McKim, Mead, & White
Architectural Research Methods (2002)
The Dissertation: an architecture student's handbook (2006)
A short guide to writing about art (2011)
Writing about art (2009) *Ebook
Craft of Research (2008) *Ebook
How to write a BA thesis (2005) *Ebook
This process forms the basis of your research, going beyond a general sense of what has been published to a fairly thorough command of the existing scholarship in your area(s) of interest. The literature review should:
"I need the most important book written on XXX." There is no magic search term that will retrieve the most important book on whatever topic. Rather, there are a variety of ways in which researchers track down core or canonical scholarship on a given topic. Review some of these strategies below.
- Encyclopedia entry bibliographies are pretty good leads and themselves are written by leading or interesting scholars in the field. For example, Reynar Banham write the entry for Brutalism in the Oxford Art Online.
- If researching a specific artist or architect, determine if a catalogue raisonné has been published. (What is a catalogue raisonné?)
- Have there been any exhibitions or conferences on your artist/architect/movement? If so, who was the lead curator and was a catalog ever published?What about proceedings?
- Has a dissertation related to your topic been written? If so, scan the dissertation bibliography for tips, leads on archives, interviews, etc.
- Figure out if any Princeton faculty teach or specialize in areas related to your research. You can usually start with the departmental web page and drill down. From there, determine what they have published by looking in indexes, the main catalog, google scholar, etc.
- How often has an author's work or a specific title been cited? If you perform a Google Scholar or Web of Science search for "william cronon," you will see that his scholarship has been cited hundreds and hundreds of times.
Both are key ingredients to a literature review. Primary sources are the documents, artifacts, buildings, artist statements, data, plans, films, or information that, when analyzed, function as evidence. Secondary sources make claims about a topic and can be used to establish the problem or question worth addressing; the secondary sources encompass the standard opinions or current state of knowledge in the field.
The Senior Essay demands a resourceful and creative approach to research. This means employing all sorts of tools, in a wide variety of formats. As you get started, think about the following:
Using Union Catalogs: Catalogs like Worldcat search across hundreds of thousands of library all over the world. Worldcat in particular (but there are others) is a very important step in senior thesis research. Don't settle for what is in the Princeton main catalog, esp. if Princeton does not have a lot on your topic. If you find something in Worldcat or Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog or Artlibraries.net, you will need to request it via ILL.
Employing Indexes & Databases: Interdisciplinary resources like Academic Search, Proquest, or perhaps JSTOR, are easy and sensible places to start research. But exhaustive research involves going directly to the subject and topic specific resources, regardless of format. Review these core lists of architecture-related and urban studies related databases.
