Construction is in the air at IU East! The new Student Events and Activities Center is taking shape! New buildings are always a welcome barometer of progress. IU East has grown from just Whitewater, to include Hayes, Middlefork (later renamed Tom Raper), and Springwood Halls. It is worth noting that all of those things were built from pieces. Some of the pieces were physical – lumber, pipes, wiring, drywall. Others were conceptual – ideas, plans, vision.

Research is like that, too. First you have an idea – a topic you’re interested in, or a question you have. And you think about it, refining it and making choices about what would make a good paper, project, or experiment. Then, when it comes time to research, you use more concrete tools. Books, journal articles, reviews, videos. The building blocks of good, grounded arguments. And as you write and rewrite, you get closer and closer to the final, finished product. The search itself is made of pieces, too. What words you use or exclude. Whether you’ll limit by date. Thinking about those pieces, like an architect thinking about construction materials, can help your final ‘structure’ be something magnificent.

So, for example, I might be interested in the development of the game chess – my vision. Thinking further, and reading about it, I might conclude that the precursor games that chess evolved from, like Chaturanga in India and Shatranj from Persia, are too dissimilar to modern chess to interest me. I might conclude that I want to focus on chess development in medieval Europe – a time when pieces like the queen and rules like castling were introduced, and the game began to take on a more recognizable form. That’s like my blueprint.

Then, I search. I pick a database like ProQuest and run a search like chess AND (medieval OR “middle ages”) AND (develop* OR evolution). This is my foundation, and what the rest of my work will be based on. Some of the stuff I find include books like Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World and articles or dissertations like Gender, Play, and Power: The Literary Uses and Cultural Meanings of Medieval Chess in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. These are my frame and walls. My raw materials.

And finally, as I write my paper – synthesize this research – it’s like creating a new building. Some essays are easy – a two page position paper might be like constructing a treehouse, while a thesis feels more like building a skyscraper – but you’re building something all the same. But for this type of construction work, you don’t need a hard hat!

Any questions on your research? Ask us at iueref@iue.edu!