This Wr2 literature review assignment, which would follow the coming to terms and a logical argumentation assignment, demonstrates that all the humanities projects undertaken by the Caltech students are organically interwoven with the digital and scientific.
The other courses I taught at Caltech include Wr3 Reading and Composing Academic Writing; Wr2 Introduction to College Writing; Wr1 English Composition for ESL Writers; SS20 Scientific Writing and Oral Presentation in the Social Sciences; Ge13 Scientific Writing in the Geological and Planetary Sciences; Graduate Workshop for Writing in the Social Sciences.
Pedagogy: Literature Review
For our final assignment, you will compose a literature review that explores the current state of scholarship in relation to a well-defined query. The following list of topics represents a selection of literature reviews completed by previous Wr2 students in my courses.
Artificial Facial Recognition: A Review of Learning Machines
The Science of Empathy: Measuring the Capacity to Understand Others
Have Social Networking Sites Made People Happier Than Before?
How to Win Texas Hold ‘Em: Advancements In Opponent Modeling and Algorithmic Solutions
A Review of the Automated Topic Segmentation of Human Conversations
Slacktivism: Its Effectiveness and Consequences on Traditional Activism
Automated Judicial Decisions Are No Longer Science Fiction: A Review of Algorithmic Criminal Risk Assessment
The Role of Social Media in Disaster Response
Digital Disparity: How to Increase the Number of Female Computer Science Majors
Automatic Composers: A Review of Music Generation by Neural Networks
The Impact of Online Social Comparison on Psychological Well-Being
Children’s Cartoons: The Portrayal of Gender Roles and Impact on Children’s Gender Perception
Beautiful Moves: A Literature Review on Game-Playing Artificial Intelligence
Linguistic Relativity: How Do the Languages Spoken Affect How People Think?
Explaining Music Piracy Through the Theory of Planned Behavior: A Literature Review
It can be helpful to frame your query as “What does the current research reveal about __________?” If it does not seem like there would be enough academic research on your topic, you will likely need to choose another line of inquiry. Keep in mind that you only have ~2000 words and a number of tasks to complete.
As you’ve read in Hofmann and Knopf, the majority of academic research papers feature a literature review as part of the introduction, but a literature review can also stand alone as a research resource. Such a literature review can take two primary forms: 1) a narrative review (more often seen in the humanities and social sciences, although also found in the sciences) or 2) a systematic review (more often seen in the sciences). For our purposes here, we will concentrate on a narrative review, but we are going to incorporate the systematic review’s discussion of exclusion criteria.
Your review should include the following elements:
Abstract of 150 or fewer words.
Introduction that presents background on the topic, the question or problem, the purpose/motivation of your review, exclusion criteria, and a brief overview of the content.
A main analysis section organized thematically
A conclusion that generalizes interpretations and provides significance
While composing a formal review article is not always part of the research process, it is tremendously helpful in both teaching yourself about the research on a question that interests you and for sharing that knowledge with others.
You must discuss at least 25 sources that represent noteworthy and/or new knowledge of the question/problem, although the most successful responses to the assignment I’ve seen have featured at least 25. You will relegate information about authors and their projects to the citations and focus on summarizing results of studies (or, as relevant, methods).
Your sources must be academic: in most cases, this distinction means peer-reviewed journal articles or books published by an academic press. However, there are exceptions to these categories that we can discuss on a case-by-case basis.
Cite every text used according to scholarly expectations, based on the style you have chosen as appropriate. We will discuss how to determine this choice in class. A Works Cited page is required for this assignment.