Podcast transcript: Critical Analysis review
This podcast is part of the UCIL Digital Society course from the University of Manchester running in 2020/21 semester 1. The story it relates to is hosted on Medium and can be found here.
In the podcast, Simone and Jakob from the Library Student Team review the topic, discussing some of your thoughts and advice on Critical Analysis.
TRANSCRIPT
Hi, my name is Simone from the Library Student Team and I’m here with my Student Team colleague Jakob. We very much enjoyed reading your contributions on ‘Critical Analysis’, which was this week’s topic. Today, we will be discussing and elaborating on what you said in response to the questions and activities on this topic.
By now, you most likely know how important and unavoidable critical analysis is in your university academic life. Being critical of your sources in university writing enables you to gain and demonstrate greater insight into the topic you are studying. It is for this reason that this course makes repeated reference to critical analysis, and it is likely to keep coming up in your other courses too. During the week, you considered questions such as ‘What does it mean to be critical?’ and ‘What are your top tips for reading critically?’. Additionally, you performed activities aimed at enabling you to critically analyse different resources and to elaborate on what you learnt from them. Thank you for your detailed contributions, ideas and reflections in this week’s session: we will now consider some of them.
The first question you had to address was ‘What does it mean to be critical?’ Many of you said critical analysis is not just about reading and summarizing your sources. You said it also extends to questioning or verifying the information you are working with, weighing up the evidence to assess possible weaknesses and strengths, and being “thorough and reflective.” We couldn’t agree more! These are good ways of looking at critical analysis because your work stands out more if you demonstrate that you are giving an informed opinion on a topic, and not simply repeating what someone else has said on it.
One of your comments being:
“critical doesn’t necessarily mean being negative. It means being able to analyse and evaluate the extent to which the information is accurate, reliable, valid and not necessarily just accepting information at surface level.”
This statement resonates powerfully with me because at the start of my course, I thought I had to only look out for negatives in the resources I was reading. Little did I know that being critical in the academic context simply means using careful, unbiased judgement to reach a conclusion, irrespective of whether I side or disagree with an author. It certainly helped that I attended sessions the Library ran [and still runs] through My Learning Essentials and My Research Essentials.
The second question we asked you was ‘What are your top tips for reading critically?’ Answers to this question are particularly important because critical writing starts with critical reading. This means any tips you share can help us and your fellow students to understand what techniques are effective in critical analysis. One of you said, “Whilst reading through the material, constantly annotate and write additional notes.” Indeed, annotations and notes can help you to earmark which parts of a resource contain points of interest to you, especially if you must return to the resource later.
Another person however commented that, “My tip is [to] highlight the important parts when I read for the first time but [I] do not make annotations. To me, it is more effective to make annotations after reading the whole article so that I would not make judgements way too soon.” This too makes complete sense because no single approach works for everyone. The most important thing is to find what suits you best and stick with it. All that counts at the end of the day is whether you have been critical in your work.
The discussion then moved to “understanding texts” and the strategy for reading critically, where you worked through the “5 questions” around the author’s main idea, evidence, analysis, linking ideas together and your individual critical opinion. When it comes to critically analysing a source, you may be lost as to where to start, so this “5 questions” approach is a great place to begin! This formed the basis for Activity 1, to which many of you provided the forum with your critical responses. You wrote your responses on the 3 main sources given: Random Darknet Shopper, Benefits of AI and AI replacing tech ethnic minority bias and also on the articles and essays of your choice.
Your responses included to what extent you agree or disagree with the author of the source and included your own critical opinion, which was wonderful to see! One of you gave the following insight into the “Benefits of AI outweigh the risk” essay — “I agree to an extent that AI needs to be regulated, but I don’t think it would be an easy thing to regulate as the level of intelligence AI could reach is not known or the full extent of the danger, as we haven’t experienced it.” When critically analysing a source, giving your input on the future implications of the topic at hand as part of your individual critical response is a great way to end your written response. Some of you also included examples and analogies to further bring out the author’s viewpoints.
Many of you contributed insightful tips to the prompt “What are your top tips for reading critically.” It is very important to understand the essence of the source rather than only taking in sentences, which many of you highlighted — “Identify the central point”, “appreciate the core message and how it is being inferred” were some of the tips. When critically analysing a source, it is not just sufficient to analyse what is written but also the sources of knowledge that inform the author’s opinions and arguments. Your understanding of this key point is very clearly seen through the comments. One of you rightly said “ Don’t just accept that the evidence they are presenting is valid. Go to the original source yourself to see if this is actually worthy of citing, and to see if it is actually saying what the writer is saying it is saying”. Another person made an interesting point, which goes beyond questioning the credibility of the sources.” Think why this information is specifically told to you and what does it change if you believe it or not.” Identifying the purpose of the text can be key in critically analysing why the author has the opinions he/she/they have and what they are using in terms of evidence and arguments to convince their readers of the same.
The discussion then moved to” creating your own question” from the sources you have critically read and analysed. Forming questions is a way to take your critical analysis one step further by identifying gaps in the texts, understanding what parts of the text are more relevant and why, and thinking about what you want to know more. We found many interesting comments under the prompt “What’s your new hypothetical research question? And what is the thought process that led you to it?” One of you gave the following response “I read the article on AI and tech’s ethnic minorities. I grew up in Silicon Valley myself, and I recognize their strong emphasis on superficial diversity there; AKA, diversity of skin colour or ethnicity. My question is, do non-superficial aspects of diversity (diversity of thought, upbringing, culture, ability) pose positive or negative effects on the role of artificial intelligence in our lives, and how do they compare to the superficial aspects?”.
This is a very interesting point and question as they are thinking further in terms of AI’s capabilities and the effects of the aspects of diversity that are often overlooked but very important. One of you commented a question “I read ‘Do the benefits of artificial intelligence outweigh the risks?’ which made me wonder about the specifics of the guidelines which could be put in place to prevent the dangers of AI, so I’d ask the question ‘What guidelines could be put in place to ensure protection from the dangers of artificial intelligence?” Forming such questions will help us think further and better inform our critical opinion of the text and also may enable us to start thinking about solutions to the problems expressed in the text or arise from the discussion in it. We can also see the varying perspectives of students who critically analysed the same article through the questions they posed. These questions can come handy when tracing your thinking when working on a research project or thesis or even in structuring the arguments in your essays!
In summary, we have seen how to go about critically analysing a piece of work where we think about faults, merits and the effectiveness of the arguments and/or opinions. Through the activities and discussions, we considered what it means to be “critical”, went through a “5-step” model to critically analyse a source and how to read “critically” and also formed our own hypothetical questions to the sources we analysed. This skill of critically analysing a source will always be useful in any strata of academic study and we hope you all can now read and analyse sources with a more critical perspective and form nuanced opinions more easily.
Thanks again for your comments and we hope you enjoyed this summary. Feel free to add comments any time to keep the conversation going, see you next time!
