Academic Technology Podcast - Episode 18
Kimberly: Hello and welcome to the eighteenth episode of the Academic Technology Podcast. I'm Kimberly Hayworth, the manager of Academic Computing's Consulting and Multimedia Services group.
Today's episode includes an interview about the process of research with Phyllis Kayten, a Librarian at the Information Center at Green Library and Jocelyn Jiao, a student in the Program of Writing and Rhetoric and winner of the prestigious Boothe Prize for her essay, "Exploring the Internalization Stereotypes within Asian American Women." So Phyllis, what is the Information Center?
Phyllis: The Information Center is really the reference desk so the people that sit at the desk are Reference Librarians, but it also is one of the reference collection areas so there are about between 25 and 50 thousand reference books in the Information Center. The Information Center Librarians have to know the entire collection that's at the Information Center plus they assist people in finding resources that we have in the library.
Kimberly: Wow that's impressive. So what types of services do you provide?
Phyllis: We'll do everything from looking up things in the catalogue to showing them how to use the catalogue, showing people how to use databases, how to pick databases to find articles, and we also walk them to the shelves because often it's hard to find a book in the library.
Kimberly: Well it's great that's you're making that so much less daunting for people who are coming in, because it can be intimidating with the sheer amount of resources available on the campus to navigate that without help. Jocelyn? So can you describe a little bit your experience of working with the Information Center, how you got started?
Jocelyn: Well, like with all PWR classes, my professor Chris Gerben took us to the library for just a researching day, but it's a research sort of workshop with a Librarian at computers and a Librarian basically walked us through Socrates especially, the SU catalogue, and we go into a lot of the databases and she asks us to explore and shows us what different buttons do, you know that sort of thing. And that was very useful. Actually, the mistake I made at that point was I actually got a lot of research done during that workshop except I pasted links to those websites into my email. And I didn't realize that you can't really get into those databases without going through the Stanford website because I don't have a subscription to all of those many databases. So, when I got home I realized whoops, and I wasn't really sure how to retrace my steps so that was a little bit difficult. But the biggest trouble I really encountered was that whether it was researching Socrates by myself online was that I really didn't know what key terms to use. I knew a few that I would have to include in my paper such as stereotype, Asian women, heterosexual relationships, but these led to multitudes of books which had nothing really to do with my topic and nothing specific enough that I was looking for and nothing with statistics or the real meat of my paper so it was a little bit difficult. And I actually talked to Chris about this a lot and he definitely said go ask a Reference Librarian, and I was like, "Are you sure? And, because it just seemed and interesting topic someone must have written on it, I just didn't know how to get it and it just seemed a little bit silly to just go up to someone and ask "Well can you help me with my paper? I'm supposed to do the research but can you do it for me? So, I did find the form online ask the reference librarian a question online and that seemed harmless enough and that was anonymous. It was fine, it was totally comfortable and that was nice. And I didn't really expect such a quick answer that I got from Phyllis, but I did and she actually gave me a lot of great sources -- they were basically the main sources of my paper.
Kimberly: And your paper is so impressive. It's amazing!
Jocelyn: It took a lot of work.
Kimberly: Yeah and I saw the note at the forward talking about the Facebook comment.
Jocelyn: Right.
Kimberly: That's pretty fascinating. So can you talk a little bit more about the experience that you had getting started. Because you said that the best way to get into it was less intimidating was via the form and asking for assistance.
Jocelyn: Right.
Kimberly: So with Phyllis, did she just respond to you via that?
Jocelyn: She, via email, really. She just emailed me back and I didn't realize that people actually check the questions that you send in and they actually do go out and do the research for you. I was actually looking for a general direction. "Where are some books? Where would I find them?" There must be some place in the library with all the sources I need but she actually gave me specific sources and that was really great.
Phyllis: One of my jobs is to sit at the reference desk and the second part of my job is to teach workshops and be available to PWR instructors and their students. So each one of us, there are five or six teaching librarians and we are assigned a number of instructors, between eight and ten PWR classes, and we make up resource guides suggesting where to go to find stuff on the general topic but we never know what topic the students are going to be working on until they come to the workshop. So they come to the workshop, we give them general information, and then we walk around and go from individual to individual and try to help them find sources.
Kimberly: It's mainly about the process. So Jocelyn said that she used the form, you responded and then there was email interaction?
Phyllis: Right. So what happens is, the form gets filled out, and it immediately gets sent to the Information Center mailbox and there are a few of us that monitor that mailbox. Jocelyn's question really intrigued me. So I got right into it. I get really caught up in people's topics. I was so interested in hers because her email said "my PWR topic is about 'yellow fever',' the fact that non-Asian men are attracted to Asian women." And I said "Well, ok, that's interesting. What's 'yellow fever'?" So I figured OK I'm going to look up "yellow fever" and see if I can find anything. And I found only one article on "yellow fever" that related to Jocelyn's topic. And that was a play that somebody had written that was kind of like the "Vagina Monologues" of the experience of Asian women. That's the topic but I can't get to it that way. So the same way that Jocelyn was brainstorming, I was brainstorming too. And really what we do in the workshop is to encourage them to brainstorm. I don't know any better than they do what kind of words we're gonna use but I know the tricks of finding them. So I'm thinking OK what is this "yellow fever" and I thought well it's the attraction to the exotic. So, I started searching for "exotic" and "relationships", or "exotic" and "dating" and then as I found things I went in several databases, so sociology, it may be a psychology thing, there were databases that index newspapers from ethnic groups, so Asian newspapers for instance, and then general databases that indexed a lot of variety of scholarly and popular journals. As I found good articles, I started to look at how they categorized those articles and then I started passing stuff onto Jocelyn.
Kimberly: Oh wow, that is such a valuable skill to have, to be able to make those types of connections and relationships.
Phyllis: But hopefully, she now knows how to do it.
Jocelyn: Hopefully.
Phyllis: Because I try to describe my process. I do give a lot of materials and the reason why I do is because I want to show them you will really find stuff. Look what I found, do the same thing. Change your words to what you think they should be, and do it over."
Kimberly: Yeah, I think that's wonderful. So Jocelyn, do you feel like you're comfortable moving forward with another search or how do you feel about the process?
Jocelyn: I think researching -- no matter what point in your life -- digging through sources will be difficult, but I understand now that you really can't just give up. You just have to keep on trying, try different word combinations. You really have to think about what are you researching? What do you actually want to know? Because it's easy to get stuck in the surface nouns that you might associate with your topic like the things you think that are in your thesis. I mean, you really have to get into the meat of the paper and into more subtleties -- more subtle elements that you're looking for 'cause those subtle elements are actually picked up in real-life articles. I realize that you really do have to go through many databases, because each database has, God knows how many articles you can get in this, "Well I am sure I can get a few sources from here," you kind of get stuck in that rut, but you really just have to move on, just keep on going and try all the resources that you have.
Kimberly: That's great advice. So you also added another component of your own research with the focus groups and also with the online survey. And can you talk a little bit about those results?
Jocelyn: Those, I do believe, were my favorite part of the paper, really. It was not the most daunting, because I was really dealing with students my age, so I didn't feel like I was really going out into the wild and researching people I'd never met or had never spoken to -- that would have been a lot more frightening. But, it was definitely something I'd never done before and my PWR teacher, Chris Gerben, handed us a bunch of handouts about primary research and they basically said, "This is a focus group. You need this many people, you ask this kind of question," you know, like for this kind of thing, "This is what you do with a survey, this is what you do with an interview." And that was useful because it gave me a place to start, and I just followed those basic directions --
Kimberly: So, did you start with those focus groups or then survey first or did you go -- ?
Jocelyn: I had the survey first and then I did the focus group . The survey itself was to really test more on a broad statistical scale the presence of a stereotype. I had to think how I would really do that, but I just needed the hard numbers, because as many sources that I had, no one had actually gone out and tested, and I needed that sort of core to develop the paper. The thing is my paper -- I had started off with a very different thesis, I had gone -- and I discuss this in the paper actually -- I expected that Asian American females all have to confront their racial and gender identity eventually sometime during their lives and they have to do something about it. There must be some internal transformation, as small or as big as it possibly can be. And I assumed that while all of my fellow friends in my dorm -- a lot of my friends are Asian American and female -- most have had the same experience as I did. And it was a big deal for me as in the paper. I expected that if the males did what I expect them to, and would talk about ""yellow fever"" in such a way and -- in any sort of way -- I would expect that the Asian females would then respond about how they feel about this stereotype, or how they deal with it, or if deal with it at all. And it was actually very interesting to see that no one of them really did say anything about how they felt. I'm not trying to say that my friends are absolutely passive -- there was no retaliation, there was no outward rebellion, which was what I was looking for, which was, like, a huge part of my transformation, my childhood. And it just really surprised me and I had to really revalue my entire outlook on this issue and my entire paper, really. It's interesting because you go into research with this sort of idea that you were pretty sure is correct, that you think is probable, but then you realize that wow, there's no evidence for it and actually my evidence points towards another trend, so I guess have to throw everything away and jus start over. But it came out great, so I'm glad.
Kimberly: Well again, your essay is amazing. So, Phyllis, how did you feel when you found out that Jocelyn won the Boothe Prize?
Phyllis: I was so pleased. I get the book, the Boothe Award Papers. They print the winners and the honorable mentions every year -- and I read them and I look to see is that one of my students, is this from one of my classes? And I'm always disappointed because it's never one of my students and it makes me wonder, am I not helping them enough? And then, Jocelyn wasn't one of my students, but I immediately recognized when I saw the title of the paper that this is the person that I emailed with, and how exciting! And I was really excited about it and I emailed my supervisor and the head of the Information Center and I said, "This is a person I helped! I actually helped this person and they won!" And then I went to the Boothe Awards and I immediately got the book, opened it up, went to the references in the back of her paper and saw "yes, she actually used it!" And I have to say this is the very first time I've talked to a student that I helped after the paper was over, and I can see that she actually learned something and that she changed the way, I think, that she does research based on what she learned in this whole research process. So it really excites me -- it excites me today even more than it did when I saw that she had won because I'm listening to her and I'm hearing that yeah, she gets it. We put so much into this it really makes me feel good -- every once in a while, someone will email and say, "You really helped me. Thank you very much." And in this case, I get to see that she's repeating back the kinds of things that we're trying to tell them about and I had no idea whether we were getting across to students at all, and now I know.
Kimberly: Well, that's great. And so, Jocelyn, do you have any advice for students who might be working on a paper and need some help with research?
Jocelyn: You really need to research something you really are curious about -- something that strikes you as something extremely important to you. I think first and foremost, you really have to do that -- because I was in Chick Flicks and Breakup Songs which is the Rhetoric of Relationships. There's something interesting to everyone, no matter what topic you're looking for. I really followed this thread that I had, this idea that actually my friend suggested to me over the dinner table once. And I just pulled on it and took me somewhere else completely. And you just have to follow what interests you, I think that's the most important thing. And I would say that also primary research, to a lot of students it may seem like a pain because it's more than just reading text -- and we all have been trained to read text, but it's extremely interesting, and it can give you results that you can interpret anyway you want, so it's extremely useful, so I think students should definitely do that more often.
Kimberly: Great, thanks so much. And Phyllis, how can people get a hold of you over at the Information Center? What's the best way to reach you?
Phyllis: There's so many ways. When we give the workshop, we give our email address and our name, so anyone that takes a PWR course already has our personal email address. On top of that, at the library home page, which is library.stanford.edu, there's a button right at the top of the page that says "Ask Us." So, you press that button and you fill out a form, and there are a number of different forms that you can fill out. If you're having trouble getting into a database, you fill out a "Connection Problem" form, and it goes to a different list of people than if you ask a reference question. And if you ask a general comments form, it goes out to another different bunch of people. So, there's the "Ask Us." Now we have a new website just for the Information Center: infocenter.stanford.edu. And on the left column of that page, there is a little box that says "Contact Us," and there are many ways to contact us. So, it says "Email Us," and if you click on that, it takes you to the reference form; "Telephone Us," and it gives you the telephone number and our hours; there's a link that says "IM Us," and you can instant message us and it also has our hours; and then there is "Visit Us," and it also gives our hours, because we're not there 24 hours a day, and we're only doing chat reference when we're at the desk. So those are the four ways, and then, of course, when I answer an email, I'm usually giving out my personal email address, and I'll continue having a conversation.
Kimberly: Well, that's wonderful. Thank you both so much for coming in today and sharing this information.
Jocelyn: Thank you.
Phyllis: Thank you.
Kimberly: Well, that's it for Academic Technology Podcast episode 18. Thanks for listening. Episode 19 will include an interview with Eric Grant about the Summer Institute at Wallenberg Hall.
Links to information discussed in this podcast and other show notes are available online at http://acomp.stanford.edu/cams Just click the Academic Technology Podcast link. You'll also find a link to our blog if you'd like to provide feedback or suggest topics for future podcasts.