Welcome
This research guide is designed for students in Tongue-Tied, a Fall 2025 Expos course taught by Taleen Mardirossian. It represents our first best guesses at where you might find the information you'll need for Essay 2.
Your Librarian
Hi! My name is Odile Harter (pronounced "oh-DEAL"). My subject specialty is literature but I work with a wide range of researchers. Contact me for:
- exploratory conversations to develop your topic
- anything about finding or getting access to information
- research strategies
- formatting and keeping track of your citations
- understanding or navigating libraries.
Help me out by saying in your email, "you are my Expos librarian" - but your question does not need to be about Expos!
Research tools
HOLLIS is a foundational research tool for Harvard students, faculty, and researchers. We recommend that you start with HOLLIS. For some topics, you may find that a more specialized "subject" or "research" database gives you better results. As time goes on, you'll enlarge your skill set, and your repertoire of research tools.
Research strategies
As you begin, remember that good research is often about following up on hunches, testing out a hypothesis and then seeing where else (or to what else) it leads. If you hit a dead-end, that's normal: problem-solving is part of the process.
Language -- the very thing you're studying in this course -- is always critical. Searching depends on words and the relationships you express between them. So use language creatively and flexibly. You may even need to try several search combinations before you strike gold. That's normal, too.
If your results are falling short in some way, consider whether one of the refinement options available in the interface - a filter, a search operator like the Booleans AND, OR, and NOT, or the drop-down options on the Advanced Search page - might be what's needed to improve your search results.
Let me know how I can help as your work on Essay 2 gets underway. We can brainstorm over email or do some searching together over Zoom or in person.
Enjoy your research adventure!
