Peer Review Meetings

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You should all receive an email from me shortly. The email will contain some important pieces of information, including (a) who your “peer reviewer” will be; (b) the rough draft that you will be reviewing; and (c) some questions you should consider while giving this rough draft a first read.

On Tuesday we will be meeting as a group at our regular time, and I will be giving you some final instructions about peer review. But you and your partner should also sign up now for a meeting with me on Wednesday or Thursday using this Google doc.

Documentation and plagiarism

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Now that you are beginning to write sections of your paper, it’s important to document your research correctly to avoid plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious violation of the Honor Code, and you should consult the Honor Council website (particularly the PDF on proper acknowledgement of sources) for a full discussion of this issue.

When documenting your research in this paper, please use the Chicago Manual of Style. You may use either the “Notes and Bibliography” system or the “Author-Date” system, but pick one and use it consistently throughout the paper. Consult this convenient quick citation guide for information on how to use either system, or email me if you have any questions. We will talk more about these systems in class today.

When reviewing your work, you may also find helpful this Checklist of Common Errors (PDF) prepared by English professor David Gullette of Simmons College. It contains some helpful questions about documentation and plagiarism that you can ask of your paper:

1. If I have used language from some other writer, have I put the language verbatim (the actual words as they appear in the source) into quotation marks?

2. If I have used an idea from some other writer or lecturer, but have paraphrased the borrowed idea in my own words, have I still acknowledged the author of the idea by name? (E.g.: “Virginia Woolf feels, as I do, that every woman needs a room of her own.”)

3. Have I identified the author of borrowed language or ideas in the body of my text? (E.g.: “As Virginia Woolf expresses it in A Room of ONe’s Own, ‘Every women has this right.'”)

4. Have I remembered that using someone else’s words and/or ideas in my writing without signaling that they’re borrowed constitutes plagiarism, a serious violation of the Honor Code?

5. If I have borrowed idea or language from another writer, have I documented the source of the borrowing by using footnotes or endnotes that give the author’s name, the book/article title, publication date & place, and page number?

In addition to these questions, consider this general rule of thumb: When in doubt, cite!

Update email

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Since we will not be meeting on Thursday, I need to hear from each of you this week by email. What I’d like is a brief email that responds to these questions:

1. Briefly, how much work have you put in to your paper so far?

2. What steps have you taken so far to find primary sources, and what have you found?

3. What are the major arguments of other historians who discuss the question you’re interested in?

4. How would you fill in the blanks today? I’m writing about because I want to know why/when/where/how/whether/who so that I can argue .

Please send me these emails by the end of the day Friday–the sooner the better, though, because I can give you feedback that may help you before then.

Reading Response for Thursday

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This Thursday in class we will be discussing Gale Kenny’s book Contentious Liberties. By now you should have a sense of the sorts of things to look for as you read a book of this kind, and Professor Kenny herself gave us an overview of the book’s major themes last Thursday. So, for your final reading response blog comment of the semester, please post a comment on these post about some aspect of the reading. You can comment on the argument, the methods, the characters, the sources, some combination of these things, or something else that interested you, but be sure to back up your claims with specific evidence drawn from the reading.

Sign up for meetings

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Please don’t forget that your proposals are due tonight by midnight in my email inbox. Also, once you have turned in your proposal (or even before), please go to this link to sign up for a time to meet with me to talk about it. Remember, we will be having one-on-one meetings in lieu of our regular class meeting this Tuesday, but we will meet as usual on Thursday to talk about Gale Kenny’s book.

John Brown and Timbuktu

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During our discussion last week, one question that was raised (I think by Michelle) was how the community of Timbuktu in North Elba got its name. As it happens, I did a little bit of research on that question back in 2010, and I posted what I found (or didn’t find) on my blog. You can read the posts here if you’re interested.

If you do read them, you might think a little bit about what we discussed today regarding the difference between topic-based and argument-driven research. These blog posts I did on Timbuktu are not really good models for you to use for your research paper, because they are mainly reports about a topic–rather than attempts to answer a significant, arguable question. That’s why I posted them in this form. That said, can you think of ways I could have turned the research done for these posts into a thesis-driven paper? That thought experiment might be useful as you consider ways to get your own topic turned into a question.

Reading Questions for Feb. 23

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Here are a few questions to think about for our discussion of Walker on Thursday. Choose one of them to discuss in your comment, which is due by noon before class.

  1. Think about what Walker’s “appeal” is. What does he want his audience to do as a result of reading this book? And whom does he consider to be his audience(s)?
  2. The Appeal is generally considered by historians (as it was generally considered at the time) as a very radical, even revolutionary, document. So … what makes it “radical”? A related question: If Walker’s document is, on the whole, a “radical” document, are there any aspects of it that seem less radical than you would expect? What are the limits of his radicalism?
  3. One way of thinking about these questions is to look very carefully at Walker’s views on violence. Is Walker’s Appeal a call for violent revolution? Even if you think the answer to that question is obvious, would you be able to find evidence to support the opposite answer?
  4. In an earlier class on primary sources, we discussed some techniques for distant reading. Try using one or more of those tools to examine a plain-text version of Walker’s Appeal. Did you find anything significant from viewing the text this way that you didn’t see from your close reading or would not expect?

See you on Thursday!