Research Project 05: Organizing the Evidence

Once you have a significant collection of evidence you must set about sorting through your note cards. This will give you an early sense of what kind of material you have gathered, exposing the quality of your sources.

As you sort through your note cards and create piles of similar cards, you are beginning to establish clear categories for your information. Essentially, the pile of similar cards is a category, which you then label with a keyword or two. Create 3-5 piles or categories of cards. There is any number of ways to organize your categories. Here are some viable types of organization.

• Phases of Life (childhood, adolescence, adulthood)
• Influences (family, education, work)
• Life Themes and/or Text Topics (relocations, feminism, identity)
• Significant Life Events (deaths, divorce, war)
• Chronological (first, second, third)

Once you have sorted the cards, you may discover that it you have a lot of data and cards that are suddenly looking not looking terribly useful. You may discover that you have a whole lot more data in one area than another. You may even discover that you need to go back to the library and find some more information in one area, because you do not have enough for what you need to begin writing.

Next, number each entry in your triple entry journal, for tracking purposes.

Now you are ready to begin finding the links between the note cards of your biographical research and the relationships that you began to identify in your triple entry journal, matching your evidence. These new combinations between the note cards and the triple entry journals may alter your earlier categorizations, this is to be expected as your data and ideas begin to take shape. Tag each entry in the triple entry journal with the corresponding note card(s). For every match you have made a direct connection between the author’s life and or experience and their work, the novel that you selected and read. There may be a lot of cards left without journal matches, just place them to the side but do not lose them. Those are cards that may be very helpful in crafting part of your introduction or conclusion, later. Here is an illustration of the process:

At this point, you are basically solving a large data accounting problem.

Once you have matched all the evidence between the cards and the journal you are ready to begin writing a preliminary outline for the body of what will become your paper. Your focus in developing the outline is compiling the matched evidence, labeling the connection with keyword(s), and then organizing everything by category into a cohesive whole. On a generic level, your outline structure will look something like this:

II. Body
     A. Category
          1. Connection
               a. Corresponding Note Card
               b. Corresponding Triple Entry Journal Entry
          2. Connection
               a. Corresponding Note Card
               b. Corresponding Triple Entry Journal Entry

A practical example would look more like this:

II. Body
     A. Family and Background
          1. Brian (character in novel) based on James (brother in life)
               a. Brother James (note card A5)
               b. Character Brian’s first appearance (entry 5)
          2. Absent father
               a. Father William (life) always traveling for work (A7)
               b. Father Samuel (novel) dies while narrator in teens (12)

Completing the preliminary outline gives you a pretty good map of the shape that your paper is starting to take. It will expose the strengths and weaknesses of your work, highlight areas where you may need supplementary research, and reveal the material that is the most important in helping you address the research question:

How are the author’s life experiences and elements in their fiction connected?