Monday, February 23, 2009

Unit 04 Assignment 02

Research Log Entry

  1. What is the main subject of your question?

    The main subject of my question is the pinhole camera/camera obscura.

  2. What subject guide or guides did you use to identify the relevant databases for your question?

    I used “art” as my subject guide

Database 01

  1. Which database did you choose for your search?

    Academic Search Premiere

  2. What terms did you enter to conduct your search?


    For this search I used the term “pinhole camera.” I also used specific search options. I used Boolean operators and I also refined my search to show only articles which had been written between 1990 and 2009.

  3. How many results did you retrieve?

    This returned 171 results.

  4. If there were more than about 100 results, how did you refine your search terms to narrow your results?

    In order to narrow down my results, I then added that I only wanted results which had both the terms “pinhole camera” and “camera obscura” in them. I also chose to only return articles that were written between 2000 and 2009.

  5. Once you got your results to around 100 (or fewer), how did you determine they were meaningful?

    Since there were only 7 results, I briefly skimmed each entry and chose the article which I felt would be more useful in answering both of the two questions I had created during our topic sizing exercise.

  6. Which article did you choose? Give the bibliographic information for that article.

    I chose an article titled "The Pinhole Point of View"

  7. How did you determine these articles were meaningful?

    I read the description of the article and it was directly related to my topic. Additionally, it was a more recent article (written in 2000). Furthermore, I know that the Smithsonian Institution is an educational & research institution. Assuming that the publisher (Smithsonian) is a publication of the Smithsonian Institution, I would say that this is a credible source. (Please correct me if I am wrong)


Database 02

  1. Which database did you choose for your search?

    Grove Dictionary of Art.

  2. What terms did you enter to conduct your search?

    Rather than using the term “pinhole camera” to start off my search, I chose to use the term “camera obscura” instead.

  3. How many results did you retrieve?

    This returned 46 results.

  4. If there were more than about 100 results, how did you refine your search terms to narrow your results?

    Although there were only 46 results, I noticed that several of the results were biographies. So, I chose to further narrow my search by only displaying results that were subject entries. This returned 23 results.

  5. Once you got your results to around 100 (or fewer), how did you determine they were meaningful?

    Again, I briefly skimmed each entry and chose the article which I felt was most informative & relevant to my topic.

  6. Which article did you choose? Give the bibliographic information for that article.

    I chose an article titled “Camera Obscura.”


  7. How did you determine these articles were meaningful?

    In order to determine whether or not the article was meaningful, I read it. After reading this article, I found that it was quite informative. The author also provided a bibliography in which she accredited each of the sources from which she had obtained her information – this provided reassurance that the information presented was both relevant & reliable. Furthermore, Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. Ultimately, it is a very prestigious press. Knowing this, one may assume that the article (which was published by OUP) is from a credible source.




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1 comment:

  1. AlineMarch 1, 2009 at 1:30 PM

    Very thorough, as always. Note, however, that Academic Search Premier, while listed on the "art" subject page, is actually a general database, not a subject-specific one.

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