| Research report for week 8 | |
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IN CLASS As always, you shall be refining and rethinking your research proposal, before and in class, to help you remain mindful of the fundamental components of your research project. The crucial steps for today that will be occupying most of your time should be new #17, and updating your workplan (#18). 1. What topic, part of the world, and time period would you like to work on for your research project? 2. What is your main interest/passion in life? I.e., what can’t you stop noticing, thinking about, reading about, talking about, et cetera? 3. How is your passion reflected, either directly or indirectly, in the research project that you are considering for this semester? (My aim is that you work on something that you really, really care about.) 4. How might someone else — who is interested in their own thing, not your thing — manage to see what’s important and inspirational about your research topic? 5. How does your research topic address something that is currently missing from our historical knowledge? 6. How do new concerns and perspectives from your own lifetime lead you to re-examine history? 7. How does your research topic question some aspect of life that is unquestioned in our society/culture? 8. Framing: What is the bigger situation (time) and world (place) around your topic? 9. What important (oft cited) books and articles exist about your topic and/or situation and world around it? (I.e., secondary sources; historiography.) Tell me about your main and/or various kinds of primary sources, and their advantages and disadvantages. 10. What sources might you investigate? (I.e., primary sources; archives.) Tell me about your archives, and how they were constructed in the past, to exist now in the present. What do those archives contain, and what do they not contain? 11. What is your historical question that you are investigating? I.e., your topic, posed as a question. 12. How do your sources enable you to answer this question? 13. Choose one piece of evidence and write a paragraph analyzing it in terms of the connection between the particular source and your historical question. 14. It is time to create a narrative arc for your project. In the writing of history, this is generally based on a historical transformation from A to B — from where something begins to where something ends. And the classic way to start the writing of history is with a taste of B: something new and amazing in the world, and then circling back to A in order to analyze and explain how some people reached B. So what is your narrative arc, from A to B? 15. That’s the narrative arc. There is also the central drama, somewhere in the historical transformation. So what is the most exciting and compelling central drama in your story? 16. It is time to organize your paper. Classic is a bookended three-part structure: introductory section, section 1, section 2, section 3, and concluding section. Usually section 2 is the heart — the central drama, the historical transformation — and thus the longest section. So, build an outline of your paper, into sections and into paragraphs within sections, while starting to pinpoint an analytical theme and assemble evidence for each paragraph.... 17. It is time to complete and fill in your outline: paragraphs within sections. Each body paragraph should have an analytical theme organizing the paragraph, with reference to your overarching thesis, and it should have sufficient evidence. And you should start writing prose for the paragraphs, since writing invariably reveals missing elements that require a little more research. Even before you finish the archival research, it is best to get a serious taste of writing so you can see how research translates into writing. 18. Please update your workplan between now (week seven) and when you have to submit a rough draft (week ten)? |