By Taylor Bye, Class of 2012
Looking back on my research project on the life and Civil War service of Levi Bowen I can say with certainty there are several lessons to be learned. The first of these goes back to the very process of choosing a topic. I started this process by looking for individuals with interesting backgrounds, which proved to be a wise way to go about it. What posed a slight problem was the moment where I had to choose a topic to commit to. On the one hand I had some pretty thin information about Bowen, which consisted of a few muster rolls and a diary of his time in Andersonville. As intriguing as that was, I also had a sort of research fantasy of finding information about a confederate pow who had participated in the invasion of Carlisle and then perhaps the Battle of Gettysburg. I still held out hope that I could find information about that topic. I probably waited about as long as I could afford before I had to start the real work to make my choice. I ended up choosing to research Bowen, mostly because after reading the muster rolls more closely a second time I got a feeling it could be an interesting story. It’s been quite an experience. My most interesting discovery was the article in the North American detailing the fact that he had been listed on the Carlisle monument to those who died in the war when, in fact, he survived 2 stints in prison and a horrific injury. Below is a link to my blog post for that particular discovery.
http://blogs.dickinson.edu/hist-304pinsker/2011/03/09/dead-man-walking/
The lesson I suppose is twofold here. First, don’t be afraid to commit to a project just because there doesn’t seem to be much to go on, or because you have this other fantasy about what you want your project to end up being. Secondly, the best and easiest projects are the ones that you are passionate about. If you are genuinely interested in the project, and emotionally invested, it makes it feel a bit easier. This is important – don’t kid yourself, research is hard. It’s time consuming, tedious, can be maddeningly frustrating and results in a large sleep deficit. Far better to work on a project that you are passionate about than one that engenders the same enthusiasm as a trip to the dentist.
Another lesson about the research process itself is the need to think ahead and to be efficient, both of which go hand in hand. In this, I did not do a good job. I followed plenty of different directions and ran down plenty of leads, but when it came to documenting sources and keeping track of where everything came from I started out as an abject failure. For the first half of the project I tried to keep everything in my head. Then, after countless times going back to websites and looking up book details, and trying to figure out how to actually cite ancestry.com (still a mystery to me), I ended up with an ungainly combination of copy-pasted word documents, handwritten notes, web bookmarks, downloaded images with and without identifying captions, and of course memory. The lesson? Think ahead – the time is going to come to actually create a finished product, and it will be easier if the source information is in one easily accessible place. All researchers need to organize and compile source information as they find it, not after the fact. Its the second major way you can make the process easier.
I guess the best lesson is to not underestimate the difficulty of any given research project. If you had asked me before this project what made good research I would have said the ability to find good sources. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact it’s one-hundred percent true. But equally important is good RESEARCH PRACTICE. Thinking ahead with and eye towards the end product, and being efficient are two aspects of this. What I learned this semester is that if you can find a topic that excites you, maintain good research practice, and maybe get a small assist from lady luck, it helps a great deal with an already difficult task.