Typically, when we hear the terms hunting and gathering, we think of our distant ancestors foraging through forests. But this is not the hunter-gatherer I am referring to. I am talking about archival research hunter-gatherers who instead scour libraries and databases.
Source: Giphy
This idea of archival research hunter-gatherers comes from an article we read in my Critical Thinking and Writing class. In this article, “What Is It We Do When We Write Articles Like This One – And How Can We Get Students to Join Us?” Michael Kleine proposes a heuristic to help students who are writing research papers.
Let Me Break It Down For You
Source: Giphy
Kleine claims that writing is
- Strategic – “researchers/writers need to collect data and write with an established and focused sense of their goal” (24)
- Heuristic – researchers/writers “need to accommodate and consider unexpected data and insights that are discovered during the process”
To simplify this concept, he constructs the metaphor of primitive hunters and gatherers. “A hunter finds what he is looking for; a gatherer discovers what might be of use” (Kleine 25).
He then breaks down the research and writing process even further into four steps:
- Collecting data
- Sifting through data rhetorically (determining what is relevant/irrelevant)
- Seeking patterns
- Translating (writing)
How This Applies to Me
When I first started my research in the archives, my goal was to find information about SCU in the 1980s; this was my hunt. However, I didn’t exactly succeed in finding this. Instead, I found the Pocket Profile which lead me down a completely different route and into new information; this was my gathering.
But then, I began a new hunt as I formulated a new research question with the goal of finding information about the impact of Title IX on women’s sports. This time, I succeeded in finding information as well as finding new pathways to alternate subjects for more gathering. I found this hunter-gatherer relationship to be cyclical and complementary.
No Theory is Perfect
Even though I found Kleine’s metaphor of hunting and gathering extremely helpful, I did notice some limitations to his segmentation of the writing/research process. I found it to be a little restrictive as “the coding was not capable of capturing the complexity of what” I had done.
For example, I found that my research process did not proceed in the linear fashion that Kleine proposed. Instead, it was more cyclical and recursive, with me going back and forth between his 4 different stages. Also, I found that some of my actions double-dipped and couldn’t be classified as just collecting or just sifting, they were both at the same time.
Maybe this is because “history is not, and never has been, systematic or scientific” or because “issues are dynamic and arguments are always evolving” (Gaillet 31, Greene 12). Either way, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fit this proposed mold. And maybe that’s not exactly a bad thing.