As of last Wednesday, you should have narrowed your research interests down to two topics, and very soon you should be deciding (based on feedback you received from me and other students) which of those topics you want to pursue. Having a topic is not the same thing as having a research question (which we will talk about more in class this week. But you should at least know by now which communities or people you are most interested in learning more about, which means that you can begin the research process:
Find information. Gather as much reliable information as you can about your community. But when evaluating information (especially information found on the Internet), consider its source and its publication context before considering it reliable. I also strongly recommend that you visit (or revisit) Fondren’s Library Guide on American History and set up an appointment with Anna Shparberg, our subject librarian for history, to see if she can assist you in locating sources.
Take notes. At this early stage of the project, your primary task will be to assemble facts about your topic (who? what? when? where? why?). It’s a good idea to make notes about what you find (e.g., a timeline, a list of major figures, etc.), being sure to mark down where you found particular pieces of information.
Dig deeper. For many communities, you may have to rely on secondary sources for your part of your research. But you also need to locate primary sources that were created by community members or contemporaries of the communities you are interested in. Whenever you can, it’s a good idea to gather or make note of possible primary sources, in case you need those sources to answer questions later down the road. If you need help identifying potential primary sources, talk with me.
Wikipedia Assignment
Your next graded assignment in this class is due by noon on October 15.
For this assignment, you will be responsible for beginning or improving an entry on your community for Wikipedia. (For more information about what Wikipedia is, read this.) Last week, we talked about the technical details of contributing to Wikipedia and improved the entry on Rosabeth Moss Kanter. For this assignment, you must draft between 200 to 300 words to add to Wikipedia, depending on the amount of research you have done and the amount of information about your community already on Wikipedia.
If there is already a Wikipedia entry about your community, you have several options. Ideally, you can expand the entry by adding an additional 200-300 words of new material (for the sake of comparison, the paragraph we added about Kanter was about 140 words). Alternatively, you can satisfy this assignment by making significant revisions or corrections to the entry. ("Significant" revisions, of course, will mean more than adding a few words or changing one line.) If both of these options prove impossible, you can also consider writing an entry on Wikipedia that will link to your community’s main entry. For example, is there a particular biographical figure who was important in your community who does not have a Wikipedia entry? You could write an entry on him/her and then modify the community’s entry to link to your new entry.
When you are writing a Wikipedia entry, be sure to consider your audience. You should approach the entry in the same way you would approach writing an encyclopedia entry or a news article. In both cases, you know that you will have a large audience, but you cannot assume that your reader will know very much about the topic. In contrast to your final essay that you will turn in at the end of the semester, which will aim to persuade someone of your thesis, your main goal in writing or revising a Wikipedia entry is to inform.
Since Wikipedia has a life of its own outside the confines of this class, you will also have to make sure that your entry conforms to the standards that the Wikipedia community has established to govern its work. For more on these standards, be sure to read Wikipedia’s general editing principles and refer to the editing tutorial.