Per our CGC discussion this week, I thought I'd post the following for future reference.
What are some of the nuts and bolts of our historical
practices? What do we do? Not all of us do all of the things listed below, and perhaps some of these things are inadvisable, but in any event this is a working list of running research practices for a band of wily genealogists.
- Look for sources that are not obvious, that are unexpected – trying to get at not only the stories that people tell – but also trying to get at the stories that are not common, that we do not expect them to tell, or that they could not themselves tell.
- Follow the chain: work through the other events and the other actors associated with your topic. One could think of this as following the footnotes, though the chain is not always connected by footnotes.
- Find their associates: look at who your people were hanging out with; who they were talking to; who they were arguing against; who they were arguing for, or citing, or reading, or writing to, or modeling themselves after.
- Consider that rabbit holes are your friend: look at as much cultural, political, legal, social context as one can, and follow all the little threads of things whispered in the pages, even if those topics appear unrelated to the project. An example: "At one point during the mosquito project I found myself deep in the bowels of an archive on maritime law just because Manson’s colleague and assistant was actually an unofficial military sea lawyer. It didn’t end up making it in the paper, but I gained a much wider sense of both the people in Manson’s life and the other kinds of discourses that Manson came into contact with."
- Read at least up to the point of saturation – for example, until the bibliographies you find in other books are filled with references that you recognize and have dealt with, or until you can read a text that was written in a vocabulary that was initially strange (3 months ago) but is now one that feels fluent (today).
- Find the oldest secondary sources one can find – leading one to new leads that one hasn't found thus far. Google ngram can be useful for hunting toward these.
- Relatedly, begin by finding the oldest or first use of a word or concept (ngram is helpful for this, but doesn’t always get it right) and then work backwards. Read everything that the author (or association, e.g., the Children's Bureau, or both, e.g., the Children's Bureau and Julia Lathrop) wrote in the previous years, even and sometimes especially seemingly unrelated material (such as correspondence), and follow the author’s sources back to their sources, and so on. A valuable rule here is this: the oldest source is never the actual beginning, a culmination.
- Find a relevant periodical source for your material – and then look at every page of every issue of the periodical, reading as many especially relevant articles as you find, for a 5-year or 10-year period leading up to (and including just after) what you are studying. Or, be like Latour (in The Pasteurization of France) and actually find the time to read every word on every page. Ideally you will find two (or more) such periodical sources of this type that represent two perspectives and survey them with some exhaustiveness.
