Media Arts & Culture

Topic Finding and Thesis Formation

• Follow your interest.
• Look for tensions, anomalies and unanswered questions.
• What assumptions have been made in previous scholarship surrounding a topic?
• What critical approaches have and haven't been taken with certain topics?
• Narrow or broaden an area of interest, and look for ways you can situate an argument within a larger argument, or in opposition to another argument.
• Look outside of film and media studies at other influences and factors that are related to your topic.

Initial Exploration

• Wikipedia (and other encyclopedias)
• Google (Scholar, Web, Images, Books)
• WorldCat  or OxyWorldCat
• Newspapers

Writing and Research Resources

The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams.  Q180.55.M4 B66 2003

A Short Guide to Writing About Art by Sylvan Barnet.  N7476 .B37 2003

The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) guides

• The Writing Process
• Visual Rhetoric
• Academic Writing
• Annotated Bibliographies

The College's collection of Film and Video Materials are listed in OneSearch. One way to search for these items is the Advanced Search.

• In order to limit your search to screenplays, add a subject search for Motion Picture Plays.
• In order to limit your search to video recordings, under Material Type, select Video/Film.

Keyword searches often retrieve too many results, including materials that are irrelevant to your topic. Meanwhile, Title searches can be too narrow and leave you with no results. The answer is an approach that figures somewhere in the middle: Subject Headings. Subject headings are terms (topics, proper names, geographic regions, etc.) that indicate the scope of a book or other resource. 

Try it yourself: you can copy and paste these example headings right into an OASys search for LC Subjects.