Active digestion

(see Phase B)

It's easy to collect articles to read, but it's important for the progress of your project to sort out which give you what you need to move your project along. So you need to read "actively" -- Develop a process for reading that ideally involves the 5 F's, especially:

• Focus: What do I want to learn now? Check out the title, intro, topic/thesis, ending, and subheadings of the article to see whether and how it connects. If not put it aside.
• Filter: Although you can't read all of every article, it is worth the time to make "dialoguing" notes (e.g., putting these in brackets or on a facing page) so that at the end you have digested the article enough to say: What was argued? What was not? Where could it have been taken further? Where does all this connect with my project? Writing a summary or annotation forces you to push your own thinking further and make the material your own, and provides bits of text to use when you write your report.
• File (see Research Organization)

Another approach to active digestion is a "Sense-making" response.