History: History - research methods

A document analysis is an analysis of a primary source. Although, technically speaking, these are not short essays; they should include a beginning, middle and an end as well as be consistently referenced throughout. 

There are four main aspects to a document analysis:
1    Origin
2    Content Analysis
3    Historical Context
4    Evaluation

Find out more from this guide from USW Study Skills.

Further reading:

• Tosh, John, The pursuit of history: aims, methods and new directions in the study of history (Florence: Routledge 2015), especially Chapter 5 "Using the resources"
• Weller, Toni, History in the Digital Age (Abingdon: Routledge 2013).

Definition:

"The study of the writing of history, although the term is sometimes also used to denote the range of historians’ writings on a particular theme"
Alun Munslow, A history of history (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 52.

Your historiographical assignments should include:

• a specific topic you are going to explore
• main authors and schools of thought about that topic
• main arguments and counterarguments
• a critical synthesis of all arguments

A step-by-step guide on creating a historiography can be found here.

Find out more from this guide from USW Study Skills.

Further reading:

• Bentley, Michael, ed. Companion to historiography, (New York: Routledge, 1997).
• Bentley, Michael, Modern historiography: an introduction, (New York: Routledge, 1999).
• Duara, Prasenjit, Viren Murthy and Andrew Sartori, eds. A companion to global historical thought, (Malden: John Wiley and Sons, 2014).

A review of an academic book/journal article is mainly concerned with weighing up what the publication tells us about a subject in a particular period of time. So, it needs to include:

• A summary of the key points made by the author(s).
• A critical assessment of those points in terms of what they tell us about the past or at least that particular version of the past.

Find out more from this guide from USW Study Skills.

Further reading:

• Hartley, James 'Reading and Writing Book Reviews across the Disciplines',  Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57, 9, (2006), 1194–1207
• Toor, Rachel. 'Why Bother Writing Book Reviews?', The Chronicle of Higher Education. 58, 31, (2012)