Discuss with a partner:
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What formats does your discourse community use to communicate?
Now that you have some artifacts of your discourse community, take notes on the following worksheet in Google Forms. What can you tell about your discourse community from its journals, conferences, blogs, etc.?
Discovering Your Discourse Community: Google Form
Note: your Google Form submission will be sent to your email, as well as to Gina the librarian and to Prof. Sweeney. Make sure to hit Submit by the end of class! You can continue adding to it after you submit it.
Before you search for articles that answer your specific research question, observe how your discourse community writes and what they write about by reading what they read. Your discourse community may write and read journals. Search for journals available through the SMC Library below.
Use Browzine (search box below) or the Journals Finder to find journals, magazines, and other publications written for your discourse community that the SMC Library subscribes to. You may need to play around with different terms for your discourse community.
Want to see publications other than scholarly journals? Try the Journals Finder.
Pro tip #1: use * to find different variants on a word. For example, account* finds Practical Accountant, Journal of Accounting, and Journal of Accountancy. Medic* finds Molecular Medicine, Medical Humanities, and Journal of the American Medical Association
Pro tip #2: If your discourse community has a ton of journals and you don't know which one to choose, find out which ones are cited the most using SciMago.
Pro tip #3: If you want to see if a journal employs peer review (also known as being refereed), look up the journal title in Ulrich's Directory of Periodicals. If you see a striped referee shirt, that means it uses peer review.
Now try finding what others have said about how your discourse community communicates. Articles about your discourse community may be published in journals for your discourse community, or they might be published in journals about writing or communications.
Try doing a search like this in one or more of the databases below:
your discourse community AND ("discourse community" OR discourse OR communicat*) and feel free to tack on keywords related to any particular research question you have
Databases:
For example, these are the kinds of articles/chapters you might look for:
"Performing the Poet, Reading (to) the Audience: Some Thoughts on Live Poetry as Literary Communication" in the Journal of Literary Theory
"A Balancing Act: Developing a Discourse Community in a Mathematics Classroom" in the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education
"Negotiating Meaning in a Hospital Discourse Community" published in a book titled Writing in the Workplace
As you look through the research you've gathered, consider:
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