Final Reflection
To think like a historian can mean a lot of different things to different people. Over this class my experience as thinking like a historian has greatly improved due to the portfolio activities. The book for the class “Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery” also helped to engage the thoughts of a historian. The way that Calvin Schermerhorn writes about the past lives of slaves get your thought process going. You must use multiple different types of critical thinking using information that’s known and some that’s potentially unknown. Now that I understand to think like a historian I shouldn’t just be using facts that I’ve memorized. I need to take those facts and break them down further. There are multiple techniques we used during the semester to do just this. I will explain a few of the techniques and why they are a great way to break down information that you know to get a better understanding. The first one that comes to mind is computational text analysis. This is a great technique for a couple of reasons. One being it can help you to figure out what an article or primary source is telling you before you take a deeper dive into the content. This helps in all stages of thinking like a historian from taking a look at evidence to making some sort of conclusion on your thoughts. Computational text analysis can also help you to make better inquiries on large pieces of text which can often make the text feel more manageable. This is something that I noticed especially with Portfolio number 6. After I was given such a large number of documents with no knowledge whatsoever about any of the documents. I was able to use computational text analysis to make inquiries which led me to a conclusion of what was taking place in the documents. It was a really broad idea of what was going on but with more time and resources I could’ve used computational text analysis to get an even more deep dive into each document. One of the other resources available to help you think more like a historian is MetaData. I came into this class knowing about the Metaverse but not very much about MetaData at all. MetaData is the online information of a historic piece of work in any form that gives good information about the thing being viewed. This information can help you to make critical thoughts about the when, where, and possibly who of the piece of history you are viewing. As a side piece while talking about MetaData i would like to also mention copyright and how it is used to protect information. Copyright is a common term to users of the internet daily and it helps to make sure that someone’s content is being used fairly and safely. Most historical artifacts are open to the public and do not require you to get permission from the user to use it. There are many different parts to MetaData that make up the backbone of where something is from and where it’s being stored. Another huge contributor to thinking like a historian is learning about Geospatial Analysis. Geospatial analysis is used to get geological data on how people moved and many other things. There are 2 types of geospatial spaces which are absolute and representational space. Representational space usually doesn’t have numbers to go along with it. It’s more so just a landmark that is significant in some way to the historian looking at the map. These can help to paint a more vivid picture for a historian to know things like where people worshiped or where the school everyone attended is. Absolute space is more of a way to track actual distance traveled. This space does deal with numbers to get the information across so that historians can look at. This can help get a real feel of how far people actually moved. This is one of the methods that I used when creating my Portfolio 8 where I made a small story map of the early life of Frederick Douglass. I used representational and absolute spaces to help me learn the story. Then I used Geospatial Analysis to relay that information that I found out. Something that I could have done better on was using the absolute space to give more detail about how far Frederick traveled during his early life. That would’ve been interesting to know if he had to travel farther than usual since he was black and probably not allowed everywhere. Those are just some of the methods that were used this fall to engage the thought of thinking like a historian. These skills have helped me to take a closer look at readings in all genres but also step back to look at the bigger picture. My overall critical thinking has definitely improved since being in this class. I personally would like to get better at text analysis and possibly become proficient in analyzing text. I think for the field that I would like to work in after college that would be a very helpful skill to have. One thing that I would like to learn more about going forward is data analysis with numbers. I think it would be good to see old ledgers of anything and just look at how businesses were run back then. That would also be useful and make critical comparisons. I am confident in my skill to be able to think like a historian and make critical thoughts. Given the resources needed. I would like to see what other approaches there are to thinking like a historian. I’m sure these approaches, much like the ones from this semester, will be useful for more than just historical thinking. With the skills developed over this course I can say that with more practice and effort into learning more advanced ways to use these skills I can break down a historical or any document with ease and confidence.
Merry Christmas!!!