Craig Newbery-Jones, LLB (Hons) Exon, LLM (Lancaster)

Managing a Long Word Document

Managing Dissertations

Better than Google: Getting the Most from Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Resources Online

This session reintroduced me to some of the online databases, library catalogues and subject gateways appropriate for researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences. I was shown how to develop a search strategy, to use advanced search techniques in order to search these resources effectively, and how to capture search results. The resources and databases demonstrated on the day were chosen to reflect the interests of the group and the \"hands-on\" part of the session provided the opportunity for me to practise.

Avoiding PhD Pitfalls: Understanding Plagiarism and Academic Misconduct

Finding and Using Archives in Research

This course showed me how to identify and access key online databases for UK archives, explained and instructed how to plan a successful research visit to an archival repository and how archives can enhance my research. It also provided instruction on the skills required to handle original sources.

Project Managing your PhD

This half-day intensive, practical, interactive and sharply focussed workshop assisted me to plan and track my progress and provided me with a highly transferable set of tried and tested techniques for this research projects, and beyond.

LTHE (Learning and Teaching in Higher Education) Stage 1

LTHE Stage 1: LTHE is an accredited course, run by the Academic Development team in Education Enhancement, for staff and postgraduate research students who teach at the university. It's designed to help develop understanding and skills in relation to teaching and assessing students in a university setting. This one-day course provided an introduction to a range of principles of teaching and learning. It provided the opportunity to explore the knowledge, understanding, skills and values needed to enable students to learn effectively in a modern higher education environment. It also allowed me to ‘practice’ teaching an aspect of my subject in a micro-teaching session, and gain valuable and constructive feedback from peers.

Atlas TI: Training

Atlas.ti is a popular package that assists with the qualitative analysis of textual, graphical and audio data. It offers a variety of tools which can help manage, extract, compare and explore the meaningful data within texts. This package in particular allows you to work closely with your data at all times. The tools provided make it extremely simple to mark up and code your text and it is one of the more flexible packages for qualitative analysis. Atlas.ti, as with many other qualitative analysis packages, does offer some automatic searching - and even allows a certain amount of ‘auto -coding’. This course covered the basics of using Atlas.ti. in relation to qualitative research.

SLDC (Student Learning and Development Centre)One to One Classes

One to One classes to improve expression in thesis writing and the development of a long piece of work.

Developing Thesis Writing Skills

The mixing of year-groups enabled new students to learn from those who have gone before. The workshops dealt with writing tasks in roughly the order in which they occur in the 'thesis writing journey.' The emphasis of these workshops is on writing activity per se: not 'research skills' and methodology in a more general sense.

Qualitative Research Methods in the Social Sciences

The module was aimed at MA and PhD students, who were planning to use or simply wished to learn more about qualitative methodologies, techniques and data. The module provided an overview and an introduction to the range of qualitative methods used in the social sciences. The course explored a range of issues from research design to validity and generalisability claims, considered different types of qualitative data and also examined particular kinds of research strategies, including participant observation, interviews, focus groups, textual analysis and the use of historical methods. The module included some analysis of the epistemological assumptions underlying qualitative research but this is not the major focus.

‘Beyond the Text’ The Use of Non-Traditional Sources in Historical Research

This module examined historical approaches to visual, audio visual, aural, oral and artefactual sources. The aim was to deepen student familiarity with the range of sources available to historians, to analyse how non-traditional sources have been approached by historians, and to suggest ways in which students can approach these sources within their own research. The course design permited a degree of tailoring around student interests.

The Ontology of the Image

Taking the form of a reading group, each week consisted of a close reading of a chapter from a key text by a different twentieth-century philosopher. Through this reading, we then reflected in depth upon the nature of the imagery into which we were undertaking our current research.

Endnote Bibliographical Database Software Training

Endnote is an invaluable tool for researchers or anyone undertaking a literature review. Topics covered included the systematic collection and storage of reference data from online libraries, the search and retrieval system for your references, accessing the data from within your word document and automatically generating formatted citations and reference lists.

General Research Study Skills in Law

Instruction/refresher courses in a variety of legal research methods and techniques such as using legal databases (Westlaw & LexisNexis), using research databases (JSTOR, etc),  Time-management, Referencing techniques for legal citations,  Avoiding Plagiarism, Thesis planning and cogent writing and more.

Research Resources: Nineteenth Century Collections

A general introduction to relevant research sources, curator talks and workshops, and details on how to get a Reader Pass. I undertook curator sessions in Newspaper Collections and Official Publications.

School of Humanities and Social Science's Annual Postgraduate Conference

Member of the Conference Organisation Team

'Law and the Victorians' - Forum for Legal and Historical Research, University of Reading

XVI. European Forum of Young legal Historians

British Legal History Conference