LibGuides: UGS 302: Ethics of AI: Thinking About Good Systems / Jiao: How to choose and develop a topic

Choosing a topic is research - and it is the hardest part!

It is important to choose and refine your topic through research.

What should I be looking for when choosing a topic?

Identify an existing controversy. You are entering an existing conversation.
Identify stakeholders: who is, specifically, impacted? Who is coming up with solutions? What expertise do they have?
Identify specialized language and keywords that will inform your searches within the scholarly literature.
Want a shortcut for discovering important articles and books that you can use as sources in your paper? Use the works cited/bibliographies at the end of encyclopedia entries.

SAGE Knowledge This link opens in a new window
Database of encyclopedias. A search can reveal interdisciplinary connections as it searches across subject areas.
Platform for Sage eBook and eReference content, including scholarly monographs, reference works, handbooks, series, professional development titles, and more. Only select ebook titles purchased by the UT Libraries are fully accessible.
For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide

Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence: the Past, Present, and Future of AI by Philip L. Frana (Editor); Michael J. Klein (Editor)
ISBN: 9781440853272
Publication Date: 2021-04-07
Encyclopedia of Machine Learning and Data Science by Phung, Dinh. editor.; Webb, Geoffrey I. editor.; Sammut, Claude. editor.
ISBN: 1489975020
Publication Date: 2020

Using news articles to discover a topic

An easy way to discover a current controversy is to read the news. Searching for news through any library is very challenging because news organizations do not have incentive to provide access to their materials through libraries. Their major revenue streams are advertisements and subscriptions.

New York Times (Recent) This link opens in a new window
2008 - 3 months ago. Unlimited users.
Full-page images of The New York Times. Users can search PDF images of every part of every page, including full-text news articles, photos, advertisements, classified ads, obituaries, cartoons, and more, with keyword highlighting. Coverage begins in 2008 and goes up through the most recent issue, with a 90-day embargo.
More recent years are also available in other full text resources.
Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Searches many news organizations at once.
Updated continually. Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an interface that offers discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Effective January 1, 2018, Nexis Uni™ replaces LexisNexis Academic.
Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints This link opens in a new window
You likely used this database in high school. It is a convenient way to uncover controversies and will connect you to news and scholarly articles in your topic
Updated daily. Provides full text access to differing points of view on current social issues. Brings together viewpoint articles, contextual topic overviews, government and organizational statistics, biographies of social activists, court cases, profiles of government agencies and special interest groups, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as links to more than 1,800 reviewed and subject-indexed web sites.