YouTube Transcript:
6 Approaches to Synthesizing Sources Like a Pro!

you've done a bunch of research and
found a ton of sources but what on earth
are you supposed to do with it all my
name is lucia zaitseva and i teach
writing at harvard university i'm also
the founder of ivyride.com and in
today's video i'm going to give you six
tools you can use to wrap your head
around new information so you can do
something of your own with it rather
than just repackaging what other people
have said these are tools that people
working at the very highest levels of
their respective fields use every day
whether they're investigative reporters
professors and scientists of all stripes
and you name it and today these tools
can be yours for only 99.99
just kidding they're free so grab a
notebook and let's get started
writing a paper that uses multiple
sources whether it's a research paper or
some kind of synthesis can be truly
daunting and all too often students fall
into the trap of sort of showing and
telling or writing a book report about
what other people have already said and
done but that's like the intellectual
equivalent of drop shipping and you're
not putting anything new out into the
world instead you're just repackaging
what someone else has taken the time to
ingeniously create he recycled this gift
he's a re-gifter as you'll remember from
the previous video when it comes to
analyzing a single source be it
historical literary scientific or
otherwise there's basically three things
we can do
you can explain something that doesn't
add up we can demonstrate that something
small or seemingly insignificant and the
source is actually important or we can
challenge a common way of understanding
the source or show how that common
approach leads somewhere surprising
today's video is basically an extension
of that list because even though humans
are brilliant and we've managed to do
things like put a man on the moon or
invent the selfie spoon we're also not
all that original and we tend to use and
reuse the same conceptual tools no
matter what problem we're trying to
tackle
or i guess another more generous way to
put it is that over the course of
millennia humans have honed their
approach to synthesizing information and
tackling complex problems so when it
comes time for you to do your assignment
to practice those skills you're not
alone you have the tools developed by
countless people who came before you to
count on so let's dive in and see what
they are and to keep things simple we're
going to do this just by zooming into
the original three tools you have from
the previous video starting with the
very first one explaining something that
doesn't add up when something doesn't
add up it could be for any number of
reasons like for example it's puzzling
that people who fundamentally want the
same thing like a green new deal to
solve the looming climate crisis
disagree on the best means to get there
one side thinks that it's impossible to
accomplish our goals without nuclear
power and the other side thinks that
nuclear power is a non-starter the world
is full of these examples of people who
want the same thing but disagree about
the best means for getting there or
people who just want different things
entirely and that's so-so news for the
human race because we can't seem to
agree on anything but it's great news
for you as a thinker and writer because
it gives you a conversation to
contribute to and that brings us to the
first possible motive for writing when
you're dealing with multiple sources you
could intervene in a debate or attempt
to resolve a controversy you could be
really helpful here by explaining how or
why they disagree maybe even showing how
they're not as dissimilar as they think
and attempting to reconcile them and
another great thing you can do when
something doesn't add up is just ask a
good incisive analytical question and
attempt to answer it by collecting your
own data of course this works best when
your question is not something other
people already know the answer to so
you're not just in the position of
playing catch-up but actually trying to
figure out something no one else has
understood before so for example we
could ask a great analytical question
like what beliefs shaped the attitudes
of american housewives toward their
soviet counterparts during the cold war
and even though people already know some
things about this we'd have to do
archival research and gather other
secondary sources in order to really do
it justice
yet another great move that you'll see
high level thinkers and writers making
all the time is putting something in
context in order to explain its
importance or help us understand its
roots origins and causes
you can really think about this as being
closely related to the second motive for
writing that we talked about in the
previous video because in this case too
you're relating something small to
something larger but that larger thing
is no longer a single source but in this
case multiple to take an example that'll
be familiar to you from a previous video
in literary studies scholars often put a
work into the context of that author's
corpus as a whole or their influences
predecessors even contemporaries and in
the sciences and social sciences this
could look like defending a policy by
putting it into the context of a
respected antecedent or even showing us
the limits of a current approach to a
problem by contextualizing the
problematic origins of that approach and
relatedly you might point out that in an
ongoing debate or controversy everyone
seems to be paying attention to a
certain set of facts at the expense of
others
for instance for a long time scholars of
history and literature focused
explicitly on works labeled travelogues
and ignored other works that talked
about the experience of travel but
didn't fall under that category as a
result they missed entire swaths of
texts that would have been really
helpful in understanding people's
changing perspective toward travel over
the centuries and they tended to focus
on men rather than women ignoring of
course that women have a really
different experience of travel and
certainly did the further back in time
we go
[Applause]
and in a case like that you can imagine
your whole inquiry starting from just an
inkling of wondering why a certain text
by a woman that seems pertinent to this
topic isn't talked about anywhere and so
a really common motive for writing that
you'll encounter across all disciplines
is people attempting to fill a gap and
explaining why what they're bringing to
the table deserves further consideration
and finally we come to common or
accepted arguments and what we can do
with them when we've got more than one
source to work with healthy skepticism
is a great habit of mind to cultivate
and you can really contribute a lot to a
conversation by bringing something new
to someone's argument in order to build
on it or applying their argument to a
new dataset that they hadn't thought to
do
for example i might agree with someone's
overall argument that modern life is to
blame for things like the increased
incidence of misaligned teeth in humans
but i could disagree about the mechanism
instead of blaming soft foods i could
simply say that for modern humans
natural selection isn't as much of a
pressure or not in the same way as it is
in the animal kingdom and of course
someone could rebut that with a
counter-argument of their own but that's
a story for another day or i could apply
an argument or theoretical lens from one
domain to a completely new one and see
what insights that yields
people have quite literally won the
nobel prize for doing this like for
example the economists who applied the
insights of psychology to their field
and created a brand new field called
behavioral economics when a lawyer
argues a case she might invoke a legal
precedent which is just another way of
saying that she's using a previously
argued and settled case as a lens onto
the present in order to better
understand it and hopefully you're
starting to get the idea but plenty of
popular apps are just the result of
applying a concept from one domain to
another like for example the popular car
rental app turo is called the airbnb of
car rental and i would challenge you at
the end of this video to try to think up
for yourself a few examples of real-life
cases where applying a model from one
field or domain to another yields novel
insights and there you have it six
different tools that you can use to put
multiple sources into conversation and
actually do something interesting
you could intervene in a debate or
attempt to resolve a controversy you
could pose a question and set out to
find the answer to it by collecting your
own sources and data
you could put a text into context to
help us better understand it you could
fill a gap or point out something that's
being overlooked or you could test
someone's theory by challenging an
argument
and finally you might just use someone's
theory or argument as a lens to
understand something new
isn't that so much better than just
summarizing what other people have said
so next time you're staring at a pile of
library books and contemplating the
existential abyss try asking yourself
which of these approaches could be
useful for your material and as i've
mentioned before you could literally put
in the header of your document
i'm filling a gap or i'm challenging an
argument and let it follow you on every
page that way you're so much more likely
to avoid pointless meandering and stay
on topic if you found this helpful
please like the video subscribe to the
channel and share it with a friend and
next time we'll dive deeper into how to
work with sources at the college level
i'll see you then
[Music]
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