5 | Final Project and Online Resource Hunting!

In this digital age, an ability to do online research is a must for college students, especially a design student like me. Even off campus, I feel that people who are really good at online research will get the most recent and more neccessary information than people who lack this skill. News, journal, thesis, archives from libraries and museums, those resources are out there in the cloud, we just have to know the right way to get them. The ability to do smart online research will help us bring out most necessary data by optimizing the right tools. A good article titled "Edupunks’ Guide: How to do research online" is very useful for digital information hunters. There, I found many different sites throughout my research hours and the most helpful research sites for my project are: Google, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, and Prezi. Website which is not listed but I found it second most helful, with great academic research documents and archived articles, was www.academia.edu. In the website, research documents in any area of interest can be put as tags to show up on my homepage after signing up. 

My topic started with a broad scope in my head about sustainability and fashion jewelry. Being the most filtered search engine, Google is really useful for exploring my topic because of its randomness of information. I was able to find a broad perspective of  information and an overview of some related case studies by googling keywords I saw from the previous search. From scrolling and reading through several sites, I got the final topic that I want to do then I googled new set of keywords again with special symbols to specify my search.

Google Doc is also one of google products that I like in its citation help. Whenever I found article that contain good information for my research, I pasted on the Doc and attached its citation by clicking at ‘Cite’ in the research tool bar, in order to keep all records before I forgot to do it.

I used Google Scholar as a search engine to find supporting materials. Some of the articles I found useful for the business topic of  my project. There were a lot of solid supporting details including numeric data diagram, charts, and stats in document as the site mainly contains scholar literatures and journals from academic publisher and universities’ libraries database and peer reviewed articles. Very helpful

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia which allows collaborative modification or deletion of its content and structure,  is a website which I generally use to initially search for definitions. For my final project research, wiki is also used to.did ok job in providing me an overview of costume jewelry history timeline. However, I ensure my information by checking with other resources

Having briefly mentioned above, Academia.edu is basically a social networking website for academics. The platform can be used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field. I like this website and feel it is a powerful tool for research and great thing from this site is that the research documents are available to download in pdf format.

Sites I found a little information were Prezi and Youtube (this surprised me). I found a nice presentation about sustainable fashion business model on Prezi, which was quite good one. Youtube is next, Videos that appeared after my keywords were jewelry making, to jewelry product presentation with sustainable concepts, which were not the thing I was searching.

And Sites I found none from keyword I put were Europeana, OpenCulture and ,surprisingly,The Internet Archive (At first I though I would find something here, but no. ) 


Citation:

"The Edupunks' Guide: How to Do Research Online." 16 Mar. 2015 <http://magazine.good.is/articles/edupunks-guide-excerpt-how-to-do-research-online>