Research

[owlectomy]

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

Comments

[lordameth.livejournal.com]

And yet, it's funny, though college professors go on and on about how this isn't high school any more, and we're expected to do real research now, I'm in my second MA now, and I don't think I've ever really been taught how to do that kind of primary source research.

Granted, I did take a small elective paleography class when I was at IUC in Yokohama - a fairly specialty thing, for reading classical Japanese calligraphy. I still can't read old handwriting in English.

But I've never even heard of such a thing as Diplomatic, as this oursin describes. I would *love* a course that helps us understand how to read primary source documents with a critical eye, how to make that leap from student to scholar. It's in there in our writing intensives and our graduate historiography seminars, a bit, here and there, but nothing like I imagine one really should want or need in order to make that leap. Are scholars today, i.e. our professors themselves, less skilled at these things than scholars of yesteryear? If they've received the same (lack of) training that I have thus far, in reading paleography, in judging the credibility of given sources, in somehow knowing what sources to look at and how to pull it all together, not to mention all the art historical tools I don't feel at all properly trained in yet - iconography, connoisseurship, etc - then, surely, scholarship as a whole has weakened and worsened, in at least some respects. No?

I think you're absolutely right - that leap is really hard to make. We're told over and over again not to make that assumption that things will be nicely packaged for us. There is no one go-to book on Southern Song dynasty landscape paintings iconography (unless there is...). And I for one have moved past that assumption long ago. But, I don't feel that I've really been equipped with the skills or training to know how to proceed now that that assumption is out the window.

Not that it should all be passive. Of course, I'm not expecting that I should just sit here and receive knowledge... of course, I should be working and trying and exploring on my own. But... well, anyway. I apologize for the long rant. You've caught me right in the middle of struggling with a research paper :)