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Research methods — Irish Historical Studies rules

January 23, 2012 in Class Summaries, History at Queens

I’m still playing catch-up on these class summaries from last semester.Oh well. This is from Monday ..2011

One part of being a historian that I am not as wild about is following style rules when writing. I understand why it’s important, but it is rather aggravating nonetheless. Naturally, no one has yet decided on a universal historical style citation guide. Someone should, seriously.

In the States, Chicago style is quite common. On this side of the pond, I believe Oxford—or something called something approximately like Oxford—is common. At Queens? Irish Historical Studies.

Since you probably won’t ever have to follow I.H.S. rules, I’ll spare you the boring details. Basically, they are the rules for contributors to the Irish Historical Studies journal. Some make sense. Some do not. Failure to follow them results in marks being taken away. I’m pretty sure I.H.S. is convinced failure to follow them will result in the collapse of the island.

If you are in the states, here are a few things you might find interesting (not all apply to I.H.S. specifically):

  • This side of the Atlantic prefers single quotation marks to double marks. Thus ‘To be or not to be’ rather that “To be or not to be”. Crazy. Quotations within quotations then become double marks. Logical, really, but confusing as heck when you still use the American system and simultaneously use the British system. My apologies if I switch in my writing here.
  • Capitals, according to I.H.S. are of the devil. Do not use capital letters.
  • Never abbreviate journal titles, except of course, I.H.S. ‘Cause it’s special.
  • Generally place a period after abbreviations, except those abbreviations which you don’t need to 1
  • For example: ‘eds’ is ok. ‘ed’ is not. You’ll get in trouble for just putting ‘ed’ down. 2
  • Never break up a citation with a period. Commas. Commas are your friend.
  • There is a significant difference between ‘p.’ and ‘pp’. And ‘p’ is incorrect while ‘pp’ is correct.

If for some reason you need to know I.H.S. rules, I’d suggest you visit their website: http://www.irishhistoricalstudies.ie/. And you can download the rules for contributors there.

Ok, ok in truth the rules are good to have. I feel like using a pretty specific journal for the rules might be, well, specific. But rules are good. And this class period was quite helpful to me to understand them better.

This is a part of my History at Queens series. I am writing on what I’m learning in my modules and as a part of my own research. Hope you enjoy!

  1. Confused? Yeah, it’s a bit convoluted ↩
  2. In truth, it generally is whether or not the abbreviation is truly an abbreviation or a contraction. Contractions=no punctuation. Abbr.=well, you see :) ↩

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Quantitative History and Statistics — Research Methods 31.10.11

January 14, 2012 in Class Summaries, History at Queens

Historians aren’t generally known for liking numbers, if not for being downright scared of them. Which is probably why we discussed them on a chilly Halloween evening! In all seriousness, this was a good class, numbers and statistics are important in the study of history.

If you don’t believe history has any quantitative elements, go through your nearest history book, article, or whatever text you might have and underline any quantitative words. You’ll probably find a lot, even if they don’t seem directly connected with words. Look for words like growth, many, primarily, for some, increasingly/decreasingly, remote, popular, one of, mass, smaller, and so on. Our lecturer, to make his point, gave us a short excerpt which we underlined those quantitative words.

Some historiographical schools of thought use statistics and economics as as significant part of their analysis. Can you guess which one I’m thinking of at the moment? Yup–Marxism! Still, their use does not have to be confined to Marxists alone. We discussed several advantages to using quantitative history.

Downsides can include:

  • Imposing to rigid categories onto history
  • Loss of detail (summarizing data necessarily involves a loss of data)
How historians might intigrate numbers and statistics into their projects will of course vary by project. Certainly, at the very least, they ought to be aware of the words they use, as mentioned at the beginning. Tables and charts are probably one of the primary ways to present data, and we discussed formatting and uses for different types of charts. It isn’t anything I didn’t learn in my undergraduate stats course, but a good refresher anyway.

As with a lot of things, I think it is important for the historian to use numbers and statistics where appropriate, just as they ought to at least consider the impact of memory, gender, culture, and so forth in their historical analysis.

This is a part of my History at Queens series. I am writing on what I’m learning in my modules and as a part of my own research. Hope you enjoy!

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Research Methods — visiting the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI)

January 12, 2012 in Class Summaries, History at Queens

One of the fun, and difficult, challenges of studying here is a rather new lingo experience. Take for instance ‘PRONI’. When I first heard professors talking about ‘PRONI’ I had no idea what they were talking about. Should you find yourself in a similar situation, I’ll save you the learning curve. In short, it is the national archives of Northern Ireland, and stands for ‘Public Records Office of Northern Ireland’. You can visit their website here. In addition to the online catelogue, the website also has some material avaliable online–great for someone researching family history!

Lingo and language difficulties aside, one of the things I really like about the MA programme at Queens is the practical experience we gain. This class was no exception. We were given a guided tour of PRONI. Located in the Titanic Quarter 12, it is in a brand-new building, which just opened in the past couple of years. The records themselves, however, date back to the 1600s. As a repository, PRONI holds both public records, as you might have guessed, but also holds records from individuals and corporations–some of which are public-accessable. All members of the public have access to PRONI and public records. 3 One must register first, however, and get a card to access the facilities. Requesting documents is done via computer, and records are delivered to a reading room for researchers. This process, supposedly, takes around 15-20 minutes.

I will undoubtedly spend many hours at PRONI conducting research. For research in Northern Ireland, it is pretty much inescapable. Not that I have any complaints, it looks like a pretty decent resource and place to spend time.

This is a part of my History at Queens series. I am writing on what I’m learning in my modules and as a part of my own research. Hope you enjoy!

  1. As the name implies, the Titanic Quarter is home to the dock where the Titanic was built, and where it launched ↩
  2. Hmm, just had a thought, perhaps I should write some about the geography of Belfast? ↩
  3. Though some documents have restrictions, often they must be over 30 years old to be open and public-accessible without prior government approval ↩

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Historiography 28.10.11 – Cultural History

November 9, 2011 in Class Summaries, History at Queens

Cultural history is yet another complicated, and confusing, historiographical theme. I found this class to be rather challenging also because our lecturer asked not only rather vague but unclear questions. And since the class was discussion based, it was difficult to answer the questions when you didn’t know exactly what was being asked. Nevertheless, it was an interesting class. The interest in cultural history can be traced back to the Marxists. As I mentioned in the Marxist class summary, Marxist history and started an interest in ‘the common man’ in the idea of ‘history from the bottom up’. Speaking very broadly, this flowed into ‘social history’ which is a very structure list view of examining history in encompasses many more specific historiographical fields. ‘Cultural history’, on the other hand, is a poststructuralists response to social history. This shift occurred during the ‘60s and ‘70s.

 

There are essentially two approaches to cultural history. The first could be labelled the ‘history from below’ or ‘humanist’ approach. Historians in this school of thought are particularly interested in giving agency or ‘humanizing’ their research subjects. A good and well known example of this can be found in the book The Cheese and the Worms by Ginzburg, which is an approach that can be labelled as ‘micro history’. Ginzburg focuses on one man who’s tried during the inquisition. Essentially, this approach, rather than discussing society at the time or perhaps the inquisition broadly (i.e. a top-down approach), focuses on only one man and allows the reader to draw conclusions about the larger societal history.

 

The second approach to cultural history could be called either ‘discourse history’ or ‘literary studies’. Historians in this school thought are heavily influenced by Michael Foucault. The words ‘discourse’ and ‘literary’ art at the office to the heavily postmodern views of this approach. The premise of this school thought is that we are products of our language, our culture, and societal symbols. Historians, therefore, will focus on a symbol or events to get ‘layers of significance’ in an approach that is known as ‘thick description’. This approach is not interested in individuals, rather it is interested in discourses. This is certainly quite a contrast to the first approach which is interested in individuals.

 

This is an important historiographical theme to study because it is currently the dominant form of thinking for most historians. Personally, I probably prefer the first approach though I do think there is value in the second approach. In general, as with any historiographical approach, there are pros and cons and I think it is better to draw from multiple ideas and schools of thought rather than depending on one school of thought.

 

This is a part of my History at Queens series. I am writing on what I’m learning in my modules and as a part of my own research. Hope you enjoy!

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Research Methods 24.10.11 — Oral History

November 8, 2011 in Class Summaries, History at Queens

This was a rather interesting class period. We had the same lecturer as we did for memory in historiography. And no surprise, oral history and memory are two similar topics. Oral history is a very interesting field because it, at least at first glance, seems much harder to work with and much less reliable than printed sources. What we must remember, however, is that all sources can and do have a bias. They ‘remember’ what they want and they ‘forget’ what they want. Even government sources can be inaccurate. I know that must be a shocking thought.

One current scholar in this field argues that people, when they remember and share, are ‘composing’ the subjectivities of their story [1. Penny Summerfield, `Culture and composure: creating narratives of the gendered self in oral history interviews’, Cultural and Social History, Volume 1, Number 1, 2004]. Her idea is that people, when they share their story to someone else, retell that story in a way ‘as to produce a version of the self that the teller can live with in a relative psychic ease.’ This is not to say they are inaccurate, but rather that they are a created, structured representation that the person chooses to share. This, I think, could easily apply to other kinds of sources such as letters or diaries.

I think to do oral history, and really probably history in general, you must lose a desire to find the pure, undefiled facts. The focus has to be on the story and on the ideas. Sources and stories can be inaccurate, altered, or simply carefully composed, and we may never know everything, but we can learn not only from what is shared, but from what is not. For example, in class we listened to two different oral history interviews. One of a elderly woman who grew up in Belfast in the 1930s and the other by a man growing up in the 1950s.The subject of both interviews was how their families ‘made ends meet’ during hard times. The difference between the two narratives was striking, the woman’s story was much more positive, while the man was much more negative, to summarize both very, very simply. We as a class discussed why. Was it gender differences? Generational differences? Age differences? There’d probably be a great paper examining even just those two interviews.

This is a part of my History at Queens series. I am writing on what I’m learning in my modules and as a part of my own research. Hope you enjoy!

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