Or, how exactly am I supposed to keep track of this
massive pile of papers?
In graduate school, my first major research projects involved hundreds of pages printed from microfilm. One paper on antebellum southern children’s literature (my first published article!) essentially involved me printing out the entire run of the magazine (about 8 years) from microfilm. For another paper, I printed out twenty years worth of speeches and articles from the WCTU’s annual meeting minutes.
Since my research as an undergraduate had not involved anything on this scale, my plan was pretty basic: keep the papers in stacks and mark important pages with Post-its. I’m fairly sure that there may have even been colored Post-its involved, so, you know, it was very sophisticated.
At some point soon after this semester, one of the most memorable and valuable moments of my academic career occurred. A professor took me into her office to show me her filing system. She had a couple of boxes filled with notecards, and each notecard referenced a printed-out document (a letter, a newspaper article) filed neatly away in color-coded file folders. The cards were arranged chronologically, and the documents were arranged by person (if they were letters) or by the newspaper (if they were articles), etc. Her system was and is fairly standard: she could move by year (what happened in April 1878?) but she could also read through a person’s papers or the editorials of a particular newspaper.
It all seems obvious now, but at the time, this was a revelation. Stacks that had colonized my living room, be gone!
For my dissertation, my research involved a large collection of letters covering around 40 years and written by 30 or so people. While I had other documents as well, this was the bulk of my research. To organize it, I assigned each letter-writer a folder in which I filed his or her letters in chronological order. I also wrote a notecard for each letter – noting the date, the correspondents, and the topics of discussion – and I filed these cards chronologically. The act of making this filing system enriched my understanding of the evidence, and when it came time to revise — individual chapters and the entire manuscript — the system was invaluable.
But for various reasons, this amazing system doesn’t always work, and I find that this is the case for my current research.
- What if you don’t print out your documents because they’re saved as PDFs?
- How do you file or write one notecard for a 90-page pamphlet or 400-page book?
Computer programs like Zotero, Endnote, (see a Prof Hacker comparison of the two) and others try to replicate this system for a digital age, but while I want these research databases to work for me, and I’ve tried using them, I find that they don’t. I’ll explain why I think this is the case in the next post:
Part II: How I acquired all of those papers in the first place.
