I\u2019ve never really thought about my strategy for approaching a new history research paper topic, but I think I do have one after all. Whenever I get a topic to write about, I try to think of where (if anywhere) I\u2019ve heard of that topic before. If not, I usually do turn to Google or a library to get me started.<\/p>\n
When I think of places I\u2019ve heard of a topic before, I\u2019m looking for other books I\u2019ve previously read, maybe even including textbooks that I\u2019ve kept. I usually will go to those to refresh my memory on basic information about the topic and try to gather important names or words I can later use as search terms to find out more information. If I don\u2019t know anything at all about a topic and haven\u2019t really read anything about it before, I\u2019ll do a quick Google search. Often I don\u2019t trust what I read on the internet, so a lot of times I\u2019ll read five or six different sites on the same events to try and corroborate the facts.<\/p>\n
Based on this week\u2019s workbook reading, I should probably do more work with primary sources. It\u2019s very rare that I actually get to use a quality primary source. Before doing the reading, I also realize I can and should be using secondary sources\u2019 sources to find useful primary sources. Above all, I need to be more careful to notice bias\u2014something I\u2019m great at doing when the bias is different than my own, but when it\u2019s the same as mine I think I often let it go unnoticed. This week\u2019s readings have definitely given me some helpful tips for how to research a new history paper topic in the future.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve never really thought about my strategy for approaching a new history research paper topic, but I think I do have one after all. Whenever I get a topic to write about, I try to think of where (if anywhere) I\u2019ve heard of that topic before. If not, I usually do turn to Google or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2704,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119924],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-4-doing-history","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist204-fall15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist204-fall15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist204-fall15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist204-fall15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2704"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist204-fall15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist204-fall15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist204-fall15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist204-fall15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist204-fall15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}