Welcome, one and all, to the eleventh (yes I'm still counting) installment of Monday Methods, where we discuss methodology relating to the human past. This week's question is a fairly broad one:
How do you organise your research?
This is explicitly aimed at as many people who work with the human past as possible, be you an archaeologist, historical linguist, historian, anthropologist, or part of any other subject that primarily studies the human past. This is also asked with more than one kind of answer in mind- you might want to talk about how you organise your notes, you might want to talk about how you go about reading through information on a subject, you might want to talk about what you consider good vs insufficient levels of research, you might want to talk about using repositories of knowledge like archives and libraries.
Whatever aspect of this question you'd like to talk about, it'll all be interest, and also highly informative for everyone reading.
Here are the upcoming (and previous) questions, and next week's question is this: How has AskHistorians changed or influenced your approach to your field?
My most important thing I learned is citation management. I use Zotero, but some other people use other things. This way if I read an article I can automatically save it in a place where I will have it forever. If you don't know what I am talking about (and do any kind of academic research, even as an undergraduate), watch this three minute video explaining it.
I tend to write by surrounding me with a stack of books and just to grind it out. I am usually reading multiple books on a single subject for a specific project (or a specific part of a project), so I have been dog earring them and putting stickies in them and underlining and things like that. I occasionally type up notes, but not generally. I find I can keep a lot of stuff in my head, I think more than the average person, so I find that this works fairly well for me, because if I need a quote, I can usually remember approximately where it is.
As for ideas, I have a big google doc just called "ideas", which includes ideas for probably two dozen papers or books. I obviously won't end up writing them all, but sometimes I'll just read something and write up a paragraph or a page (or even just tag a couple of quotes) on one of the potential projects there. Having them written down somewhere lets me think about them a lot--so like, when I'm out walking my dog, I might be thinking about the paucity of the term "fundamentalism" or the "double domestication" of Turkish Islam, which lets those ideas develop, and for me, making the connections and setting the skeleton is the part that takes time, reading and writing can be binged through. When a project is definitely going to get done, it moves from the Google doc to a word document in Dropbox and keep tinkering on it in my head. Often their will be two documents, like "Nationalism" and "Nationalism notes", with nationalism notes containing cut bits and ideas and citations and sketchy pieces that may or may not be into the other paper.
how you go about reading through information on a subject.
As an amateur with an interest in many different areas of history, How would I find the best academic-type sources of these different areas. I suppose & from this how should I go about refining my interests to one or two areas? How do I go about finding niche subject area? How did you find yours?
I normally don't take notes while I'm reading, although when I do, I use an outline format. That outline focuses on sections within the book or article I'm reading, and I mainly use it to summarize that section in three sentences or less. So, for example, I'm currently reading Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China's Great Leap Forward and Famine. I just finished the section about women's radicalism, and if I were taking notes, they would go like this:
However, when I have to write essays or whatnot, where I need to make an argument, I always write an outline. I usually organize it by topics I want to address, with my subcategories being quotes from sources I want to use and the relevant citation alongside it so that I don't lose track.
Citation management is vital, I use Mendeley and it's been godsend. I've also moved away from using my phone's camera to take pictures and have started using a scanner app to scan pages. It makes organizing them later on far easier.
Read once to get the gist, go over it again and take notes. I do almost everything in LaTeX since that's where it's going to end up eventually anyway. I've also started doing more stuff in NoSQL so that I can quickly search and tag and go nuts with the data structure, but this is more for core stuff, like taking big-picture notes.
The other nice thing with doing it in latex is that it's purely structural, and is its own stand-alone outline. I can do in and reorganise later, or just toss it into a presentation or paper or whatever else without having to worry about the details.
The other non-LaTeX way I do it is massive spreadsheets. I can't think of a paper/presentation I've done in the past two years that didn't involve a huuuge spreadsheet of all the core data. It's a good way to do some quick number crunching as well as visually spotting patterns that may be pretty darn informative.
I have a really bad habit of gold-plating. I'm working on that, but not very hard, since it's also a nice way to keep me from getting too bored with the data.
As for reading, I binge and just read everything I can get my hands on. Usually the topics are specialised enough that that's reasonable in a week.
As for citation management, I actually hate every method I've ever tried. I'm planning on just coding my own for dealing with bibtex files, but just haven't had the time. I have Papers on my computer, which is nice, but I never got around to fixing the data on about 2000 pdfs that I've got sitting around, and any program that's out there is pretty much total crap when it comes to sources in Chinese, independent of whether or not OCR has been done.