This week, ending in March 27th, 2014:
Today's thread is for open discussion of:
History in the academy
Historiographical disputes, debates and rivalries
Implications of historical theory both abstractly and in application
Philosophy of history
And so on
Regular participants in the Thursday threads should just keep doing what they've been doing; newcomers should take notice that this thread is meant for open discussion only of matters like those above, not just anything you like -- we'll have a thread on Friday for that, as usual.
One part of the writing and research cycle:
While writing, notice a hole in your argument; you need to know about relatively obscure topic X to plug that hole.
Search academic databases for published work on X.
Find very little of any quality.
Wonder, perhaps no one has written about X.
Think, "no, of course someone has written about X! You'd better find it, or you're going to look awfully silly at that conference/when your adviser points out the problem/when reviewers read this!"
Stress about it, browse reddit in frustration.
Return to step 1.
This week, X = medieval baking methods. Did they use sponges? Ferments? Straight dough methods? I've recently learned that they purchased yeast regularly (since it's listed in their allowance under the Assize), but I can find no good descriptions of their baking methods, just their guild organizations, the laws regulating them, the various names for medieval bread, its prices, bread and grain riots, the moral economy but nothing about how they actually made it. I need to know this for the one paragraph in which I want to mention this. This is a vital piece of information for like 150 words out of a 10,000 word chapter. How could no one have written a social history of medieval bakers? Surely some graduate student wrote this c. 1930, and got published in some obscure journal, right? I'd better get back to searching.
I am kind of curious, what languages do you need for your field? Certainly there is individual variation, but if someone were to ask what the typical set of languages you need is, what would you say?
Classical archaeology is generally Greek, Latin, Germany, French and Italian, although this shifts around a bit depending on what region you work in (someone working in Spain in particular will probably favor Spanish over Italian).
I've always wondered about the history of the Children's Crusade. How did it get into historical canon and how was it removed?
I took part in the ritual holding of Sunset Limited by Richard J. Orsi this morning. The group then launched into a full-fleged discussion of how many footnotes/endnotes are too many? How did Dr. Orsi manage to get the University of California Press to include 168 pages of endnotes? The professor leading the discussion retold a story about meeting Dr. Orsi at a conference and discussing his publication.
The group of students did not come to a conclusion regarding how many footnotes/endnotes are too many. Would anyone like to weigh in on this matter from personal publishing experience?