RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT #1: Project Description
Due: Monday, January 31, in class
REMEMBER: CLASS MEETS IN CITI, in the Library
Assignment: On a sheet of paper, please type the following:
1. List your General Topic
2. Come up with a more specific Research Question (one sentence)
3. Write 1 paragraph describing how you will answer this question
4. Append a list of one primary and one secondary source appropriate
to your question.
Remember: all of these may well change in the next few weeks, but I'd
like to see you try to flesh out a project as soon as possible.
Explanation of the Assignment:
1. General Topic:
By and large these are the sorts of things we have been discussing
in our individual conferences: judicial battles, the nobility and sanctity,
Christine of Pisan, etc., etc. Here I am asking for your topic -
it is necessarily descriptive.
2. Research Question:
Every historian begins her/his research with a question. The
question helps to determine what you hope to uncover about your general
topic. Your topic may be judicial battles, but, as your professor
will probably say to you, "What about judicial battles?" In other words,
what are you hoping to find out about your topic? It is important
to have a research question (or perhaps one or two questions) before starting
to do your research, or else you won't know what to look for. Keep
in mind, too, that it is very common for your question to change as you
do research. You may start out asking the question "What role did
Christine de Pisan assign to peasant women?" You may well find, however,
that 97% of Christine's work addresses aristocratic women and you thus
have to modify your question accordingly.
Keep in mind that there are several kinds of questions. The weakest questions require a description for their answer. Hence the question "What happened in medieval judicial battles?" requires only that you find some texts about judicial battles and report back about them. In a way, such a question is more suited to journalism (at least certain kinds of journalism - no offense to journalists, BTW!) than it is to history. A second, more impressive question is one that requires analysis in answering it. This question, "What does the medieval practice of judicial battle tell us about the aristocracy's attitudes towards justice, peace, and warfare?", clearly requires you to do more than simply file a report; it requires you to think about the meaning of your topic to particular people in particular circumstances. This is the stuff of history (and, incidentally, of editorial pages ...). Try to make your Research Question an analytical one.
Your research question is something that you should keep in the forefront of your mind for the entire semester. Constantly ask yourself "Why am I reading [whatevever source]? What am I looking for?" Your research question will guide your reading appropriately.
3. Brief Description of the Project
Explain to me how you think you will pursue the research question you
have just asked. You might discuss the kinds of sources you know
(or hope) are available, and suggest some preliminary conclusions to your
question. I only need a short paragraph here.
4. A List of Two Sources
Please provide the bibliographic information for one primary source
and one secondary source that you feel will be relevant to your topic.
Should you be at a loss for sources, you might consult the bibliography
in Bouchard, or you might use Jaclyn, or you might come talk to me.
If you are having trouble keeping primary and secondary sources straight,
consult the handout I distributed in week one, or check out my website
(I have much more on the distinctions between primary and secondary sources
on the page for my History 221 class - click
here).
A tip on formulating Research Questions:
It may help in formulating your Research Question to work through the
following sequence of questions.
1. Name your topic:
"I am studying
[topic]
,"
2. Imply your question:
"because I want to find out who/how/why ________________,"
3. State the rationale for
the question and project:
"in order to understand how/why ___________________."
Words of Wisdom: Make Use of Notecards
Make sure you are well stocked with notecards. Notecards are
the researcher's best friend. I find it best to extrapolate a concept
or topic from the quotation you are making note of and record it in the
upper left corner. Try to be consistent in coming up with categories.
In the upper right, you might note either the type of source (primary v.
secondary), or something more specific (like the genre of the source).
The point of a notecard is not to copy down lots of information - that
would be wasting your time. The point of a notecard is to construct a reminder
to yourself of sources that contain evidence relating to a particular topic/concept.
Then when you sit down to write your paper, you can collect all your notecards
and set them out before you; as you set out to write each section, you
can pull all the notecards pertaining to the section at hand. It
will save you lots of time flipping through books or large, unorganized
notebooks. See Barzun and Graff, pp. 21-29, for helpful hints on
how to take notes with a notecard.