User:Llywrch/researching


 * Notes on researching Empire of Trebizond

No school does a good job of teaching how to research a topic. Nowhere, no when. My own formal education involved being shown the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature (the equivalent of Google before the Internet), & discovering that it did not unlock information on the subjects I was interested in. Everything else has been self-taught, or picked up from incidental comments my college professors made.

This is a report of how one Wikipedian successfully researches a topic.

1. I started knowing something about the Empire of Trebizond. It was an exotic city at the edge of European civilization, known for its rulers who relied on their fabulous wealth & the appeal of their beautiful daughters to defend themselves from the predation of hostile neighbors. And the standard reference was Miller's Trebizond: The Last Greek Empire, published in 1926. So I had somewhere to start.
 * Criticism of Miller
 * Started by adding cites to Miller in relevant articles. This helped by (1) adding inline cites to articles that needed them, & (2) cleared the ground so that other statements needing cites could be handled -- either sourced elsewhere -- or removed.

2. Finding further sources
 * Case study of Alexios I of Trebizond: a search thru Speculum uncovered A. A. Vasiliev's 1936 article, "The Foundation of the Empire of Trebizond (1204-1222)" -- expanding on & updating Miller on the origins of the Empire of Trebizond. Sadly, my further searches thru Speculum failed to uncover much more.
 * Bibliography in the 1968 edition of Miller. This leads to:
 * Many subjects have existing bibliographies, hand lists of books/articles/publications/surveys of sources. Librarians will know what they are.
 * A citation in a periodical or book is often a lead to other possible sources. Maybe not directly: a cited source may have the citations needed.
 * Thumbing thru articles in periodicals. (Thanks to Charles LeGuin for this tip.)
 * Not everything is on the Internet. At least not yet, probably not ever. (There are millions of documents & photos that haven't even been published in print, let alone in some kind of electronic format.) So the would be researcher must go beyond the first dozen hits on Google.
 * That said, sometimes even doggy websites will offer leads. (Internet discussion sites often have threads mentioning accessible sources. Look for them, not for discussions about what the sources prove.) And quality ones are dry wells.
 * Look at related topics. Cross-discipline studies have been useful in revealing errors & opening insights in research. (I don't consider it original research to point out that one discipline states A, while a related discipline states B.) Examples:
 * My side trips into Byzantine topics: the Kantakeuzenos family, work on Michael VIII Palaeologos.
 * One of the major weaknesses Miller's book is that he discusses the history of the empire without any reference to contemporary Turkish history. And Trebizond shared its longest border with Seljuk (& later Ottoman) emriates! Of course, when Miller wrote his book Turkish history before the Conquest of Constantinople was largely unknown territory, & still remains so in many ways.

3. Obtaining further sources
 * Libraries
 * ILL -- example of Archeion Pontou, which is rich with material. (Wish I had an index of its articles.) It appears every topic has at least one important periodical which is only accessible thru ILL requests.
 * JSTOR, persee.fr, archive.org, academia.com, other websites
 * Buying books. Only if you expect to use the book on a regular basis -- otherwise use a library. You can also photocopy the book before returning it: I've heard this can be done for a few hour's labor for about $20.00 a volume, but since this infringes on the copyright of the corporation that published author who wrote the book, of course I've never done this. Even though it is the only way to obtain a copy of some out-of-print books.

4. Do not be afraid of using sources in foreign languages. (I had to translate an important primary source for Trapezunite history from a German translation. Yes, doing that invites problems of comprehension, but doing that got me one step further towards understanding the subject -- & confirmed some statements which I had not seen citations for.) Because one language rarely has all of the information desired. Germany, France, Italy, Russia, all have strong scholarly traditions in many areas of study -- in some disciplines stronger than in the Anglo-American tradition -- that deserve respect. Chinese & Japanese scholarship are not well known outside their countries, so adding them wisely can only enrich an article.
 * Using online services for machine translation. This will get you 60-80% of the way to a useful translation, so it doesn't hurt. I found that using it to translate French articles I could fix many of the problems by comparing the rough translation against the original, considering the appropriateness of English cognates, & applying some bits of French & Latin grammar I have picked up over the years.
 * That said, sometimes a man's gotta know his limits. A collection of primary sources on Trebizond from Italian archives is in print, but the original texts are in Medieval Italian & the editorial apparatus in Modern Italian. (It could be worse: the editor's native language is Russian.) And I'll need to rely on ILL to get this book. With all of the other options open to me, I may never get to this work, which means some of the articles in this topic will remain incomplete.

5. Evaluating sources
 * NB -- Some authors' names appear more often than others. This tends to be an indication of the author's value as a Reliable Source.
 * Not all authors are reliable. Most authors are better in some areas of their specialties (or worse in some areas) than others.
 * Primary sources vs. secondary sources. Prefer one to the other with care. Which leads to:
 * Understand how the experts writing the secondary sources came to their conclusions based on what the primary sources say. Sometimes primary sources are in a form of a code which requires an expert to properly interpret, sometimes they are not, many times there are layers of meaning to them (example from archaeology or numismatics)
 * The Massarelli Manuscript. Why I currently consider that a warning with air horns & flashing lights that the information is totally unreliable.

7. Other
 * It takes about 6 months of determined effort to get a useful handle on a topic. By this, I do not mean one is an expert, but that one has achieved a sense of the value of sources, how much information exists about the different subcategories of the subject, etc. All of which are subject to revision as experience is accumulated.
 * Always be careful to distinguish between the opinions of an authority, & the actual facts. This is not black-&-white, but it can inadvertently be presented in that manner. Even expert scholars commit this mistake.
 * One point is not only to determine the facts, & the different interpretations of those facts -- & how the two were not the same -- but to also understand the primary sources & how the different interpretations came to be formed.
 * Try to question what the secondary sources say. Example: who was the older brother, Alexios or David? (Yet to find a primary source which answers that question.)