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Week 10 7/23/2021
This week I continued checking footnotes for the six undergraduate papers submitted in the 2021 conference. Also of this practice has helped me memorize the exact citation formats. Throughout my entire college career I have used https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html as a reference for all my citations because I have difficulties remembering whether a period, comma, colon, or some other punctuation goes between the elements of the source. This meant I have had to flip back and forth between my Bibliography and the examples as I was citing, which always ate up a surprising amount of time. At the moment I have the format for books, edited books, and journal articles pretty well ingrained in my head. Since this is memorization of a specific format, I will only be 100% confident I have the formatting correct if I use it regularly so I am not sure how long I will remember these after the internship when I am citing less frequently. And I will alway have the citation quick guide for reference so it is not essential to always have them memorized. But right now, while I am checking these papers, I am immensely glad to have them memorized, as it has sped up my progress tremendously. Primary sources continue to require the most attention and time because they often do not fit neatly into the genre categories Chicago constructs. Doing this work has also made me hyperconscious of the ways that the internet and databases can improve history work. Checking these citations would have been far more time consuming, and would have required significant labor from librarians if I had to find physical copies of all the sources. And some would have been simply impossible to check without traveling across the State or to Washington D.C. to visit archives. Thinking about how useful and revolutionary these databases are has also made me think of how limited and inequitable access to academic texts and historical documents are. Floridians provide large amounts of UCF’s funding yet only people with a UCFID can use the content in UCF’s library database. And without access to an academic library people are legally expected to purchase copies of such documents from places like Amazon, which is prohibitively expensive. When I graduate UCF I will lose access to its database and any research I want to continue independently from my undergraduate days would be basically impossible. I feel that I would not be able to produce historical knowledge independent of an academic institution because of research difficulties. This troubles me because I feel that historical knowledge is best produced by many decentralized local people, incorporating their local experiences, and communicating with each other. The internet provides the perfect opportunity to further this goal and remove barriers like transportation and scheduling but currently has disappointing financial barriers.
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Week 8 7/9/21
This week I began editing the 2021 undergraduate papers.For this week I was just checking the citations in the footnotes and making corrections using the track changes feature on word. Dr. Farless said this would be the most difficult and tedious part of the editing process and she was certainly right. Checking citations took considerably longer than I expected. And while I am familiar with Chicago 17th edition and had both guides and sample sheets at hand, there was much more decision making and interpretation involved than I expected. Chicago citations are both strictly formulaic and specific. I have found when you try to define the world with strict categories and rules, it does not fit and there are numerous exceptions, contradictions, and muddled areas. This rings true for Chicago citations. Chicago creates numerous categories of texts and prescribes a specific format for citing each category, but language is just used, people do not first think of what Chicago citation category they want to fall under before speaking or writing. This is less so much an indictment on the concept of Chicago citations, they are usually very clear and helpful, and more a personal reflection on encountering some of the limits of Chicago, as well as a possible direction for improvement. Though it is a brief opportunity to recognize the inherent folly and distortions of Colonial classification projects and impulses. Chicago is excellent at citing published books and academic published journal articles but found the most ambiguity with online and older sources. I think this shows the bias of Chicago and of academia more broadly. Academics institutions, and as a result many academics themselves, prioritize texts published in traditional channels as the principally method of gaining knowledge and as the most legitimate sources of knowledge. This is reflected by the easy and centrality of citing these texts in Chicago, which in turn reifies this system each time we cite. Checking citations has also given me a much stronger appreciation for citations. The ostensible purpose of citations is so that readers can locate the sources you used. And after spending several hours locating sources that were vaguely or improperly sorted I have a much greater appreciation for how important that is. History research and knowledge is made through communication and cooperation so if people cannot find your sources then we can’t benefit from each other's research and everything breaks down. For example a paper cited a specific table in a large book but did not provide page numbers. I could only access that source as a pdf WITHOUT in-text (ctrl+f) searching. So it took a considerable amount of time to find the table. This both highlighted the importance of page numbers and of providing the most information possible. People will be accessing the source in different formats, so while the author may have had no problem using the citation to quickly find the table, if they had an in-text searching format, people with physical copies would have difficulties. Moving forward I will be extra careful and extra detailed in my own citations.
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7/2/21 Week 7
This week I met with Dr. Farless. I had read the six undergraduate papers which were submitted in 2021 and we discussed our feelings on them. First we talked about what my top three papers were for the Clarke award. I will not say which papers we liked but my first and second picks are also in accordance with the picks of the other committee members.We also talked about how to focus on quality of research, strength of the thesis, and the structure of the paper as opposed to our personal research interests and interpretations. After that picking a third became harder. Three of the papers were biographies of prominent people who were socially elite. I had trouble with these papers because I am ambivalent about exactly how biography fits into historical work. And when those people are upper class, I am especially cautious of the pitfalls of Great Man History. And I feel like the shortcomings of that historical tradition are present in those papers. They all do not engage with gender or race in an effective way, which I feel will improve their analysis and will also help keep them from whitewashing history. Further one the difficulties we discussed with biography is that authors tend to become overly sympathetic to their subjects. Some of the papers were too concerned with our perceptions of their chosen figure. By this I am not saying that historical memory and modern perceptions are important. But sometimes it felt that the author was more concerned with apologizing for their chosen figures' faults and getting us to like them, then they were with explaining who they were and how that impacted the events they were involved in. Another big takeaway I had from our meeting was the absolutely central importance of your thesis. For example one paper bit off a bit more than it could chew and while the author clearly spent a lot of effort researching but since they were trying to cover an entire person’s life and legacy in a short paper it was difficult to have a clear thesis. We also discussed how to be constructive and help author’s with the revision process. I found this important because I do not want to just be torn down when I submit my own paper, so I very much want to help the authors make their papers better. Finally we made a plan for next week. I am going to begin checking footnotes and citations for the top three papers and we will meet again next week. This is the nitty-gritty of editing so I feel it will be tiresome and time consuming but I feel that checking people’s sources will help me get more efficient with my own research because I feel I always read more than i need to from a text and so this will be ample practice at finding what I am looking for quickly. And it will improve my citation skills, so I am optimistic.
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6/18/2021 Week 5
At the beginning of this week Dr. Farless sent me five papers from 2019 that are already published. She sent me the edited manuscripts with the comments and tracked changes so that I could see what editing actually looks like. And to get a feel for published undergraduate papers specifically because they read a bit differently than papers written by people with more experience writing for history journals. As an editor, I am supposed to help bring out the author(s) vision in a way that the journal will publish. But since I am new to this I am not quite sure exactly when a piece of text should be changed vs. when I just would have done it differently. For example, in one of the papers (about Race and Westerns from the 1930s) the author says that they will use “American Indians” to describe Indigenous people the US government claims jurisdiction over. The author said that they do not want to use colonial terms and are using “American Indian” Rather than specific tribe names because the subject of the paper is too broad to identify specific tribes. However when discussing StageCoach the author specifically identifies characters as members of the Apache Tribe, and then refers to them as American Indians a few sentences later. This seemed to be inconsistent with the paper and possibly symbolic violence, so I thought it was worthy of comment, but the editors did not address it. Further, in the examples, sometimes the editor offered a suggested change and sometimes the editor only pointed out the problem for them to address as they see fit. Obviously there is no plain answer for what should be commented on and what I should say, since this is the core of editorial work. It will mostly just need practice to get better at answering those questions, but I am glad I got some direction from the samples.
I met with Dr. Farless at 3pm today to discuss how everything is going. We talked more about editing undergraduate papers. Undergraduate papers tend to have more structural problems, like having a weak thesis (I struggle with this in my own writing as an undergraduate student), so it is important to comment and work with them on these issues. Going forward I am going to comment when there are structural problems, the text is unclear, or the text is unethical.
During our meeting we discussed how to move forward. I am going to be on the Zoom call when the committee meets to decide which papers presented in the 2021 FCH Conference should be published. I am ecstatic to be a part of this because I am currently writing a research paper so I will get to see what exactly journals look for and how they decide what to publish. For this meeting, Dr. Farless sent me a batch of 2021 papers to read over and think about their quality and whether they should be published. We also arranged a weekly check-in on Tuesday. And later next week she will send me a batch of 2020 papers that have been selected for publication to edit. All in all, it was a good week and I am happy to be really digging into this internship.
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June 4 Week 3 Update
I met with my advisor on Zoom this Thursday. It was good to catch up with her and to meet in real time with her, because last week she had a family emergency so we did not meet on Zoom. We agreed to meet face to face every two weeks. I am personally happy about this arrangement. We also discussed my duties more in the meeting. Dr. Farless is going to send me several completed essays and several essay from last year that are further along in the editing process.This way I will have some examples to compare my work to. Also I am going to give a pass at the partially edited papers and track changes, this will be my first time doing editing work for this internship, and is important to have many different people look at the papers before publication..After this, she is going to send fresh paper from this year later on. After speaking with Dr, Farless I am really excited to get into the meat of this internship. I also spent some time studying and practicing the style sheet for the FCH Annals. It is very important that I am familiar with the style sheet because all the papers I edit need to be brought into accordance with its rules. However, studying the style sheet can be frustrating because I have different preferences. I personally think it is bad practice as a historian to us BC and AD, it reflects an undesirable colonial and christian historical tradition. We should really always use BCE and CE. But the style guide requires us to use BC and AD, so that is what I will do. Further some of the rules felt arbitrary and unnecessary. For example, avoiding slashes and em dashes. You certainly do not have to use those in your paper but it hardly seems like a bad thing or something that would affect communication if you had slashes. However, I am sure there is a reason for all of this. Most of the rules seemed eminently useful and clarified some point of confusion. So it is very reasonable that there is a very good reason to do everything this specific way and I just have not learned it yet.
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Week 1Update: 5/21
Hello, my name is Conner McGowan. My research interests are colonialism and capitalism in Latin America and the Caribbean. I am a History Major at UCF. And plan on getting a master’s degree in public history. In this internship I will work with Dr. Farless as an editor on the undergraduate portion of the yearly Florida Conference of Historians Annals, which is the journal publishing noteworthy papers on history at the annual Florida Conference of Historians. As an editor my primary work will be editing undergraduate papers, getting them in accordance with the journal's style guide and with proper 16th ed. Chicago citations. My other duties are to communicate with people who presented at this year's conference, telling them they will not be published in the 2022 Annals or that they are and helping them with the next steps.
I am excited to participate in this internship because I am also currently writing a research paper about Urban Space and Informality in Cochabamba Bolivia and Central Brevard, Florida. I am going to present this paper in the UCF Student Scholar Symposium in Spring 2022, so experience editing other people’s papers will help me improve my own writing.I have read the style guide for publications in the Annals and there where many more tiny formatting requirements so I am very glad for gaining experience with journals at this stage in my academic career. And further I will become extremely proficient in Chicago Citation which will help in my research paper, and in graduate school. I am also excited because I want to get my degree in Public History so I think meeting and communicating with historians about their work will help me gain important interpersonal skills for public history and help integrate me into the Florida community of historians.
Dr. Farless reached out to everyone in her class about participating in this new internship. I got back to her and we met and I became very excited for the project. I think it's really cool to help spread historical knowledge by working as an editor. And Dr. Farless has told me how much she promotes undergraduate research, so it is nice to work with someone who shares the same sentiments. Further as a journal that is freely available to the public and includes undergraduate research I think this internship incorporates the core tenets of public history of wide and non-hierarchical creation and retention of historical knowledge.
As I am writing this I have to comment that I enjoy the blog post format as a way to document our work; it is regularly occurring, largely free form, and is personal enough to capture our distinct progress and feelings in our internships.
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