switchoffthestars replied to your post “things in history I care about: socks (vindolanda for roman socks!...”
I have historical socks info! In 2016 a pair of silk stockings was found in a 17th century shipwreck near Texel (in the Northsea), and people are trying to recreate them to better understand the way socks/stockings were made back then. But! the way they're doing that is asking people who are good at knitting to come together and knit a bunch of socks.
thank you for this historical sock fact
experimental archaeology is the best form of archaeology. can’t figure out how people did a thing? attempt to do the thing yourself. ta daaa now you know how they did the thing
I’m so sorry this has taken so long! At least we’re near the start of the new term now, so hopefully this will be helpful for people who are looking at their syllabi and considering that long research paper at the end.
This is a thing I’ve experimented with a lot over the years, since I’m a classical historian and sometimes it feels like all I do with my life is organize research papers. Bear in mind that my bias here is that I’m a classical historian, so I don’t know how much of this is going to translate to another discipline.
(Cut for length and pictures -- the latter of which is why I’m answering in a separate post, because the asks sometimes mess up my pictures.)
I use Word for everything, because I like Word, but a lot of my methods would work better in a program like Scrivener or OneNote or something similar. (Like, anything with tabs would be hugely helpful for this, but I am stubborn and don’t like change.) I also don’t use any citation software or Word’s citation maker; I always do it manually, and part of that has to do with my own control issues and part of that is just that I don’t like learning new things.
When I first start doing research for a paper, I start a Word doc called “books and articles read.” Whenever I finish reading a book or an article, I immediately put it into that doc exactly as I would cite it in a bibliography. I subdivide that doc into “books,” “articles (in anthologies)”, and “articles (from journals.” If I end up with other sources I put them into their own subdivisions. I also mark each entry with a shorthand symbol so that I can tell if I read the entire book, if I took notes from it, if I’ve already cited it, etc.
I’ll put books both in the BOOKS section and in the ARTICLES section, with the book bolded and then individuals chapters or articles cited as well.
If I have a series of books -- for me it was the Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series and the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC) -- that will actually get its own subheading before it breaks down like the others.
Loose articles just end up under their own subheading.
The reason I keep track of all these with the exact citations is because as I’m writing, I keep a separate document just for the bibliography. Whenever I cite something, I immediately go over to my books and articles read doc, copy and paste the citation, and drop it into my bibliography doc, then change the code on the books and articles read doc to note that I’ve cited it. This means that I don’t spend a lot of time later trying to put together the bibliography and hoping I haven’t missed something.
(You’ll note there’s some inconsistency here in capitalization -- when I put the initial list together I just capitalized as however it was published (UK and American styles differ), but it got standardized to American-style capitalization when I did my final bibliography.)
When it comes to my notes, I use a couple of different methods and a couple of different Word docs, as well as physical notebooks.
For my field, classical studies, I usually have three different types of sources: books, journal articles, and primary sources. I keep different Word docs for all of them, though I break books up into single author books and anthologies. The format is the same, though. In each document, I have subsections for every source, which I’ll start with the bibliography citation in bold. Then I’ll break the notes down by chapter and page number.
My notes tend to split pretty evenly between a brief summary of whatever I thought was relevant and a direct transcription.
Anthology notes look about the same as single-author notes, save that they’re broken down with the bibliography citation for both the book and the article/chapter.
For my thesis, I actually didn’t keep the bulk of my notes digitally -- I only typed them up when I wasn’t going to be able to keep the book. This is the first time that I kept the vast majority of my research in a physical notebook, and it worked out well enough for me that I’ll probably repeat it in the future.
When I’m reading for research, I go through a lot of post-it notes. A lot a lot. So many. (These ones specifically.) And I color-code by subject of what I’m marking -- for my thesis, it was
orange - academic discourse about imperialism/post-colonialism
yellow - secondary sources
I actually had two shades of yellow, one for in-text references and for bibliographic references
green - primary sources
pink - Roman imperialism
blue - Roman Britain
In the past I’ve also had a separate color for images/maps/etc., but that didn’t really come up this time. (One thing that also ends up happening is that I’ll run through some colors faster than others, so occasionally my beautiful color-coding scheme gets disrupted and I have to remember that, for example, Roman Britain is both blue AND purple. NOTE THIS TOO.)
While most of my thesis books were library books and thus have long since been returned, I do have a couple that I own and that I never pulled the post-it notes out of, so it ends up looking like this:
When I go to write up my notes, I use the first page to write down the title, author, and year of the book -- I don’t bother with the full citation because I’ve already put it into my “books and articles read” doc. Then I write down the color-coding scheme I used for the post-its.
Also pictured: STICKERS. (One per day/session of working, either research or writing.) In retrospect, I should have used the first page as a table of contents, and I’ll do that in the future. (Later I stopped leaving so much empty space on that first page.)
The second page I’ll use as a list of secondary sources to look up; when I’m reading, I’ll keep track of any references that look particularly interesting, and then I’ll write them up here so I can look them up at another point. On the third page I start actually keeping notes, and that includes
chapter title + author if different than editor (I think I later started including the page numbers)
brief summary of chapter
notes
I usually a highlighter to color-code just the page number reference, so I can flip quickly to it because I’ve post-it noted it. If it’s got a post-it note on it, then it gets a note in my notebook.
I put the author surname and publication year in the top corner of each page -- for anthologies, it is the editor name, not the author name.
Here are some things that I didn’t do this time, but I will in the future:
table of contents + page numbers
kept a master list of books/articles to look up -- because I split them by whatever book they were referenced in, I had a lot of crossover I wasn’t aware of and it was difficult to find stuff. I tried to cross them off whenever I looked them off, but I didn’t always catch something, especially if it was referenced in multiple places. And sometimes I didn’t bother to cross stuff up.
In the past I’ve kept this list in (yet another) Word doc, but this time I didn’t bother to do so, partially because I always had my notebook on me when I was at the university library and could easily look a book up.
My handwritten notes are much shorter than my typed notes -- it’s basically a short reference to the post-it, so I can immediately flip to that page in the book. If I'm not going to be able to hold onto the book for as long as I needed it, I’ll type up the notes. Basically: typing up the notes is so if I need to I can write the paper from the notes without looking at the actual source, handwriting them is so I can find what I’m looking for with the source to hand.
I don’t have any pictures of this because I didn’t use them for my thesis, but if I think I’m going to be using images (pictures, drawings, charts, maps, etc.) in my paper I’ll keep those in a separate doc as well with a full citation beneath each, and as I’m writing, if I reference them I’ll drop them into another doc rather than into the main body of my paper. (This is because I don’t want to deal with formatting images while I’m writing -- I’ll also normally keep all the images at the end of the paper, right before the bibliography, when I do final formatting, rather than putting them in the main body, but that’s personal preference and it may depend on your institution.)
I hope this is helpful! Not all methods will work for everyone, but I always think it’s interesting to look at how someone else does it.
translations/editions of táin bó cúailnge, like a normal person
45. What's something you wish you had more time for?
literally everything rn 💀💀 although it's not so much time i lack as energy and freedom from pain to use the time I've got. I haven't had the capacity to go to any quaker stuff for months and months though so that's the one that's really fallen off the bottom of the list
switchoffthestars replied to your post: If I wanted to write a fic based on the Ulster...
I highly recommend Fergus Kelly’s “Early Irish Farming” for food related stuff, though it isn’t really light reading (i mean… i used it as light reading before bed, but i’m one of those people who enjoys reading old irish law texts so). also doesn’t give you recipes or anything, but does give lots of info about what foods they had access to/used regularly
another good rec! one of these days i should probably actually read more of kelly than just flicking through to find one (1) thing now and again
switchoffthestars replied to your photo “It may seem strange to post such a Christmassy picture when it’s New...”
I mean honestly you can get away with it until jan 19th, if you say you do old calendar christmas (jan 7th) and christmas is until theophany (epiphany for non-orthodox?)
switchoffthestars replied to your post “Ah yes it’s a lovely morning to remember the time my 17 year old self...”
celtology is a perfectly fine word!! It's used in Dutch!! (Keltologie, keltoloog (=celtologist))
Thanks! That’s what I’ve always thought, since the term stands in German as well! (Keltologie) And it isn’t like Oxford has any problems using the term when discussing the history of the field. But when you’re 17 and being slapped down by a grad student with years more experience in the field than you, you don’t want to fight any more than necessary and so you go off to lick your wounds in private.
switchoffthestars replied to your photo “Moments before disaster… or at least, moments before I tipped over...”
Also I'm enjoying the book pics a lot! I don't have Instagram bc I'm 80 and don't understand all this newfangled media, but they always make me happy when I see them here
I’ll try and remember to cross-post them! Sometimes I forget because I post them on my way home from work or whatever. You can probably see them on Instagram even if you’re not logged in / don’t have an account. :)
switchoffthestars replied to your photo “Moments before disaster… or at least, moments before I tipped over...”
Those are great socks!! (I am a firm proponent of non-boring socks) (all socks should be fun, life's too short to wear socks that don't make you smile when you look at your feet)
Agreed. Then again, I went to matriculation formal wearing bright blue socks with goldfish on them...
