Researching

Where to start
Once you’ve read through the text several times, taken notes, and asked yourself all the right questions, it’s time to begin the research process. This is where you take the text and begin to weave it through historical facts that will give you a better understanding of it. Your main goal during this step will be to gather all the information needed to really dissect the text and get to the center of it. The best starting point for research is to simply take a look at the time period in which it was written.

Where to find information on the time period

• News stories from the time.
• Current events of the time. 
• Other literary material from the time period. 
• Historical textbooks.
• Advertisements from the time period.
• Internet search for significant or specific issues during the time period.

While you don’t necessarily need to become a scholar on the subject, you will need to familiarize yourself with the era in general. Keep the following aspects in mind while researching and take notes of any of these elements present during your target time period.

What to look for

• Social structure—race, class, and gender roles.
• Cultural climate—how did people live, what was important to them, and what was the common family structure like? 
• Political status—wars, political leaders, and political conflicts.
• Economic structure—depressions, recessions, and divisions between classes.
• Religious status—religious leaders, religious conflicts, and the importance of religion.
• Intellectual history—sciences, education, and philosophies.
• Language of the time period.
• Other literary works from the time period.
• Specific references to historical events or people.

If you pay attention to all of these details and take notes, you should be able to mine enough information for your analysis. Consider re-reading your text after you finish your initial research to see if any new questions arise now that you’re more aware of the context of the text. Hopefully you’ll notice that you have a better understanding of it already. 

My research method
Personally, I don’t like to spend a lot of time writing everything down. Though writing things down does help some people understand the content better, that isn’t the case for me. So, my researching technique involved searching mostly historical textbooks and literary articles I found through online databases, such as JSTOR and EBSCOhost.

Making sure to keep a record of my resources, I scanned pages from the textbooks and copied and pasted relevant information from the literary articles. Then, I went through all of my research material and marked it up–highlighting, underlining, making notes in the margin. 

Later, as I wrote my paper, I crossed out blocks of text that I’d already used so that I could focus my attention on the information I still needed to address. It’s worth noting, though, that I didn’t actually end up using even half of the information I had found in my actual essay. Though it did enable me to understand the text better, I only used the information that supported my specific thesis. 

My Research