Trained in literature departments for the humanistic interpretation of texts, we had a lot to learn. Some of it we learned by direct instruction and some by studying methodological texts. The rest we learn as we go along, through trial and error.

Now we’ve gathered thousands of student texts from 16 U.S. colleges. (Our website says 15, but as soon as we can catch our breath, we need to update it; a 16th college came on board this summer, bringing their own researchers with them!) This summer a whole team of people is finding sources, reading student papers and their sources, and coding the relationships between the students’ citations and the sources they cite. That’s the fieldwork. We have a small grant that allows us to pay a few graduate students this summer, but for most of us this is volunteer work, scholarship to which we feel ineluctably drawn.

Sandra Jamieson and I are tracking, compiling, processing, and analyzing the results of the fieldwork. That’s the lab work. The first three of these–tracking, compiling, and processing–are my job this summer. And it *is* drudgery! I am amazed by how many hours and how much concentration it takes to do this “lab” work.

Yet it is exciting drudgery. As the movement of data among researchers is tracked, marked-up papers are PDFed and stored in accessible online folders, and spreadsheets are assembled with data for the SPSS database, I unavoidably feel excited. We are moving toward a goal, and the goal is one that we all count as very important. We expect to produce the kind of results that can profoundly aid teachers and curriculum-builders. We are too much in the throes of the fieldwork and lab work right now to see that light ahead of us, but we know it’s there. And it keeps me moving through “the drudgery of the lab.” Now I have a better understanding of how scientists are motivated, and why they find their work rewarding.

I did a brief presentation on some preliminary insights from the research team of the Citation Project. We haven’t done any statistical analyses yet, but as we code students’ papers, we see again and again that they are writing from isolated sentences in their sources, rather than from the whole source. We’re also seeing wide-ranging difficulties in citing online sources, and we’re realizing afresh how challenging that job is. When I was an undergraduate writer, I worked with books, journals, magazines, and newspapers. Period. Identifying author, title, and publisher was uncomplicated. That is not the case today, and not only does it complicate citation, but more importantly, it further removes inexperienced student writers from any sort of relationship with their sources. The sources too easily become undifferentiated masses of information. Hence students seek the most concise, information-laden sources. Then they struggle to produce an argument from the data they’ve collected. It takes an expert to develop critical insights from data; new scholars need other scholars’ perspectives as a way of getting into the complex issues that underlie the data.

As the day’s conversations unfolded, I busily took notes on my PDA. One of my favorite moments was when someone mentioned a research assignment developed by a colleague (who I think was Chris Madden-Feikes): “researching the researcher.” As I understand it, students do some preliminary research; identify an important source for their inquiry; and then research the author of that source. That’s a terrific idea, one that speaks to what we’re discovering in Citation Project research. A “researching the researcher” assignment will definitely be in my syllabus when next I teach our WRT 205; it’s a great way to press students to notice who the author is and to explore her background, context, and previous publications.