The Process of Researching Latinx Art

 I learned a lot in this course, not just about Latinx communities but about research in general. A better way of describing my experience of taking this course would be that it opened my mind. I have not taken a course like this and it really opened my eyes up to the research process, particularly for museum exhibits and what happens behind the scenes to put one together. Something I found unique about this class and the project in general, is that we started with questions about Latinx communities, but the primary goal of the class was not necessarily to answer those questions specifically. Our group strived to answer some of those questions, but because of limited historical research on some of these topics, we were allowed to readjust our questions as we researched.
    Something else that was encouraged in this project was actually to find as much information about our research topic as possible. A lot of times, while writing essays in the past, I actually had to narrow down sources and information, but in this course it was beneficial for myself and the museum to gain as much information about Cobb County Latinx Art as possible. During the research process, I was able to look through archival databases and learn more about the KSU Library, something I may not have done without taking this course. Something small, for example, that surprised me when I learned it, was that you can put quotation marks around phrases in search engines to search an entire phrase. This is something I can definitely use in future courses when doing research. 
    I also found it unique that we started a blog to coincide with the research topic, it gave me a chance to reflect on the class material I had read each week and connect it to my individual research.  On top of this, I had to organize this information into an annotated bibliography and summarize what I learned. This made me look at the work in two ways- on the blog post and writing portion, I had to deeply analyze sources, while on the bibliography I simply summed up sources for the museum to use in future visits. While doing these analyses and summaries, I did get frustrated with identifying the difference between primary and secondary sources, but Dr. Harris helped me understand the difference between them. I used to think of primary as simply being in first person, but now recognizing that primary sources can be much more than that, I know it will help me in future research projects. 

(non-copyrighted photo from StockSnap)

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