Take My Advice: Starting On Secondary Lit

 

Stacked books. Photo by Anthony from Pexels.

One thing that I still find intimidating is the vast amount of secondary literature in the world. How do you make sense of what historians have said about a field that is new to you? Getting a grip on historiography is something that hasn't come naturally to me, but it has been a continual process of discovery and false starts in my career as a student and teacher of history. In this post, I want to talk a little bit about one way in which I've approached getting to know the state of a field-- an activity I call the Fifteen-Minute Filter.

Why Bother?

The need to get a quick idea of a field is applicable to a variety of levels of study. You may be an instructor designing a new course or a graduate student studying for exams or a researcher writing an article, in which case you've likely had some experience with the concept of historiography. However, I first encountered this need while taking upper-level undergraduate classes. It can be a tough transition between papers for lower- and upper-level history courses. In the lower levels, the readings tend to be provided for you; papers are written based on sources you have covered in class or selected from a list provided by the instructor. As you progress to higher level courses, however, you may be expected to find your own secondary literature to reference in either a historiography paper (which focuses on what scholars have written on a topic, and you make an argument about their arguments) or a research paper (in which you use primary sources to make your own argument, and refer to the work of other scholars to suggest how your argument relates to theirs). I've tailored much of the advice in this post to students at the undergraduate level for whom research might be somewhat new, but the method can be useful for a variety of tasks.

I came up with my method in my senior year of undergrad, when I needed to evaluate the historiography on Japanese-American concentration camps for my final project in a course on race in the US and was surrounded by a stack of books on the topic. I needed to figure out which books to concentrate on for my project, I wasn't sure where to start, and I wanted to figure out which books I should invest time in reading closely and which ones would not make the cut.

Before You Begin

To do the Fifteen-Minute Filter, you'll need a stack of possible candidates, preferably more of them than you actually need for your project. You can identify possibilities in a few different ways. Your course materials or your syllabus might have some suggestions in footnotes or suggested reading lists. You can use your university library catalog to search related topics; you'll likely find a few possibilities. Once you've identified a number of options, go into the stacks and find them. Wait! Don't leave just yet. Look around on the shelf near the books you've already chosen. Anything look interesting or relevant? Grab it. 

So now you're sitting on your couch with a bunch of books, probably all bound in that uninformative library binding. See how many books you have? Multiply that number by fifteen. That's how many minutes this will take you. You don't have to do all of them at once, but I find it easier to figure out how they might relate to each other if I do, so block out some time if you have it.

 

 Fifteen-Minute Filter

1.  Grab book number one. Set a timer for fifteen minutes. 
2. Quickly skim the intro-- I'm talking five seconds per page. Once you've seen them all, go back and look at the pages that seemed like they told you what the overall argument of the book is. Ignore the detailed arguments about each chapter for now.
3. When you feel time is getting short, make sure to glance at the table of contents, which will tell you a bit more about how the argument will unfold. Any chapters that look especially fruitful? Go back to that intro and see if there's a description of that chapter, probably toward the end of the intro.
4. Put the book in a pile. You have three piles: Yes, Maybe, No Way. Don't think too hard about this. Timer rang before you feel like you have a handle on it? No worries, just go with your gut.
5. Grab the next book and repeat.
6. If you feel confident that a book is not useful to you before the timer has sounded, feel free to plop it into the No Way pile. More time for you! 

 

Optional Variations

• Make your timer alarm a song you can dance to for a minute at the end of each book to keep your energy up.
• Fast reader, or too little time? Try ten minutes per book.
• Skim for ten minutes per book, and spend the last five writing down the most pertinent information gathered. This can help remind you of what you read later if you don't have a chance to come back to the project for a while and/or are forgetful, as I am. 
• For instructors: Try the ten minute skimming/five minute writing variation in class with some short articles or introductions on a topic.

 

Next Steps 

This process can help you narrow down your options and get a quick idea of what your paper might look like. It's easy to see in fifteen minutes if a book is a political screed or a hagiography rather than a critical analysis, or if it is actually less applicable to your topic than the title would suggest. More than likely you'll come out with a couple hard nos, a few yeses, and a big stack of "eh, maybe." Following the Fifteen-Minute Filter, you can take a closer look at the yeses and the maybes with benefit of the larger context you've already gathered.

Still don't have enough books?

• Look at books being cited in the texts you have found. Do any of those seem relevant? 
• Don't be afraid to use interlibrary loan, even if just to see if a book is useful. Start early though! It can take some time.
• You can also get some good leads with a journal search. Every school is different, but on the UIUC library website, click on the "Journals" tab and then do a search for your topic or a book you want to know more about. It could lead you to useful articles or reviews of books that should be on your radar.

Do you have any techniques for approaching a huge stack of secondary literature?

 

Related Links:

Related to this method: strategies for getting the gist of a single book quickly. I love this post from Northwest History on "How to Read a Book in One Hour."