Document Driven Research Methods Task 1
Welcome to Document-driven Research Methods!
Before we start analyzing some different research methods, we need to think about some fundamental questions. What is a document? What is document-driven research? What sort of methods might we use for documents? How can we select and explore our own document? Before you come to my workshop, I’d like you to complete the following “steps.” It will take around 10 hours to do all the prep.
You will need: an internet connection
Step 1: Reading
Reading the following articles will help you to think about answers to some of these questions. I’d like you to come to the workshop prepared to discuss the key arguments in Aurélien Bénel and Christophe Lejeune’s article, along with the Introduction in Gitelman’s book.
- Bénel, Aurélien & Lejeune, Christophe. “Humanities 2.0: Documents, interpretation and intersubjectivity in the digital age” International Journal of Web Based Communities. 5, 2019, pp. 562-576.
- Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Duke UP, 2014. (just the “Introduction: Paper Knowledge” chapter).
Step 2: Applying theory to documents
We’re going to be approaching the idea of documents through old magazines from the 1910s and 1920s.
After you’ve summarized the arguments from the reading above, please navigate to the following website: https://modjourn.org/journal/
Familiarize yourselves with some of the magazines on the site. Click on them. Open them. Think about how the definitions of documents from the above articles apply to these artifacts.
Now that you’ve had a look at the various documents (magazines) on the site, it’s time to start thinking about some of the research methods people have applied to these documents. To do this, please read the below article:
- Drouin, Jeffrey. “Close- and Distant-Reading Modernism: Network Analysis, Text Mining, and Teaching the Little Review.” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies:Special Issue Visualizing Periodical Networks , vol. 5, no. 1, 2014, pp. 110-135
Step 3: Choosing a document to analyze in the workshop
Now that you’ve started to think about how we read things “closely” and at a “distance”, pick one of the magazines from the modjourn site that you’d like to use as your “document.” Select a specific issue of the magazine to analyze. It might be one you like the look of, it might represent an interesting year e.g. 1914. Download the pdf file of the specific chosen issue and be sure to have it ready on your computer. For example, I’m choosing the issue of The Egoist from May 1st, 1914 here: https://modjourn.org/issue/bdr520584/
Step 4: Creating a database from the document
The next step is to look at how we can take down and use certain data about the document. To do this, we’ll construct a simple Excel spreadsheet containing information about the people who published in the magazine’s issue.
- Access the workshop’s group Excel file here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eyoL4pg7G5BQrVWqzIun6DLVrECK- fMma_yn8ALfm5M/edit?usp=sharing
- Add a new sheet by clicking the + sign at the bottom left of the file (see image below)
- When you’ve added your sheet, rename it by clicking the little green triangle to the right of “Sheet” and then “Rename” (image below). Your Sheet should be named in the following format: Magazine Title, Volume, Issue, Month, Day, Year (if issue or day of the month isn’t available don’t worry) For example: The Egoist Vol 9 Issue 1 May 1 1914
- Now, using the template sheet as your guide, enter the required information (Contributor, Title of Contribution, Genre of Contribution) for each contribution in the magazine you chose. It may pay not to use a magazine issue which has 200 contributors! Don’t just rely on the magazine’s content’s page-actually enter in the details for all the contributors in the pages. For the Genre of Contribution, please enter in one of the following: Poem, Play, Short story, Political opinion piece, Non-fiction essay, Editorial, Review. You can add a genre that’s not represented, but only if you’re certain it isn’t represented. If a pseudonym is used instead of an author’s name, just put it in as Contributor’s name e.g. RH. If a person contributes more than once, list all their contributions, not just one.
