Hello historians of Korea!
Thanks for posting your 5-15 reports! I have sprinkled some comments around in our Hypothes.is group; in addition I post a group response as a blog post, and you may also get an email from me if there is something that I want to follow up with you individually.
Journal Trawling:
Kaya found this speed-dating exercise useful to get quickly through a lot of Korean history. Anna points out that to do this type of exercise well, you may have to get used to a very different type of reading! Skimming is a skill, and you can learn it, but it’s very different from “close reading”, which many of you have been urged to do for all your reading. Abe gives a detailed description of his method and this is pretty much how I’d go about it, but we all develop our own variations on this theme as we do more of this. Does your method differ? Share with us!
I hope all of you have Serena’s experience with this exercise (and by the sound of it, many do!) that you felt more motivated to complete this assignment because you got to pick what to look at in more detail, and where to spend your (precious!) time. Do you notice how this exercise has shifted the motivation towards you, and your curiosity and desire to learn (intrinsic) rather than coming from me, and your need to comply with my instructions so you can obtain a certain grade (extrinsic). Maybe there is something to that Alfie Kohn piece, hmmm.
Formatting things:
Eva included hyperlinks to the articles she had a closer look at, that’s really useful! Remember we’re on the internet and hyperlinks are the number one thing that we can do easily to help our readers connect to our sources.
There is a second, additional way, and I kindly request this for future posts: remember we use Chicago Notes and Bibliography style in this class. When you refer to a specific source you found, it’s useful to use that in addition to a hyperlink or URL. A bibliographic reference gives the full info of author and title at a glance so we don’t even need to click through to follow along with your thought process!
For journal titles, use italics, for the titles of the articles themselves, use “ “.
For book titles, use italics
Terminology:
A quick word on terminology: I seem to have confused a few people about what a “journal” is in academic context, apologies!
A journal is a regularly scheduled publication –– think “magazine”, but for academics. It’s often published by large organizations, e.g. Society of X, Association for Y, etc. Journals are published in Volumes, with a year and number.
Articles are the individual pieces/texts inside a journal.
If the journal is the ocean, the articles are the fish, and we trawl the oceans (journals) for fish (articles). (Disclaimer: trawling is a destructive fishing practice so only do it metaphorically!)
E.g.:
- Brazinsky, Gregg A. “Remembering Ŏmŏni: Using Chinese Memoirs to Understand Sino-North Korean Interactions during the Korean War.” Journal of Korean Studies 26, no. 2 (2021): 251-270. muse.jhu.edu/article/820368.
The journal is Journal of Korean Studies, the title of the article is “Remembering Ŏmŏni…”. It was published in the journal’s Vol. 26, number 2. The “number” is used when multiple issues appear in a single year (Volume). Not every journal uses “no.”, because some only publish once per year, others 2, 3 or 4 times (and hence have 2, 3, or 4 “no.”)
I hope this clarifies things a bit. Next week we will learn about a piece of software that will help you keep track of many of these aspects so sharing your bibliographic finds will be much easier!
Coming up next:
If you want a look at what a reading journal for future weeks will look like, look no further than William’s post, which already contains detailed reading notes as I’d love to see them when we start with the Reading Journal component starting for the materials from this week (due Monday Feb. 7)
Even if we have assigned readings, I encourage you to keep trawling through journals and poking around in the library catalog, because it’s fun, it’s a fast way to learn a lot, and it’s the best way to figure out if you’re interested enough in a topic to research more! Add your trawling results to the 5-15 reports!
