This link has been bookmarked by 23 people . It was first bookmarked on 03 Oct 2007, by Jeremy Price.
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11 Jul 11
Brittany Cature: with a good index you can make progressively longer and more focused lists that give you “random access” to the text, and allow you to dig deeper and deeper until you approximate the actual cover to cover manner in which a text seems (wrongly I hope I have convinced you) that it was meant to be read.
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28 Jun 11
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- Turn to the index.
- You will make two lists. Begin by looking for the largest entries, those indented with sub-headings, and lots of page references. Write them all down: people, places, things, concepts. In a normal academic tome (300ps) there should be anywhere between 10 and 30 pages of index, so this list can range from 5 terms to more like 100. But really, start with the longest and most detailed, which should yield a good list. This is your list of the main subjects and problems of the book.
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Read the last few pages of the introduction, where most likely there will be a series of paragraphs here dealing with the content of each of the chapters. Read carefully, noting which chapters relate to which entries on your two lists.
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- Having read the intro and conclusion, you can now turn directly to each of those sections (you have the technology!) and “read from the inside out.” The longer list (filled with people, places and things) in turn gives you a good sense of where the data is, and how it is distributed across the chapters (if you go back and look at all the subheadings in the index). “Reading from the inside out” means literally starting in medias res, looking for the precise places where the author has made it a point to connect theory and data. Read the paragraphs leading up to it and following it. Note the references to empirical material marshaled or referred to, and decide which of those things you need to read more about– turn to list two, and find the places where you can follow up. After running through the entries of the shorter list, you will have read a fair amount of the most important parts of the book.
Note that this approach is fractal in nature: with a good index you can make progressively longer and more focused lists that give you “random access” to the text, and allow you to dig deeper and deeper until you approximate the actual cover to cover manner in which a text seems (wrongly I hope I have convinced you) that it was meant to be read.
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I think that what we lose touch with as we progress through the academic ranks is how poorly prepared we often are for what is expected of us after transitions (1st year undergrad, 1st year grad, etc.), and how difficult the process of learning how to learn can be. The sentiment behind what you’ve said here is good–students should get some guidance in how to aproach the mounds of information in our world–but the way that we take this sentiment and turn it into teaching needs to be done with careful attention to the level of the students, to the tools that we can realistically expect them to have, and with attention to where idealized methods for learning break down.
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04 Apr 11
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19 Mar 11
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09 Oct 10
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16 Apr 09
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19 Apr 08
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15 Feb 08
Rudy GarnsNeedless to say, this is a strategy that works only for good books, and for books that are primarily dense with detailed empirical material, which most histories, ethnographic and other forms of social science research usually are.
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18 Jan 08
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03 Nov 07
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20 Oct 07
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03 Oct 07
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