Technique to Learn Research Topics Other Than Your Own: Part I

This brief post extends itself from my earlier post on "Learning How to Learn" which basically summarized how one can go about structuring learning habits to grind out subjects that are not naturally intuitive. I have had to force myself this semester to learn about processing remote sensing images just because my class prof thought it was a bad idea for me to drop the class, so here I am, grueling out overdue assignments and term projects. 

Although my research is based on nano satellites, specifically on extreme (because it's related to space) embedded optical (camera) design, and is somehow related to post processing of remote sensed (satellite) imagery, they are completely different research areas. The only reason I took the class was to learn about image processing algorithms I could apply on my on board computer but ended up working on "post processing" of already taken and downloaded images. 

Trust me, these are very different things. 

The reason I am explaining this is that I had to learn about a new research topic from scratch. So all I am doing now is documenting how I am approaching this problem of learning something that's not going to give a any shit about my thesis. 

Oh yeah, the thesis. That's another thing I have to think about soon..

Ok, so focus, the way you want approach learning a topic let's suppose "X" is this:

1. Literature Review: 

I cannot stress this enough. Not a big fan of fat books, the only way I can learning something about a certain topic is to go to www.scholar.google.com and typing down "X" and all the related keywords and going through all the paper, one at a time. 

This will force me to do two things:

A. Learn technical jargons required to make a proper, meaningful, not totally out-of-place statement on that research

B. Force myself to understand those jargons by going through another round of research just to look and understand what that jargon specifically means. By doing this, I am allowing myself to iron out sub-topics that I wouldn't have otherwise understood.

It will also allow you to:

A. Copy the methodology through which the authors have approached a certain/specific problem 

B. Look at the result and see how effective the author(s) methodology is
C. Build knowledge on different methods through which the same problem has been solved. Or at least tried to solve. 

I wasn't sure what spatial resolution imagery I should use for my landslide detection project, so I had to see whether LANDSAT images (30m) could be used 

So I found out that there were papers who used LANDSAT images before:

I will have to leave it at that for now otherwise I will run late.
I will talk more in part II