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.
I also find it helpful to use presentation tools (e.g. prezi) to generate maps of connections between different historical actors (institutions, groups, individuals, texts, concepts, locations, technologies, forms, etc.). Tools like these also enable you to enfold multiple timelines into whatever object you are inquiring into (e.g. short-term timelines preceding the years of emergence, longer-term timeliness tracking the object's stabilization and uptake, etc.).
ReplyDeleteI've also used tools like zotero and excel to manage references and information that is otherwise difficult to keep track of given the abundance and diversity of sources. Excel is esp. useful in this regard for categorizing texts, authors, key figures, movements, organizations, times, locations, etc.
I asked our fellow conspirator Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson for her thoughts too. Here's what she said:
ReplyDeleteDo not just pay attention to what is in the archive but be aware of what is not there that you’d expect to be there. For instance, when I did research for my Algeria chapter, there are lots of claims about the efficacy of torture in producing information that helps prevent violence. But there was no evidence at all of any violence being prevented because of such information.
Relatedly, keep in mind that archives themselves reflect power relations. Their construction involves choices about whose artifacts are preserved. There might be relevant actors who did not leave artifacts (e.g., Kevin Olson’s work on Haitian slaves), whose traces are preserved indirectly in reports of others (e.g., David Lambert’s work on James McQueen’s making of a map of the River Niger based on the knowledge of African slaves), or who are only included in the archives in the form of their death (e.g., Saidiya Hartman’s work on the archive of slavery).
Think about your responsibility to your people (both the people you’re writing about and your audience). This means that you have to make choices about what sources to include, which to leave out, which to describe but not show, how to describe them in a way that respects the people involved, etc.
I agree that you want to know about your people and their associates. But this must be supplemented with attention to statements free from regard for people/context. By focusing on a discourse, you can reconstruct rules for the formation of concepts, theoretical elements, etc. without imposing assumptions based on your knowledge of people and context.
Make sure you pay attention to all possible sources, written and unwritten, and to the form and materiality of these sources.
Keep in mind that taking notes involves decisions about what is important. But you might not know what’s important while you’re working through the archive. So instead of taking notes, copy text without changing it or, when you have limited time in an archive, take photos.
Treat contradictions in your sources as something in need of explanation, not resolution. It might be that contradictions indicate different modes of thought.
In addition to following the chain and reading to the point of saturation in the context of your project, also read works that do the kind of historical work you want to do, even if the topic is completely different. For me, Sarah Richardson’s book Sex Itself (a history of the science of sex) was one of the most important sources of inspiration about how to do what I wanted to do. Whenever I was stuck, I went back to it to see how she solved certain problems and dealt with particular issues.