Hello everyone,
Here are a series of relatively straightforward questions for this week: When you approach a new history research paper topic, do you have strategies and tactics for approaching it, or not? Do you simply go to the closest search engine–probably Google–and simply move on un-systematically from there, or is your method more intentional? Has the material in the workbook reading for this week changed your understanding of the problems involved in historical research, or simply reinforced notions you already had?
My approach to research and papers normally varies depending on the topic. If I am given a lot of choice on my topic, and only given a specific region or era to go off of, I will read through the relevant Wikipedia pages until I find a topic that I find both interesting and appropriate for a research paper. From there, I will use JumpStart on the Dickinson College website, including both key and broad search terms to look at relevant articles, and begin to hone my topic even farther. As my research progresses, I will begin to look at the sources and footnotes of articles I found particularly helpful, and then use those as new search terms. Sometimes this is helpful, while other times it leads me down a rabbit hole.
However, search engines have their limitations as well. Google Scholar, while helpful, does not always bring up relevant articles, while other times the sites charge exorbitant prices. Some search engines are difficult to use and only helpful while using specific terms. However, the college library website has subscriptions to a wide array of excellent websites, including ones for specific subjects, such as ancient art, or neuroscience. Learning how to navigate these sites and search engines is essential to researching and writing a paper. While this takes some time, now that I have had some experience with them, I feel much better equipped to tackle intimidating research papers.
This week’s reading has not taught me new information, but rather it has articulated thoughts and notions that I had learned from my own experiences, but was not actively aware that I applied them to my work. It has also taught me some terms, such as “summary” versus “limited interpretation” generalizations. While these are not knew concepts, I was not aware of them terms used to describe them. This week’s work has taught me to slow down and carefully examine historical evidence and documents to truly understand its implications and information.