Unit 3 — Active, analytical reading
“Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.”
— Khaled Hosseini
“Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.”
— Malorie Blackman
Remember that this Unit lasts one week. All of the activities outlined below should be completed by Sunday, September 26, by 11:59 pm MDT.
There is also an Optional Zoom session that you can join on Tuesday, September 21, between 4:00 and 5:00 pm MDT. As before, we’ll have some informal conversation about how the class is going. You’ll have time to ask questions about topics we’ve studied, technical details about the workings of the class, etc. This one will be especially important if you’d like help with Hypothes.is. If you can’t make it, I’ll record the session and post it in Brightspace.
As a discipline, History was founded on the written word. For generations, historians privileged knowledge that had been written down in one way or another. If a society maintained oral methods for communication and the passing down of generational understanding, academic historians generally failed to consider it as part of the historical record.
Therefore, the term *prehistoric* carries some cultural baggage. Historians of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century applied the term to entire societies that did not utilize written forms of communication and record-keeping. While there’s nothing wrong with noting the distinction between societies that write and those that do not, scholars of that earlier era interpreted that difference to mean that societies that had adopted the written word were “civilized” while those without it were “uncivilized.”
This way of thinking placed a negative value-judgment on peoples who cultivated the non-written word, who use oral traditions, pictorial representations, or other modes of accounting (like the Incan khipu) for maintaining community bonds and providing a sense of shared identity. Fairly recently, within just the past few decades, historians have increasingly recognized this bias and looked to other forms of historical evidence to fill in the gaps in the written historical record.
I preface our unit on analytical reading in this way because, although historians still tend toward the written record (given the way our class is set up, you can tell I’m a fan 🙂), we should recognize that historical evidence comes in all shapes and sizes — much of it not written. That’s why I’ve pointed out that, with Medium, you can include much more than just written words in your posts for class.
I’ve suggested a few examples of non-written historical evidence; can you think of some others? Post your ideas to Twitter, using the class hashtag (#CNM1103). Include links to websites, articles, etc that illustrate the non-written evidence you’ve shared.
Following this Unit, we will examine the ways that historians construct and evaluate secondary source materials. In order to successfully do that, this week we’re focusing on reading strategies more broadly. The activities below will help us think more deeply about how to read historical materials.
Before we jump into our exercises on reading actively and analytically, be sure that you’re ready to use Hypothes.is. Once again, here’s a link that will allow you to join our class group. To annotate with Hypothes.is, you’ll need to install the extension for Google Chrome or the bookmarklet if you’re using a browser other than Chrome. If you weren’t prompted to do that when you registered, click here and go to Step 2 and/or review the video tutorial in Brightspace. This tutorial might also help if you have any questions about how to annotate with our class group.
The activities:
First, read “‘Predatory’ Reading,” by Patrick Rael at Bowdoin College (what a title!). This short article comes from a website on historical reading and writing for undergraduate students. We’re starting with this particular section of the site and we’ll come back to it to read more about how to approach primary and secondary sources in the coming weeks.
After you click on the link to open Rael’s article, be sure to also open Hypothes.is by clicking the extension or bookmarklet in your browser. As you read, use the Hypothes.is tools to add your comments, ideas, questions, and thoughts in the margins (that’s what I’m asking you to do when I ask you to annotate the reading). In your comments with Hypothes.is, point out the most important ideas and strategies for reading historical texts by answering these questions: What are some of the most important tips for reading scholarly works? How should we approach scholarly or nonfiction works differently than novels or pleasure reading?
Next, read Chapters 1 and 2 (about 12 pages of PDF text) in The Foundations of Analytical Reading, an open, online textbook. Unlike Rael’s article that focuses on analytical reading for history classes, these chapters present strategies for college reading more generally. What ideas and strategies does their work add to those that we learned about in “‘Predatory’ Reading”? Which ideas do you plan to use as you read future assignments in this class? Once again, use Hypothes.is to annotate these chapters with our class group by answering those questions.
You may also want to look over this entry on Reading Strategies and Notetaking on the University of Colorado-Boulder Libraries website as a summary or shorthand reference guide for analytical reading.
Our final activity this week will be an application of the reading strategies and skills that we’ve studied in the two pieces linked above. We will again use Hypothes.is to annotate a shared reading, but this time we’ll read a scholarly, peer-reviewed article to apply the ideas that we’ve been discussing thus far.
In order to ensure that the articles don’t get so thickly annotated that it’s difficult to make sense of our conversations on Hypothesis, I‘ve provided two different options. Just be sure to focus on one or the other — you don’t need to annotate both. Choose the one that is most interesting to you.
Links to the two articles follow below. I’ve shared them with docdrop.org, so you should be able to annotate them with Hypothesis directly from here. If you run into any issues, please let me know and I’ll help you gain access to the files so you can annotate.
- Nash, “Community Building on the Border,” in African American History in New Mexico, Bruce A. Glasrud, ed, UNM Press, 2013.
OR
2. Lovell, “The Archive that Never Was,” The Geographical Review, April 2013.
Whichever article you choose, please address the following in your Hypothesis annotations:
- Identify the author’s argument. What is the historical problem and solution that he is putting forward?
- Identify the “signposts” that Rael discussed. What are the basic cues that help you to understand the article’s organization?
- Identify the author’s evidence. What types of sources does he use to construct the argument? (Look at the footnotes/endnotes and Bibliography)
- Identify the author’s interpretations. How does he interpret the evidence cited to support the argument? Is that interpretation valid? How do you know?
- Asking questions throughout the article also helps us to be active readers. What questions are you asking of the text as you read it? How do those questions help you to engage more strongly with the article?
Even when an article appears to be objective or present just “the facts” about a particular historical topic, the author has interpreted the sources they’ve consulted to draw conclusions and construct a narrative. Historical articles are always based on arguments. When I was an undergraduate, I sometimes found it difficult to distinguish between evidence and interpretation in those cases. Sentences that explain how a particular turn of events or actions support the author’s main point present interpretations of those events or actions. Look for the ways in which the author explains the meaning and importance of the events they’re narrating.
All of the readings and activities for this Unit are due by Sunday, September 26, at 11:59 pm MDT. As always, please don’t hesitate to send me an email, a text, or a tweet, whenever you have questions or need some help.
