Prior to attending University, the concept of creating a contribution to knowledge was practically meaningless. In the high school environment, the work being undertaken is rarely considered beyond the context of the classroom it is created in. Therefore, creating knowledge means, at best, accumulating it within one’s own mind. During the last two terms of ASTU, however, the continued stressing of the “so what?” and the knowledge contributions it requires has truthfully changed how I perceive this integral part of scholarly work. To illustrate this transformation in understanding, I point to my group’s work with the Gilean Douglas Fonds during our time in the Rare Books and Special Collections here at UBC. For it was in this project, with its use of primary documents not found elsewhere and a publicly available end product with no pre-existing match, that I realized that making a contribution to knowledge that may actually hold some significance on a larger scale is possible.

This shift in thought was a process. Our work in the archives was less the beginning of this thought as it was the culmination of that process. With the introduction to scholarly writing ASTU provided me from the beginning of term one, the need for an identified gap in the state of knowledge (and with it an identified contribution to that SOK) was evident. To contribute in a new way to the state of knowledge, that is, the state of knowledge as seen by scholars across the globe, was a daunting yet exhilarating task. However, the state of knowledge we outlined in our assignments was informed by only a limited selection of scholarly voices and thus we were not quite contributing in the new way we framed our papers to appear as. The state of knowledge was, in a way, hypothetical, and as such so were our contributions to it.

Archival work proved different. It presented us with primary sources seen in few enough places to be investigated in a reasonable amount of time so as to be able to assert that the gap we are claiming exists truly does exist. The video my group and I produced is the only video that appears on YouTube when “Gilean Douglas” is searched: it is a contribution available to the public and potentially useful to other scholars or interested others.

A scholarly investigation of any kind has no purpose if not to contribute to what knowledge already exists. ASTU did not teach me this. What ASTU did in addressing the concepts of the knowledge gap and contribution is allow for me to consider myself a scholar. In a sense, the incorporation of a more personal reflective note for this post is an accurate representation of my argument: this year introduced me to the responsibilities and methods of the scholar, but the biggest change was thinking of myself as one.

References

Douglas, Gilean fonds. University of British Columbia Library Rare Books and Special Collections, Vancouver, Canada.