Hey /r/AskHistorians,
I suspect this may be a naive question, or one where the answer is "go get a history degree" but I figure it wouldn't hurt to ask.
I'm a big spaceflight nerd and have decided to try to capture some of my enthusiasm in a podcast about NASA spaceflight history. It isn't anything rigorous and it's just for fun, but I want to do a good job. I've started reading some old NASA books and cruising around their history.nasa.gov website and it's a lot to take in. Do you have any advice for a history newbie on how to effectively intake and digest a large amount of information and come out the other end with a coherent and succinct idea of what happened?
So far my strategy has just been to read a bunch, then try to write down a few sentences that sum it up nicely. I also make a note of the sources I'm reading because while I don't plan on providing anything like a bibliography now, it seemed like a good idea in case I change my mind.
Any advice, cautions, or comments are extremely welcome! Thanks.
One piece of advice I would have is to not try to learn everything at once because you will make yourself crazy and probably not retain/remember most of the details. Pick one thing to focus on or one question that you would like to answer and then research just that for a while until you fully answer the question or understand the topic. I'm not a space exploration expert but maybe start with something smaller like, "Why was the Gemini capsule designed the way it was?" or "Why the first astronauts were test pilots" or something similar that interests you. The best thing about research like you are doing is that it already interests you so the research probably will be fun.
Good luck and I hope this helps!
You may find the handouts on historical reading and writing on this page useful. http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/cendy/histlinks.htm
Also, think about how you are organizing your notes. If you keep this up for awhile, you may very well have thousands of them, and that gets unwieldy in a word document. I use a simple database program (Eaglefiler), and know others who use Evernote and the standard citation managers such as Zotero.
In addition to summaries, it's worth noting down any punchy quotes that you think you'd want to use.
There will be a whole different set of advice if you want to get into primary source research (archives, interviews with people who worked on the space program).
I would mark your notes with subject tags as you go. When the time comes to write, you want to assemble the material by subject not by source. Also keep seperate files with a time line and lists of people that you can update as you go