Welcome back – from Reading Week and to blogging! I have some suggestions below to get you started (along with the standard set of prompts I created last semester). As you plan and write your post, remember that point of our research blog to practice our skills in developing and sharing results of our scholarly research, and in particular the methods of qualitative literary analysis. So in your 500-700 words, I look for the post to:

• Develop a research question or questions that address a high-level idea or issue;
• Explore the research question through analysis of a specific research site (a case-study),
• Discuss, as part of that analysis, specific examples, quotations, and other low-level details that you show / explain as illustrating the high-level ideas.
• Provide links to examples AND provide reporting expressions and citations.
• Connect, as always, in some explicit way, to the broad topic of “life narratives” and the issues and ideas we engage in ASTU

What could you write about?

• Return to our discussions of Facebook / social media, Humans of New York, PostSecret, and StoryCorps.
• Work with the reading from Carter, and/or the archives we are discussing on Tuesday (PARI, Mass Observation, and High Muck-a-Muck)
• Look ahead to the Rare Books’ archival collections we’ll start working with on Thursday: the Bamford family papers, Japanese Canadian research collection, Chung collection, Jack Shadbolt fonds, the Kosaburo Shimizu fonds, the Olive Allen Biller collection, the Langmann family papers, Gilean Douglas
• Other archives or archival-related materials: for example, you might be interested in this article, about the digitized archives of 19th coroner’s reports from the American south, which explores how they contain “hundreds” life narratives the coroner collected about his subjects. (I’m wondering: why did the coroner decide this was important work to do, at all?).
• And of course anything else that fits the criteria of being related (or relatable) to ASTU

While you’re here, another post I recommend: Zoe Gray, who took my ASTU class last year, blogged about how archives have used Tumblr to increase access, something that might be of interest to you as you think about your own archival projects. Check out her post for the academic study she cites as well as the many links she includes to archival Tumblers.

Posts are due Mon noon & comments (on THIS post) Tues by 9:30. For full credit on the comments you must comment on 3 separate blog due dates, so if you missed the January post you should comment on each of the next 3.

Archival research can be intimidating when you first start because it seems so different from “regular” research. And it does indeed have some particular challenges. To help you as you begin your research, I’ve put together some pointers for doing archival research.

Before you go into the archives:

• Review all the finding aids or fonds descriptions for the collections you’ll be choosing from. Which ones do you find most interesting? Begin with those papers, but make sure to look at more than one collection, because you can’t know what exciting stuff might be there.
• Think about what questions you have, based on your own interests, the scholarly readings we’ve done, or the goals of the Archives Project. Use these to guide your initial readings, but be open to discovering something new and taking that direction instead or in addition.

When you get to the archives

• If we aren’t meeting as a class, sign out 1 box from the materials assigned. If we are meeting as a group and have the materials already out for us, choose 1 box from the materials assigned.
• Open a Word doc or start notes on the purple pads RBSC provides. Use the finding aid or archival description (typically at the front of the box) to scan through the different materials available: based on what you hope to find or think about, what jumps out at you as most interesting? What else occurs to you as you scan this list that you’d like to check out? Write yourself a list of files to check out.
• Choose one. Immediately, write down the Collection / Fond, the Box number, and the file number you’ve chosen to work with. (You could also take a photo, but it’s a good practice to keep the notes and file info together in one document.)
• Start reading, carefully flipping through the pages (remembering to keep materials in the order you’ve found them).
• Draw on your skills in qualitative literary analysis: read these as texts. What makes them meaningful, and how, and to whom? Think about audience (original and archival), rhetorical structures, genres, functions, even literary devices. What patterns emerge, in the one collection and also across collections (e.g., how artists represent their work to their agents in correspondence)? What seems anomalous, why, and how? What intrigues you and you need more information about?
• Feel free to take photos of documents so that you can consult them later; just be sure your flash is off and the archive tag is included in the image.
• Don’t hesitate to call on the archival staff for help about archival questions. For historical or contextual information about the people, times, events etc related to your chosen archival material, use Google!
• General advice: Pace yourself, giving yourself time to look through multiple folders or collections if it’s your first time working with the materials. Explore. Be open to discovery. The goal is to find 5-6 documents that you’d like to talk about because they illustrate an idea, issue, or research problem you think needs addressing.