample topic: A research project on Cyril and Methodius, founders of the first Slavic literary language
Questions: What are the “concepts” that define my research? What are the index terms or subject headings for my topic? Which databases should I choose? What format (monographs, journal articles, conference proceedings, Internet resources) should I look at?
Sample searches:
Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism: iconoclasm, iconography, semiotics, hermeneutics, nominalism, translation theory (theoretical concepts)
ATLA and Philosopher’s Index: iconoclasm, iconophiles, iconography, icons, nominalism, Old Church Slavonic (religious concepts); Vita Constantini (tracts); Cyril, Photius, Methodius, St. Constantine, Jerome, etc. (people), trilingualist controversy (events)
Linguistics and Language Behavioral Abstracts: rhetoric, grammar, Old Church Slavonic, glagolitic alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, translation theory, trilingual controversy
Historical Abstracts: Theodora, iconoclasm, Michael III, Cyril and Methodius, Moravian Mission, trilingual controversy, Byzantine Empire, Venetian Empire
Additional searches: search for iconography in Art Index; chant, early music in Music Index
Web searches: Look for primary documents of church history, such as Byzantine Lives of the Saints on the Web as well as online bibliographies (Fordham, elsewhere)
HUMANITIES DATABASE SEARCHING
ABSEES
Description:
Sample searches:
Pushkin (as keyword)
A War Remembered: Soviet Films of the Great Patriotic War (as title) >choose Soviet Union—Cinema (subject heading)
MLA
Description: Over
Sample search one: Akhmatova (as keyword)
Sample search two: Akhmatova (as subject) limit by format, language or year
Tips:
Use + for plurals (s and es)
Use * for truncation
Use # for a wildcard character
JSTOR
Description: Full-text articles from more than
Sample search: Pick Basic search>expand and pick from list; choose Slavic; limit by type, full text, subject
Slavic publications: Europe-Asia Studies
Linguistics and Language Behavioral Abstracts
Description: All aspects of the study of language, covering various fields of linguistics, including descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical and geographical linguistics.
Sample search one: Go to index>browse by author
Sample search two: Go to thesaurus>search by semiotics
Sample search three: Got to advanced search: semiotics (as keyword) Lotman (as author)
Gerritsen Collection
Description collection of full-text primary sources relating to the history of women.
Sample search: Tolstoy marriage
Cross-platform Searching
Philosopher’s Index
Description: Citations and abstracts of books and journal articles in philosophy and related fields. Linked URLs to some full-text articles.
Sample search: Russia* and mysticism in “terms anywhere”
Sample search: Marxism in Descriptor and Soviet in Descriptor
Note: Select Database Feature; search limits
ATLA
Description: Citations, abstracts, and some full-text articles from religion journals and essay collections.
Sample search: Marxism in Descriptor and Soviet in Descriptor
Historical Abstracts
Description: World history, excluding the U.S. and Canada,
from
Click on Access your subscription>historical abstracts>
Sample search: land reform as “keyword”, “Russian revolution” as subject term, Russian as “language”
PRIMARY HISTORICAL RESOURCES ON THE WEB
Examples:
Lomonosov Moscow State University Faculty of History Electronic Recourses Library
http://www.hist.msu.ru/ER/English/index.htm
Soviet Archives http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/buk.html
Russian Historical Texts in English http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dml0www/Russhist.HTML
PRIMARY LITERARY RESOURCES ON THE WEB
Examples:
Sher’s Russian List of literature sites
http://www.websher.net/inx/icdefault1.htm#cat014
From Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Poetry
http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/index.html
Moskhov’s Library of Literary Texts