Additional Dissertation Resources

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ADDITIONAL DISSERTATION ADVICE 2012-2013

SOURCES

There are two broad categories of sources - primary and secondary, but pleasenote that one is not better than the other. Your dissertation might necessarily

favour one form over another.

Depending on your topic, you might not need primary sources at all.

Examples ofprimary source material would be the V&A museums collection of

original British posters seen at firsthand; an interview you conduct with Neville

Brody, or a key historical publication such as any by Jan Tschichold concernedwith the new typography (additionally you may consult say back issues ofThe

Times Newspaper from the 1930s at Colindale).

Secondary sources (chiefly published books and articles) are commentaries on

primary source material and other academic publications: they bring together

information and understanding currently available in a particular academic field.As you think and write, consider how you can provide a critique of some texts

and a useful synthesis of others.

Most dissertations, like many books, rest heavily on secondary material. Range iscrucial. Poor dissertations draw on a restricted range of secondary sources, often

dependent on five or six picture-book, coffee table histories and extensive use ofnon-scholarly websites.

QuestionnairesAvoid sending-out questionnaires to generate data, responses will rarely justify

your effort. However, there is a place for carefully-constructed questionnaires

so please speak to your tutors beforehand. There are also important ethicalconsiderations that will be discussed during level 2 preparation.

Archives, galleries etc.

Consider the hundreds of museums in the UK that often have original objects andimages in need of analysis - these constitute a primary source. Visits howevercan be time-consuming, expensive and sometimes unproductive. Always be polite

and organised when approaching an archive, gallery or museum. Most people will

be happy to help but remember they are as busy as you, so be sure of yourintentions so as not to waste anyones time.

WebsitesAnyone can surf the web. Anyone can use Wikipedia. Have ambitions well beyond

simple-to-locate online material. Examiners are NOT impressed by dozens of

footnotes referencing secondary online dictionaries and interpretative material.


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ADDITIONAL DISSERTATION RESOURCES 2012-2013OTHER ADVICE

Interpretative Framework

This refers to the way in which you make sense of the information that you have

gathered. It denotes the conceptual framework that youdeploy, theinterpretative grid which you use, the theoretical filter thatenables you to sift

through the empirical material which exists. Withoutsuch a framework you willfind yourself on a seemingly endless searchfor facts that you will be unable to

organise coherently.

Historical and factual accuracy

Careless errors must be avoided. Reference appropriately. Avoid repeating

received wisdom and received opinion. Test/corroborate what you uncover orclaim.

Conciseness and clarity of expressionYour dissertation seeks to analyse a subject and persuade your reader of the

validity of a particular perspective. This will not happen to best effect without

clear thought and expression. Edit your text carefully to avoid repetitions. Avoid acasual or journalistic tone in your phrasing; do not use colloquialisms or slang.

Instead adopt a more objective, measured, formal approach. Spend time readinga serious journal such as Visible Language orArt Historyto see how a scholarly

tone is formulated. Use phrases such as: It could therefore be argued that...

Historical evidence would suggest that... This particular view is supported byKinross in his most recent account of... Good writing is not a gift from above, but

a function of constant drafting, redrafting and attending to academic exemplars,

i.e., good reading.

Grammar punctuation and spelling

External examiners expect these aspects of a dissertation to be withoutfault.Allow plenty of time to read your work (a) for comprehension and (b) to proof thecopy for typographical, grammatical andpunctuation errors. You may wish to aska friend or family memberyou can rely on to do this. (Do not expect others who

are meetingsimilar deadlines to do it).

NOTATIONS, REFERENCING AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

DO NOT leave the compilation of all your notes, references and bibliographic

detail to the final phase of the dissertation project. There will be other, equallyimportant tasks to address at that time such as redrafting, proofing, illustration

work and binding. (To avoid last-minute panics therefore, follow best practice andmake a full record of all your sources - especially page numbers - when you first

encounter them and your access date of web materials).

Above all, do not panic - notes, references and bibliographies once understoodare comparatively easy to produce.

Footnotes and endnotes

Whilst footnotes are encouraged, please DO NOT USE ENDNOTES in your

dissertation or at any point in the preparation of your dissertation.

A footnote is a note that appears at the bottom of a page. An endnote is a notethat appears at the end of your work.

Footnotes are often used to give further information about something in your


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ADDITIONAL DISSERTATION RESOURCES 2012-2013main text. You should use notes discriminatingly - only on those occasions when

including the information in your main text would disrupt the flow of theargument. Footnotes are not a compulsory element of any work, but a general

rule might be that the longer and more in-depth the piece of work, then the

greater the expectation is that it will contain notes.

They should be used consistently:Footnotes are used to supply one of three types of information:

(i) General references to key primary and secondary sources that contain

significant ideas or historical data.(ii) Specific reference to the precise location of a direct, word for word (verbatim)

quotation, or your abbreviation or paraphrase of it.

(iii) Statistics.

Footnotes are also used to supply further information, comment and examples

which, if placed in the main body of text would disrupt its pace and flow. Theymay be used to tell your reader the exact whereabouts and nature of your

primary and secondary sources, quotes and data. Readers are then free to locate

them for themselves, uncover additional material and of course, mostimportantly, check the information on which your arguments are based.

The use of notes also ensures you give proper credit to others for their insight,eloquence and hard graft. Footnotes demonstrate the breadth of your research

and show the ease with which you knit discrete texts and other sources together

to form fresh analyses and interpretations that take your chosen field forward.

THE HARVARD REFERENCING SYSTEM

An excellent Harvard referencing resource can be found here:

http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/referencing/harvard.htm(This is an interactive web page that contains examples of the vast majority ofcommon sources, and many rare ones).

You can even use free software tools to format your references for you!For example: http://www.harvardgenerator.com

Obviously, you need to be vigilant that you are entering the correct information

in your bibliography, and ultimately you are responsible for every word in yourdissertation, but tools such as this may save you time and effort that you can

dedicate to reading, thinking, and writing.

CSAD Policy

CSAD does not demand that you use a specifically named referencing system.There are many academic referencing systems available, and you might have

been previously trained with a certain method. However, you are not allowed to

invent, modify, or combine a system of your own. Nor are you allowed to switchbetween systems in the same document. Be consistent, pick a method that works

for you and stick to it.

We recommend the Harvard Referencing System and it is detailed below.

How too use the Harvard Referencing System

A citation is a reference to any information that you have drawn on in the courseof your research and that you include in your essay. You MUST cite ALL

references to the work of others whether they consist of direct quotations orindirect references by means of comments, paraphrasing, summary etc. Usually

citations refer to extracts from publications such as books and magazines but you

might wish to cite unpublished works, archive material, television programmes,


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ADDITIONAL DISSERTATION RESOURCES 2012-2013tape recordings, the Internet etc.

A quotation is a phrase, sentence, paragraph etc. taken directly fromsomebody elses work. You make it clear that it is a quotation either by including

the passage in quotation marks ( ) within the main body of your text (short

quotes) or for quotes longer than 3-lines by setting the quotation apart in ablock, indented and single spaced. You must follow such a quotation with the

authors name, year of publishing, and printed page number, and this informationis contained within brackets. For example:

Pepperell and Punt define technology as the tangible expression of desiremotivating human imagination to modify reality (Pepperell & Punt 2000, pp. 7).

The reader can then refer to your bibliography (please see the next section formore on bibliographies) for any additional information.

If you are referring to an idea that isnt copied from a specific page, for exampleif you are sumarising a whole book or paper, then you need not include a page

number. For example:

Archaeology suggests that design is intimately tied to human history and to

human behaviour (Basalla, 1999).

You should not need to include any other information than surname,

publish date, and page number (if necessary). Do not, for example, placewhole URLs in brackets. Follow the hyperlink above for further information (item

4.2, page 21).

Please study the following section on bibliographies very carefully as its content

relates intimately to your understanding of the Harvard System.

Bibliographies

You MUST provide a full bibliography at the end of your dissertation to show the

range of work that you have drawn on in producing your text. It should include all

the works directly referred to in your text as well as all your background reading,and it should be arranged alphabetically by authors surname.

You must provide a full bibliography that lists all the works cited as well as yourbackground reading. The form of entry within the bibliography is the same as the

first reference described above with this important difference: the authors

surname should be given first with first name(s) or initial(s) following and thenthe other details in the same order. You do not include the page number(s) of

your quotations but you do need to include the page numbers of the articles orchapters that you cite.

Do not number the entries in your bibliography.

This is a list of every book

and article that you have personally read and consulted. You must nothowever provide long lists of unread titles lifted from other

bibliographies so as to fill-out your own - even if they seem central to

your work. If you have yet to read it, dont list it.

An example is given below of how a bibliography might look (yours will be muchlonger!)


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ADDITIONAL DISSERTATION RESOURCES 2012-2013Appendix 1: Notation Exercise

The following edited extract comes from Jon Lewis, The Road to Ruin. Teen Filmsand Youth Culture, New York and London, Routledge, 1992 pp.1-5.

Use an asterix to indicate where you would expect to see a note.Introduction

By my best estimate, my daughter was two or three thousand years old when shewas born. She never manifested any discernible interest in sex, drugs, rock n

roll, cars, dresses, or the stock market. She used a $65,000 Vassar education to

learn how to become a Tibetan Buddhist nun specialising in carpentry.

Life is sheer ambiguity. If a person doesnt see this, hes either an asshole or a

fascist.By some time in the mid-1990s over half the earths population will be under the

age of twenty. For better or worse, the world is getting younger. At this writing,

there are 1.37 billion teenagers on the planet.And though it is a source of some dismay for the shrinking majority, youth is

rapidly becoming the dominant the official culture [...] But what is it that

comprises their culture? Do they even have a culture? And how can we beginto talk about it? Youth is fragmentary and fleeting, transitional and transitory. Of

late, the academy has warmed to the importance (if not the merits) of thepopular and the proletarian, youth culture has become the focus of considerable

interest. But while much of the recent work is compelling, youth culture has

proven to be an elusive target.

[...] At one pole in this debate we find the Frankfurt School model and

Theodor Adornos concept of culture as a standard of excellence, asthe best a society has to offer, as that which is not consumed or readily

understood by the masses. Adorno, who coined the term the culture

industry, saw youth culture as the logical product of postwar media,

derisively characterising the gesture of adolescence as that which ravesfor this or that one day with the ever present possibility of damning itas idiocy the next.

[...] According to Adorno, as we study contemporary society, we end up talkingless about culture than about the media, less about genius and achievement and

more about the masses descent into chaos, powerlessness, and privation.

Such a view is updated in Guy Debords icy monologue Society of the Spectacle.For Debord, Adornos dire prophecy has come to pass; the economic has

supplanted the social, and human endeavour has been sundered to the obvious

degradation of being into having. The media engage a concrete manufacture ofalienation. For Adorno, youths happy mindlessness and passive consumption

characterise a pervasive erosion of standards, a masochistic adjustment toauthoritarian collectivism. [...] An alternative [...] emerged in the United States

in the 1960s. Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettleheim, S. N. Eisenstadt, Talcott Parsons,

Reuel Denney and Kenneth Keniston outlined a psycho-social/Oedipal model andposed the controversial argument that youths growing dysfunction was the direct

result of the failure of adult society.


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ADDITIONAL DISSERTATION RESOURCES 2012-2013Appendix 2: Dissertation Tips


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ADDITIONAL DISSERTATION RESOURCES 2012-2013


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ADDITIONAL DISSERTATION RESOURCES 2012-2013Appendix 3: Academic Process Words


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Appendix 4: Writing an Abstract


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ADDITIONAL DISSERTATION RESOURCES 2012-2013Appendix 5: Dissertation Self Assessment, A Check List


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