This guide was created with the intention to help you locate resources, including scholarly articles, magazine articles, images, textual analysis, and other cultural artifacts for your assignment rhetorically analyzing a song of your choice. 

Themes & Keywords

To begin research for this assignment first think about the themes represented in your song. You'll also want to consider what are the main ideas and concepts of your song. Themes like women empowerment, female agency, or gender roles can be used to locate articles or textual analysis. You'll find themes, ideas, and concepts are very much alike. 

The other thing is to think about specific themes or ideas and turn these into "keywords" or the main, important words that are heavily mentioned or explored. Once you've decided on the main themes and keywords associated with your song, then you can start the research process to locate articles or cultural artifacts.

Cultural artifacts can range from pictures, interviews in articles, magazine covers, articles found in magazines, and many others that were created within or close to the timeframe your song was written or produced. 

Visit The Perch and read print materials - magazines, newspapers, literary reviews, and popular publications - to find cultural artifacts, articles representing themes, magazine covers, etc. You may read and enjoy these materials, but cannot check them out. If you find something you like, you can scan the original and print off a copy. 

What if I can't find or access back issues of a magazine? 

A. We have back issues for all of our magazines located on the 3rd floor of the Main Library in our periodicals section.

For select magazines, such as Vogue, Variety, or Billboard or more, we have older issues in our digital collections. To find these you can search by title in InfoHawk+ Advanced search OR you can also browse by publication title in ProQuest or Academic Search Elite to view more issues.