Research

oursin has a post on archives, and research, and how we know what we know about the past. This is the thing that distinguishes college-level research from high school-level research: in high school there's the assumption that information will be neatly packaged for you in a form that you can use. You're eight and you have to do a report on tigers and you go to the library and you get a book on tigers and you put the information in your own words, and that's pretty much how it goes until high school although the papers get longer and the topics get more complex.

And I think a lot of people develop the assumption that the information they need will be packaged for them like that -- it's hard to make the leap to looking up primary sources, looking at them with a critical eye, gleaning information from them that's sometimes utterly irrelevant to what the original author intended, because the original author had no idea you'd be sitting here in 2010 and trying to find these things out. But it's even harder to realize that there's even a leap to be made.

Which is why I was so fortunate to find a book that answers, quite neatly, "What were working conditions like in silk filatures in Japan, in the early part of the 20th century?" -- but even then, the author isn't trying to answer my question. He's trying to outrage people, and people probably not including me, over 80 years after the book was written and now that sweatshops have more or less moved on to other parts of the world.

It's a very important distinction to make, between the thing you're looking for, and the reason people created the document to begin with