Diary: working methods

I would like to comment on a few points that Thomas makes in "Diary: working methods".

Thomas states:  “It never helps historians to say too much about their working methods. For just as the conjuror’s magic disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done, so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if readers learn everything about how exactly their books came to be written. Only too often, such revelations dispel the impression of fluent, confident omniscience; instead, they suggest that histories are concocted by error-prone human beings who patch together the results of incomplete research in order to construct an account whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence.”

·         I don’t think it’s so much about the magic as it is about what future readers can learn about the research methods and/or the authors’ work.  This is especially important for two reasons when one examines a paper like Hartel’s “Managing documents at home for serious leisure: A case study of the hobby of gourmet cooking”:

1.      Hartel claims that her project provides an original conceptual framework and research method for the study of information in personal spaces such as the home, and describes information phenomena in a popular, serious leisure, hobby setting.  Having no existing framework to rely on makes transparency important.

2.       If it is true that we can only see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, then Hartel sharing her methods for coding to describe information phenomena in the home (table 1, page 855), will only aid future researchers, especially when Hartel is working with an original conceptual framework.

Thomas states:  “In his book on The Footnote, Anthony Grafton quotes a letter by the great Swiss historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt, reporting that he had just cut up his notes on Vasari’s Lives into 700 little slips and rearranged them to be glued into a book, organized by topic.  From this practice of making notes on separate slips of paper there emerged what became the historian’s indispensable tool until the electronic age: the card index.”  

This quote reminded me of Luker’s use of index cards for interview questions.  She first starts by writing down every single question she wants answers to on separate cards and then rephrasing it into jargon free and accessible language to use during the interview.  After this step begins the clumping: sorting the index cards by topic outline and areas of interest and arranging the questions as “closely as possible to an approximation of natural language” (Luker, 2008);

 

·       Marginalia:  what’s not to love!  Every time I think of marginalia, I think of paper shortages, and this always fondly and sadly reminds me of poor Bakhtin who used his research notes and his manuscript as rolling paper.  I cannot imagine our loss.

Works Cited

Hartel, J. (2010). Managing documents at home for serious leisure: A case study of the hobby of gourmet cooking. Journal of Documentation, 66(6), 847-874. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7723987]

Luker, K. (2010). Salsa dancing into the social sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (ISBN 9780674048218)

Thomas, K. 2010. Diary: working methods. London Review of Books, 32(11), 36-7. [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary]