0:00 you've done a bunch of research and
0:01 found a ton of sources but what on earth
0:04 are you supposed to do with it all my
0:05 name is lucia zaitseva and i teach
0:07 writing at harvard university i'm also
0:09 the founder of ivyride.com and in
0:11 today's video i'm going to give you six
0:12 tools you can use to wrap your head
0:14 around new information so you can do
0:16 something of your own with it rather
0:17 than just repackaging what other people
0:19 have said these are tools that people
0:21 working at the very highest levels of
0:23 their respective fields use every day
0:25 whether they're investigative reporters
0:27 professors and scientists of all stripes
0:29 and you name it and today these tools
0:31 can be yours for only 99.99
0:34 just kidding they're free so grab a
0:35 notebook and let's get started
0:37 writing a paper that uses multiple
0:39 sources whether it's a research paper or
0:41 some kind of synthesis can be truly
0:43 daunting and all too often students fall
0:45 into the trap of sort of showing and
0:47 telling or writing a book report about
0:49 what other people have already said and
0:52 done but that's like the intellectual
0:54 equivalent of drop shipping and you're
0:55 not putting anything new out into the
0:57 world instead you're just repackaging
0:59 what someone else has taken the time to
1:01 ingeniously create he recycled this gift
1:04 he's a re-gifter as you'll remember from
1:06 the previous video when it comes to
1:07 analyzing a single source be it
1:09 historical literary scientific or
1:11 otherwise there's basically three things
1:13 we can do
1:14 you can explain something that doesn't
1:16 add up we can demonstrate that something
1:18 small or seemingly insignificant and the
1:20 source is actually important or we can
1:23 challenge a common way of understanding
1:24 the source or show how that common
1:26 approach leads somewhere surprising
1:29 today's video is basically an extension
1:31 of that list because even though humans
1:32 are brilliant and we've managed to do
1:34 things like put a man on the moon or
1:35 invent the selfie spoon we're also not
1:38 all that original and we tend to use and
1:40 reuse the same conceptual tools no
1:42 matter what problem we're trying to
1:43 tackle
1:44 or i guess another more generous way to
1:46 put it is that over the course of
1:47 millennia humans have honed their
1:49 approach to synthesizing information and
1:51 tackling complex problems so when it
1:53 comes time for you to do your assignment
1:55 to practice those skills you're not
1:56 alone you have the tools developed by
1:58 countless people who came before you to
2:00 count on so let's dive in and see what
2:02 they are and to keep things simple we're
2:03 going to do this just by zooming into
2:05 the original three tools you have from
2:07 the previous video starting with the
2:09 very first one explaining something that
2:11 doesn't add up when something doesn't
2:13 add up it could be for any number of
2:15 reasons like for example it's puzzling
2:17 that people who fundamentally want the
2:19 same thing like a green new deal to
2:21 solve the looming climate crisis
2:23 disagree on the best means to get there
2:25 one side thinks that it's impossible to
2:28 accomplish our goals without nuclear
2:29 power and the other side thinks that
2:31 nuclear power is a non-starter the world
2:34 is full of these examples of people who
2:35 want the same thing but disagree about
2:37 the best means for getting there or
2:39 people who just want different things
2:41 entirely and that's so-so news for the
2:43 human race because we can't seem to
2:45 agree on anything but it's great news
2:47 for you as a thinker and writer because
2:49 it gives you a conversation to
2:50 contribute to and that brings us to the
2:52 first possible motive for writing when
2:54 you're dealing with multiple sources you
2:56 could intervene in a debate or attempt
2:58 to resolve a controversy you could be
3:00 really helpful here by explaining how or
3:03 why they disagree maybe even showing how
3:06 they're not as dissimilar as they think
3:08 and attempting to reconcile them and
3:10 another great thing you can do when
3:11 something doesn't add up is just ask a
3:13 good incisive analytical question and
3:16 attempt to answer it by collecting your
3:17 own data of course this works best when
3:20 your question is not something other
3:21 people already know the answer to so
3:23 you're not just in the position of
3:25 playing catch-up but actually trying to
3:26 figure out something no one else has
3:28 understood before so for example we
3:30 could ask a great analytical question
3:32 like what beliefs shaped the attitudes
3:35 of american housewives toward their
3:37 soviet counterparts during the cold war
3:40 and even though people already know some
3:42 things about this we'd have to do
3:44 archival research and gather other
3:46 secondary sources in order to really do
3:49 it justice
3:50 yet another great move that you'll see
3:52 high level thinkers and writers making
3:54 all the time is putting something in
3:56 context in order to explain its
3:57 importance or help us understand its
4:00 roots origins and causes
4:02 you can really think about this as being
4:04 closely related to the second motive for
4:06 writing that we talked about in the
4:07 previous video because in this case too
4:09 you're relating something small to
4:11 something larger but that larger thing
4:13 is no longer a single source but in this
4:15 case multiple to take an example that'll
4:18 be familiar to you from a previous video
4:20 in literary studies scholars often put a
4:22 work into the context of that author's
4:24 corpus as a whole or their influences
4:27 predecessors even contemporaries and in
4:30 the sciences and social sciences this
4:32 could look like defending a policy by
4:34 putting it into the context of a
4:35 respected antecedent or even showing us
4:38 the limits of a current approach to a
4:40 problem by contextualizing the
4:43 problematic origins of that approach and
4:46 relatedly you might point out that in an
4:47 ongoing debate or controversy everyone
4:49 seems to be paying attention to a
4:51 certain set of facts at the expense of
4:53 others
4:54 for instance for a long time scholars of
4:56 history and literature focused
4:58 explicitly on works labeled travelogues
5:00 and ignored other works that talked
5:02 about the experience of travel but
5:04 didn't fall under that category as a
5:06 result they missed entire swaths of
5:09 texts that would have been really
5:10 helpful in understanding people's
5:12 changing perspective toward travel over
5:14 the centuries and they tended to focus
5:16 on men rather than women ignoring of
5:19 course that women have a really
5:20 different experience of travel and
5:22 certainly did the further back in time
5:24 we go
5:28 [Applause]
5:29 and in a case like that you can imagine
5:30 your whole inquiry starting from just an
5:32 inkling of wondering why a certain text
5:35 by a woman that seems pertinent to this
5:37 topic isn't talked about anywhere and so
5:40 a really common motive for writing that
5:41 you'll encounter across all disciplines
5:43 is people attempting to fill a gap and
5:45 explaining why what they're bringing to
5:47 the table deserves further consideration
5:50 and finally we come to common or
5:52 accepted arguments and what we can do
5:54 with them when we've got more than one
5:55 source to work with healthy skepticism
5:57 is a great habit of mind to cultivate
5:59 and you can really contribute a lot to a
6:01 conversation by bringing something new
6:03 to someone's argument in order to build
6:05 on it or applying their argument to a
6:08 new dataset that they hadn't thought to
6:09 do
6:10 for example i might agree with someone's
6:12 overall argument that modern life is to
6:14 blame for things like the increased
6:16 incidence of misaligned teeth in humans
6:18 but i could disagree about the mechanism
6:21 instead of blaming soft foods i could
6:23 simply say that for modern humans
6:25 natural selection isn't as much of a
6:27 pressure or not in the same way as it is
6:29 in the animal kingdom and of course
6:31 someone could rebut that with a
6:33 counter-argument of their own but that's
6:35 a story for another day or i could apply
6:37 an argument or theoretical lens from one
6:39 domain to a completely new one and see
6:41 what insights that yields
6:43 people have quite literally won the
6:44 nobel prize for doing this like for
6:46 example the economists who applied the
6:48 insights of psychology to their field
6:51 and created a brand new field called
6:52 behavioral economics when a lawyer
6:55 argues a case she might invoke a legal
6:57 precedent which is just another way of
6:59 saying that she's using a previously
7:00 argued and settled case as a lens onto
7:03 the present in order to better
7:04 understand it and hopefully you're
7:06 starting to get the idea but plenty of
7:08 popular apps are just the result of
7:10 applying a concept from one domain to
7:12 another like for example the popular car
7:14 rental app turo is called the airbnb of
7:17 car rental and i would challenge you at
7:19 the end of this video to try to think up
7:21 for yourself a few examples of real-life
7:24 cases where applying a model from one
7:26 field or domain to another yields novel
7:29 insights and there you have it six
7:31 different tools that you can use to put
7:33 multiple sources into conversation and
7:35 actually do something interesting
7:37 you could intervene in a debate or
7:39 attempt to resolve a controversy you
7:41 could pose a question and set out to
7:43 find the answer to it by collecting your
7:45 own sources and data
7:47 you could put a text into context to
7:48 help us better understand it you could
7:50 fill a gap or point out something that's
7:52 being overlooked or you could test
7:54 someone's theory by challenging an
7:56 argument
7:57 and finally you might just use someone's
7:58 theory or argument as a lens to
8:00 understand something new
8:02 isn't that so much better than just
8:03 summarizing what other people have said
8:05 so next time you're staring at a pile of
8:07 library books and contemplating the
8:09 existential abyss try asking yourself
8:11 which of these approaches could be
8:12 useful for your material and as i've
8:14 mentioned before you could literally put
8:16 in the header of your document
8:18 i'm filling a gap or i'm challenging an
8:20 argument and let it follow you on every
8:22 page that way you're so much more likely
8:24 to avoid pointless meandering and stay
8:27 on topic if you found this helpful
8:28 please like the video subscribe to the
8:30 channel and share it with a friend and
8:32 next time we'll dive deeper into how to
8:34 work with sources at the college level
8:36 i'll see you then
8:41 [Music]
8:47 you
Chrome Extension