Active digestion

It is easy to download articles to read, so it is important for the progress of your project to sort out which ones provide what you need to move your project along. To separate the important from the interesting, you need to read actively and digest what you are reading. 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: Even though the time you have is typically too short for you to read all of every article, it is worth using time to make notes in which you have a dialogue with the author. (You might put your dialogue notes in brackets next to any notes you record in your notebook or on a facing page.) Such dialogue helps you to get clear about: What was argued? What was not? Where could it have been taken further? Where does all this connect with my project? For the important articles write a summary or annotation that indicates how the article related to your project. This habit not only provides bits of text to use when you write your report, but also forces you to push your own thinking further and make the material your own.
• File (see Research Organization)

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

(see Phase B)