Research Lab I

Course goals

After completing this course you will have or be able to:

Historiographic context and positioning:

• search for, find and assess secondary literature
• read literature critically: academic article, collection of articles, monograph, review;
• knowledge of and practice in historiography and academic debate.

• explore the work of professional historians;
• use reviews appropriately;
• translate historical knowledge into contemporary academic debates;
• link historiographical knowledge to social issues and place social issues in a historiographical context.

• write a literature review and a literature study;
• formulate and present a research question;

Content

In this course we practice skills for historical research, focused on secondary sources (literature), and writing an academic research report.

Any historical research begins with an exploration of existing literature, and thus the academic debate. This requires systematic searching and finding literature, and critical reading and evaluation of this literature. In this course, we strengthen our skills in finding literature in the university library and train critical reading skills. In the second part of the course you will conduct your own historical research, based on secondary sources (literature). You practice formulating and embedding a research question, searching and analyzing literature and processing all that information into a contribution to the academic debate on your subject in accordance with the rules of the discipline.

This course is part of a series of four courses in which History students are introduced to the discipline and practice various research skills - from Introduction to the Study of History (Block 1), Research Lab I (Block 2) and Research Lab II (block 3), on primary sources and methods, and Big Data, Big Questions (block 4).