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Research Excellence Series - Humanities

York University Libraries has launched a new approach to teach Information and Digital Literacy to undergraduate students in the humanities. Our humanities information ecosystem can at times seem difficult to navigate, but this series of three interactive classes are designed to help you achieve the competencies you need for success.

Series Description

This series consist of three 120 minute classes that introduces upper year undergraduate students to humanities research as a process of entering and shaping scholarly conversations. Beginning with how research questions are formed, moving through how evidence is found and evaluated, and culminating in how arguments are constructed and positioned, the series combines practical skills with a critical understanding of how knowledge is organised, preserved, and debated in the humanities. Each class stands on its own, but together they offer a coherent pathway from curiosity to contribution. 

Enrollment & Completion 

Course instructors, we invite you to share this registration link with your students. We can provide a certificate of attendance for each of the classes your students attend which can be uploaded to your class at your discretion and for your records. Please let your students know they can see the three-class titles under the series “Research Excellence Series—Humanities”.  
If you are interested in this series and would like to incorporate it into your course, please email us at yul_slas@yorku.ca

Curriculum

This class teaches upper year undergraduate students that developing a research question and choosing search terms are interpretive acts with political stakes and gives them the practical tools to do both well. Topic development, academic reading, and source evaluation are not neutral skills — they are interpretive acts shaped by whose knowledge gets treated as legitimate. This class teaches the practicalmechanics while keeping that political dimension visible throughout. These skills matter whether you're writing a research paper or evaluating sources in a newsroom, a policy office, or a community organization.

Learning Outcomes  

  1. Understand how humanities disciplines organise knowledge into distinct conversations, and how research tools (such as specialised databases and reference works) reflect and reinforce those structures 
  1. Move from a broad subject interest to a researchable humanities question using concept mapping and background reading strategies 
  1. Identify the dominant vocabulary in their topic area and understand that keyword choices are interpretive, not just logistical 
  1. Recognize whether they are working inductively or deductively, and understand that their research question should be expected to evolve 
  1. Read an academic text strategically — for argument, intervention, and evidence rather than content retention 
  1. Apply an evaluative framework that goes beyond peer review, asking about methodology, positionality, and relevance to a specific argument 

This interactive class takes students into and beyond the databases to show them what libraries and archives preserve, what they exclude, and how to work with both to locate and evaluate sources. Finding sources in the humanities means navigating a deeply uneven landscape — of what has been preserved, digitized, catalogued, and made accessible, and to whom. Learning search strategies means learning that landscape's history and politics, including what it systematically excludes. Understanding how physical archives work and who controls access to them is relevant to anyone working in law, journalism, heritage, advocacy, or public life

Learning outcomes

  1. Navigate the full humanities source ecosystem: secondary scholarship, textual and non-textual primary sources, grey literature, and community archives — with non-textual sources flagged as an area for further independent exploration rather than taught in depth 
  1. Search humanities databases effectively, understanding the difference between keyword and subject heading searches and using citation chaining as a research strategy 
  1. Distinguish between a library and an archive, locate relevant physical archives, and understand the practical and intellectual conditions of archival research 
  1. Understand the political economy of academic publishing, including open access options and what paywalls mean for who participates in scholarly conversation 
  2. Recognize absence from an archive or database as analytically significant rather than simply inconvenient 

This class teaches students to write literature reviews as intellectual positioning statements rather than annotated bibliographies — covering synthesis, citational ethics, and a practical framework for using AI tools critically rather than uncritically. A literature review is not an administrative summary of existing scholarship — it is a positioning statement. Every decision about whose work to cite as foundational, whoseto footnote, and whose to omit is an ethical and intellectual act. This workshop teaches the mechanics of synthesis alongside the accountability those mechanics require.

Learning Outcomes  

  1. Understand citation as an ethical practice that builds collective knowledge and assigns intellectual credit, not merely a formatting requirement 
  1. Use specialist humanities tools — Oxford Bibliographies, annual reviews, citation chaining, and network visualization tools — to map the shape of a literature before synthesizing it 
  1. Read sources strategically for a literature review — tracking position within a debate rather than content 
  1. Write synthesis rather than summary, putting sources in conversation with each other and identifying the shape of a debate 
  1. Distinguish between inductive and deductive structures in a literature review and make a deliberate choice between them 
  1. Develop a clear positioning statement: whose conversation they are entering, where the gap or tension lies, and where they stand in relation to it 
  1. Apply a critical framework to AI tools in humanities research — understanding their legitimate uses, their significant limitations, and the ways they reproduce the same exclusions as the publishing landscape they were trained on 
  1. Use Zotero or an equivalent citation manager as a basic organizational tool — with independent follow-up recommended for full functionality