As part of my Critical Thinking and Writing class, I get to put on my investigator hat and research something about our school. You might ask, “well, what is that something?” That, my friend, is a very good question.
It’s not easy to pull research topics out of thin air. It takes some time and a well thought out idea of your interests. Who wants to spend hours pouring over documents on a topic they have no interest in? No one. So that is where I started. What am I actually interested in? What more do I want to learn about this school? That’s when it came to me.
Greek life!
Better question, how did I get here and how am I supposed to proceed? With the help of Tirabassi, I was able to build a roadmap of what my research journey would look like (no, she did not personally help me, she just wrote a really neat book about research. Check it our here!). She created these points:
- Principle of Selectivity: the researcher’s understanding of how archivists select and omit artifacts for a given collection.
- Principle of Cross-Referencing: the practice of searching across documents for contextual traces that clarify an archival document’s rhetorical situation or that confirm, corroborate, clarify, or contradict a fact or point cited in a given document.
- Principle of Categorization: the development of keywords and finding aids that help researchers access information in the archive.
- Principle of Closure: the researcher’s understanding that there are inherent gaps in archival records and that while the archive is complex and rich, it cannot be searched exhaustively. Finding the endpoint or knowing when to make an exit is an essential part of archival research.