Overall, I find research itself intriguing, as my curiosity can be strung along down rabbit holes of uncovering mysteries. What I specifically enjoy about research is the magical feeling when I find the exact source or information that I am looking for, especially if I find a secret trove of archived primary sources. I particularly love reading personal letters and show programs because they give insight as to what life was like at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, it’s easy to enjoy research when you find precisely what you need and\/or enjoy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The difficulties of research for me begin with navigating the technological seas. I find it very confusing when I search for a specific term in the Olaf library catalyst, and the results do not contain this term in their word content. Perhaps I have a misunderstanding as to how searching the catalyst works; it would be really helpful if all texts were digitally coded (particularly scans of handwritten\/news-printed documents) so that I could search for a word located anywhere in the text and the results would be these such article texts. I’ve had a difficult time finding ticket prices and show programs for the Ballets Russes, evidence which I need for our paper #2. Searching terms such as “ticket,” “cost,” “price,” “program,” and “euro” hasn’t come to much avail. I even browsed the Library of Congress, but the website sometimes responded with an error, or else pointed me towards archive collections to which I couldn’t gain access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next research roadblock I encounter is the anxiety procrastination. Because I know that these technological and logistical difficulties surrounding finding the right sources exist, it becomes difficult for me to muster the courage to being searching soon enough. When I am proactive and eager to start, I find some good sources but eventually storm off in frustration once I start hitting search dead-ends as I described above. Then<\/em> the procrastination period begins, until the research paper deadline comes closer and I’m forced to get back on the horse. For me and my perfectionism (and my reluctance to do the things I don’t enjoy, human as I am), the simultaneous facts that (a) there is such a myriad of sources to sift through, and (b) seemingly none of them give me exactly what I need, give me anxious analysis-paralysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the whole, the academic timeline and requirement to research reduces my enjoyment and intrinsic motivation to carry out the research process. But I am grateful that I retain some joy and “umph” to continue, in knowing that I may be one of the first to analyze neglected papers from the 1920s to which no one prior has given much attention\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Overall, I find research itself intriguing, as my curiosity can be strung along down rabbit holes of uncovering mysteries. What I specifically enjoy about research is the magical feeling when I find the exact source or information that I am looking for, especially if I find a secret trove of archived primary sources. I particularly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4406,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4406"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1335"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1387,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions\/1387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}