Writing a Historiography

Historiographies are historical analyses of the historical scholarship written about a given subject. Rather than just identifying gaps in a scholarly conversation, historiographies analyze how that historical literature has been produced and how it has changed over time. Writing a historiography gives you the chance to make a historical argument about how the knowledge in your field has developed and evolved. However, approaching a whole new field of literature as an undergraduate researcher can be overwhelming. Here are some strategies I’ve used to parse historical literature and write historiographies for my independent work. 

Shelves filled with books in Firestone Library.
I start my historiographies in Firestone looking for a wide range of literature. Photo credit: Denise Applewhite.
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A Guide to Tackling a Research Journal

Whether you’re jumping onto the wagon of a research project or are pursuing a research assignment in a course, professors will often assign readings of journal articles as a way to familiarize students with ongoing research in the field. However, for newcomers to a topic, tackling the understanding of a literature review can often be difficult with the influx of new vocabulary and complex, dense information on the topic all at once. Here are some tips on how you can tackle the difficulty of journal reading. 

Picture of someone writing. that is meant to represent annotations while dissecting a research journal.
Reading a research journal and understanding its key points can be achieved with just a few tips of advice! 
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Writing a Literature Review? Some Tips Before You Start

Writing the literature review section for a scientific research article can be a daunting task. This blog post is a summary of what I have personally found to best help when writing about scientific research. I hope some of these tips can help make the process an easier and more fulfilling experience!

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