research strategies for historians

Research StrategiesHIST 7405: Research Methods

Sarah Lawrence College

Margot Note

November 13, 2017

Agenda

• Historical Categories of Inquiry

• Developing Research Questions

• Recall/Precision

• Search Strategies

• Beyond Text

• Self-Care for Researchers

• Discussion/Questions

Historical Categories of Inquiry

Five Major Categories

• Cause and effect

• Change and progression

• Turning point

• Using the past

• Through their eyes

Cause and Effect

• Most familiar category

• Ask questions about the causes and consequences of past events

• Our answers, our historical interpretations, take the form of stories about causes and consequences

Change and Progression

• We also ask questions about what has changed and what has remained the same over time

• Answers to questions about change and progression connect events and give meaning to the chronological sequence of events

Turning Point

• We wonder if the change was so dramatic that the topic of study was a historical turning point

• By studying the historical records we are able to reach conclusions that some events or developments so dramatically changed a society’s ideas, choices, and ways of living that some paths of development could no longer be followed and others became more likely or possible.

Using the Past

• In other cases we look to the past as a guide to our present

• We want to know about the particular course of events that shaped our present

• We are using the past to seek guidance in the form of “lessons of history” that can help us grapple with current problems

Through Their Eyes

• We find it both necessary and fascinating to examine the ways in which people of different times, places, and conditions made sense of the world

• We consider how their experiences, needs, and worldviews affected their actions and the course of events

• We try to imagine their world through their eyes

• Avoid presentism

What category will you use?

Developing Research Questions

Research Questions

• Address something of significance that interests scholars

• Have to be researchable

• Ask questions that haven’t been definitely answered

• Try to make sense of the world

• “So what?”

Good questions have the power to turn meaningless information into meaningful answers. And while answers have the power to change what you think, questions have the power to change how you think—or, even better, to make you think.

—Jim Cullen, Essaying the Past

“Informed Serendipity”

• Non-strategic research method

• Historians: expert researchers

• Students: coping strategies

• Incomplete and inefficient

Historiography

• Systematic method for identifying, evaluating, and synthesizing existing body of work

• Provides understanding how people formed arguments

• Allow researchers to become part of a larger dialogue

• Determines if project is work is worth taking on

Recall and Precision

Recall

• Percentage of all relevant sources that are actually located during the search

Precision

• The percentage of all located sources that are actually relevant to the researcher’s interests.

Recall vs. Precision

• Often inversely related

• Goal is to find important information, including things outside the normal scope of reading materials

How will you use recall or precision?

Search Strategies

Consultation

• Involves locating references by corresponding with others

• Low recall: limited by knowledge, memory, and biases

• High precision: pre-screened for relevance

• Ability to locate unpublished materials

• Internet has increased its utility

Browsing

• Looking through materials (e.g., library shelves, journal indexes)

• High recall, since the amount of information collected is limited only by the researchers willingness to continue searching

• Low precision

• Technology is improving the efficiency and effectiveness

Journal Run

• Identify central journal in an area of interest

• Locates the run of volumes of journal

• Unlikely to meet need for information on a topic of the normal degree of specificity associated with a research project

• Useful more for general monitoring of the environment

Interactive Scanning

• Start with a large set of results retrieved on a broad concept

• As you scan retrieved items, the concept becomes clearer

• Throw out redundant terms and include in relevant terms

Searching

• Keyword Searching

• Subject Searching

• Publisher Searching

• Series Searching

• Author Searching• Identify an author who has published in the area of interest

• Find the author's CV, which might contain obscure or unpublished materials

Subject Indexes

• Search bibliographic descriptions with title, abstract, authors

• Controlled-vocabulary terms (e.g., subject headings, index terms)

• High recall and low precision

• Precision improved by combining keywords and controlled-vocabulary searches

• Search-refining capabilities such as combining or limiting searches

Building Blocks

• Divide a query into facets

• Create sets of conceptually related concepts by combining related terms and/or synonyms using the Boolean OR operator

• Add concepts together using Boolean AND operator

Pearl Growing

• Utilizes bibliographic databases

• Start with a very precise search to find one key relevant citation

• Examine index terms and free text terms found in the relevant citation

• Any new terms, not in your initial strategy, are incorporated

• Continues until you have identified all additional relevant terms

• Can be used for citations, subjects, internet pages…

Successive Fractions

• First facet represents a major topic

• Each subsequent facet is added as an AND condition to the results set

• Each result set becomes smaller until number of retrieved references becomes manageable

• Can save time

• Smaller result sets of higher relevance

Most Specific Facet First

• Start the search with the most specific aspect of the query

• Usually selected where there is precision

• Appropriate for narrow topics

• If set size is too small, then use pearl growing

• If set size is too larger, then successively fractionate

Drop a Facet

• When the number of references in a result set falls below an acceptable level (or reaches zero), drop the least relevant facet

• Yields a more sensitive result set that is less vulnerable to the vagaries of abstracting or indexing practice

Related Articles Features

• Machine equivalent of pearl growing

• One limitation of this automated approach is that articles may be related across multiple characteristics, not simply those that are the focus of our search

Citation Searching

• Identify an influential article

• Locate all of the articles that cite it

• Process can be repeated using the new materials as the starting point

• Useful for tracing the orderly progression of a body of literature

• Recall and precision tend to be high

• Looks forward

Footnote Chasing

• Identify an influential article

• Locate useful information by searching the reference section

• High precision, since other authors have reviewed the material

• Recall is dependent on the quality of the literature review in the source materials

• Looks back

Berry-picking

• Start with a query

• If you find an answer or a partial answer, refine your search

• Useful for scoping a research question, defining concepts, or searching for specific information

• Meta-strategy using footnote chasing, citation searching, journal run, browsing, subject searches, and author searches

Google Scholar “classic” papers

• 10 most-cited papers from 10 years ago

• tiny.cc/classic-papers

What search strategies will work for you?

Beyond Text

Historical Sources

• Images

• Videos

• Oral History

• Online Resources

• Social Media

• International Resources

• Unpublished/hidden collections

How can you incorporate non-text sources into your research?

Self-Care for Researchers

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

—Audre Lorde

Planning Skills

• Research takes longer than you expect

• Break down infrastructure of work

• Use your calendar to create blocks of writing time

• Avoid writing binges; write in small, regular amounts

• Figure out priorities

Getting Stuff Done

• Know your internal schedule

• What is the natural flow of your day?

• When are you most creative?

• When can you focus closely?

• When can you “enjoy” office/admin work?

Getting Unstuck

• Pomodoro Technique

• Productive Procrastination

• Always Be Closing

• Eat That Frog

Management Skills

• Make a to-do list — paper or digital

• Type citations of everything you read

• Footnote as you go

• Never put your work into a tool that you cannot easily export and migrate to another platform

• Backup to off-site options

Writing Advice

• Set up a writing schedule

• Create a dedicated workspace

• Write daily in a journal

• Distill your argument into a single sentence

• Visualize your ideas

• Fuel your mind with exercise, nutrition, hydration, and sleep

• Cultivate community

The Gentle Art of Revising

• You’ll never get it exactly right the first time.

• Grammarly

• Hemmingway App

• Expresso App

• Text-to-Speech Readers (TTSReader) and reading it out loud

• Copyedit on paper

• Let it sit

• Revise and rewrite

How will you be more kind to yourself

with this project?

How do you know that you’ve done good research at the end of the project?