Early in graduate school, I remember hearing someone lament that few faculty ever discussed their teaching. While this might still be the case, it has fortunately not been true for me: I took a pedagogy class in grad school, and I frequently attend workshops on teaching, as well as engage in informal discussions with friends. Additionally, the subject arises on academic blogs, some of which are devoted to discussing teaching.
As advice about pedagogy has so wonderfully proliferated, I find myself running up against a new problem: the mysterious research process. What do people do when they “go to the archives?” I know that not everyone does what I do: quickly read and then transcribe documents until my fingers cramp. I can’t say that this is efficient work. I have spent hours reading and transcribing one nineteenth-century diary while another scholar at work in the same archive zipped through an entire pile of documents, snapping pictures with their digital camera. Of course, that isn’t the only change technology has wrought on archival research. For much of my research, I don’t even need to go to archives anymore since the pamphlets, books, and even letters have been digitized. Right click. Save as. Done.
My goals for this blog:
1. To think about my own and others’ processes of conducting research and how different pathways of obtaining archival sources (the real manuscript collection; microfilm; digital platforms) impact this process.
2. To think about how scholars organize all of this information to best serve their writing.
3. To provide a place to discuss different approaches to research methods and to give students just beginning a research project a kind of sounding board for the highs and lows of research. Since I’m teaching a research seminar this semester (Spring 2012), I hope this can be a place for them to see the “craft of research” in progress, and to see how researchers face challenges and find solutions.
