Respose to Readings

The readings that have been assigned to us to read in the Research Methods class for the past five weeks have been very valuable in helping me see just how to set up a thesis and develop a research question and my ideas in a clear and cohesive fashion. In fact, the article by Whitney Baker about bumper stickers really helped me understand a lot more clearly just how important it is to make my paper a cohesive whole. The biggest problem I found with that article was that though Baker states in the abstract that she will talk about preserving bumper stickers very little is mentioned about preservation throughout the paper until the conclusion, which just basically states that there needs to be more research before it can be written about. However the paper would have been a good cohesive whole without talking about preservation methods in the abstract, which really proved to me that a very specific and truthful abstract are really important to the creation of a good paper. (1)

The readings have also showed me just how varied and specific many thesis style articles are. Everything from work in collections, education, digitization, and informatics are there as well as many people working off a specific idea, such as the garbage plate or bumper stickers. However no matter how varied one thing is always needed in an article such as this, and that is that the author needs to pull from the writings from their field of study to help place the ideas in the article within the larger conversation of the field. This means that all authors need to research what has been previously done in the field and work off of that knowledge to create a paper that is a different look at the topics than the literature that has come before. It is only through this process that one can write a paper that can make a meaningful contribution to the literature of the museum field. The article by  Volker Kirchberg and Martin Trondle about visitor studies made that especially clear to me because they didn't really have very much previous literature to work off of on this topic, at least compared to other topics in the museum field, so they worked off of what little they had as much as they could so that they could help contribute more to the field. (2)

1) Whitney Baker. "Soapbox for the Automobile: Bumper Sticker History, Identification, and Preservation." Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, no. 3 (2011): 251-270

2) Volker Kirchberg and Martin Trondle, "Experiencing Exhibitions: A Review of Studies on Visitor Experiences in Museums," Curator 55, no. 4 (October 2012): 435-452.