Author: ammon

Digging in to the dissertation

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Pun intended, of course.

I found a really cool piece of software that will, I believe, be very helpful in writing the dissertation. It’s a Mac application called Scrivener. I found it while reading up on an influential digital historian’s blog, William Turkel. I like it because it organizes the writing process in the way I already think about it. I can write, or rearrange bits of text as if they were note cards, and so much more… I’ll let a few screen shots speak for themselves:

 

As you can see, I’ve been working on my outlines for the first two chapters. I was worried about integration with Zotero, but found this tip to be helpful. It’s a bit of a process, but sure beats doing all citations by hand.

Funding Update

Also, for an update, I have now applied to two big fellowships, USHMM and the GHI, with one more to go at the National Archives. I should hear back about the USHMM this month.

After that, it’s the big two, the Fulbright and the DAAD.

Sources Update

I have most of the documents scanned from USHMM. There are still a bunch of microfilms I should get digitized from the National Archives (or the originals from the German Archives). Now I just need to start going through them and translating and organizing. I’ll have a post on that later.

Detail of A4 at Hadmersleben

Above is a teaser of one of the documents. This detail shows the location of the proposed tunnels in relation to the town of Hadmersleben, in Germany. The different areas of the tunnel are labeled.

Writing Proposals

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I spent the day researching grants and reading about how to properly put together a proposal. I also spent a bit of time plotting out my todo list for this semester, creating a checklist of tasks and when they are due. I made the list in my Google Calendar, so it’s not available to be embedded on this site. I’ll have to work on finding a replacement or something.

One of the places I’ll be applying to for a research grant is the Social Science Research Council (http://www.ssrc.org). They happen to have a short paper on how to best write a proposal for their competitions, and being no dummy, I know I can apply these tips to all the proposals I write. So here are some tips from their paper, “On the Art of Writing Proposals.”

Purpose of Proposals is to Persuade

The main thing to realize when writing a proposal, is that you are trying to persuade the approval committee that your project is better than all the others. The trick is to do it in as short a space as possible—in the first paragraph, or at least the first page—while including all of the points the readers are looking for. In the end you want the readers to associate you with your project (Billy’s the guy researching blind Algerian water cave fish with telepathic properties), rather than other mundane tidbits (Jane is the gal from New York City, right?). It truly is an art.

What do they want?!

All scholarly projects require three basic merits: “conceptual innovation, methodological rigor, and rich, substantive content.” Additionally, the readers are going to be asking three questions that the proposal needs to answer:

  • What are we going to learn?
  • Why do we need to know?
  • How do you prove it?

And this all needs to be done initially very clearly, succinctly, and as forcefully as possible in the shortest amount of text.

Let me be clear about this…

It’s important to keep in mind that the individuals in the approval committee come from varying disciplines. Therefore, the proposal needs to be clear, free of the jargon typical of your discipline, all the while explaining the boundary pushing or unique way your project approaches your field. Keep the focus of the proposal on the ideas and leave the technical aspects to an appendix. Make the first page explain as clearly as possible what the topic is about, and what the readers—essentially, what the granting committee—is going to learn from this.

So What!

This is the crux of the whole matter. Why in the world does anybody need to know about this? What’s the point? Who cares? Why?! This is sometimes the hardest part to figure out. I know it is for me. I continually mull this point over. Do I really have a convincing and compelling reason. It seems for the time being, for me, that my biggest compelling reason, my “so what?” is because it hasn’t been researched before. While that may be a valid reason, be careful. Others may conclude that there is adequate justification for there to be no scholarship in the first place. There are other aspects that make a research topic important and valid. “Turning points, crucial breakthroughs, central personages, fundamental institutions, and similar appeals to significance of of the object of research are sometimes effective, if argued rather than merely asserted.

Apply the topic to current political, economic or social debates. How is your research not only timely but currently urgent, such that it provides a new way to view current issues, or turn the direction of current understanding?

Also try to be fresh and appealing in your approach. Promote the apparent contradictions, extrapolate on puzzles, and catch the readers off guard with surprises. Take the less traveled path. If current trends lean towards one area of research, but your topic can gyrate towards a new and fresh approach, take it!

Oh Yeah? Prove it!

It is important for the proposal committee to know the methodology of your approach. Do not just tell them what you will discover, but how you intend to discover it. What types of sources, what means of debate, what technology will be employed? But don’t just list out your tasks and how you’ll do them, argue why this is the best course of action to achieve the results you intend to acquire. Because some readers may be from interdisciplinary fields, take the time to explain “what parts of your methodology are standard, and which are innovative.” Some ideas to cover:

  • Activities you plan to undertake to collect information
  • Techniques you will use to analyze the data
  • Tests of validity you will apply
  • Specify the archives, sources, and respondents

Finally, proposals should describe the end product. Will the grant help to complete a dissertation chapter, a book, a digital project? Be specific as to what the proposed outcome of this supported project will be.

End with the Beginning in mind…

And begin with the ending in mind, of course. It takes a long time to write a decent proposal. Start early. Give yourself several weeks, or months if possible. Write a first draft and set it aside for a day. Then revise and set aside again. Ask others to take a look at it. Revise it again. Make sure your opening paragraph is succinct, to the point, and effective.

The closing of your proposal should reference the beginning. If you mentioned a story or a specific and compelling reason for the research, reference it again. The effect is to try and tie it all up in a neat little package.

Now, get back to work!

Well, that all sounds really good. Now if I can just apply it to my proposals!

Amber Room

Solving the history of Nazi Tunnels

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Invariably, when I tell people about my dissertation topic, they reference a show they have seen recently about Nazi Tunnels. Usually they’re referencing this episode of Solving History with Olley Steeds on Discovery.

http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/solving-history-nazi-treasure/

I thought it would be interesting to make a list of connections to the dissertation that I come across throughout this research and writing process. I’ll include links to news stories, TV shows (like the one linked above), or any other research and resources about the topic.

Solving History

Amber Room
Amber Room before World War II. (source: Wikimedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oldamberroom.jpg)

The TV show linked above tries to track down the mysteriously missing Amber Room, a room decorated from carved amber and gems, once the pride of Russian czars. It was crafted by Prussian and Russian artists during the first decade of the 1700s, and given as a gift to Russian Czar Peter the Great in 1716. On June 22, 1941, the room was looted by Nazi soldiers as a part of Operation Barbarosa, and set up in the Königsburg (now Kaliningrad) castle museum. The current whereabouts of the Amber Room are unknown. At the close of the war many valuable art treasures were moved to more protective areas. A ship that could have been carrying the Room along with other treasures was sunk by a Soviet submarine. It is possible that the room was destroyed during Allied bombing in 1943.

Olley Steeds, in the Discovery show Solving History, tracks possible leads that the Amber Room may be stored in an abandoned mine shaft in the Czech Republic. Throughout the show, Olley Steeds goes through Nazi hideouts, underground fortresses, and secret tunnels.

Dissertation Relation

Tunnels, mine shafts, caves, and other underground structures had a variety of uses to the Nazis. Many of the most well known tunnels were for looted art and other treasures. Fortunately (I suppose) for me, the less well known causes were for protection of industrial factories. That’s what I’ll be focusing on for the dissertation.

This also brings in the question about public history, especially that used as entertainment. Don’t get me wrong, I think history, or learning about the past, is full of entertainment. And such shows definitely have worth. In the few short minutes I saw of this show, though, I was left wondering how much of it is simply myth hunting in order to make an entertaining show, and how much was trying to figure out what happened in the past. I haven’t seen a whole episode, so I can’t make any judgment calls, but it does bring up the larger issue of the possibility of degrading historical events for entertainment value. I guess the question is, does history and entertainment have a place together? Histertainment, if you will. If you judge by certain cable shows dealing with history, and the many books on the subject at any given book store, I would venture to say yes. Reality, as the saying goes, is often much stranger than fiction.

Sources

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/world-history/brief_amber.html?c=y&page=1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Room

Images from Wikimedia Commons and the Wikipedia article linked above.

Sources for grants and fellowships

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Finding resources doesn’t have to be rocket science, although it often feels like it! I’ve been working on applying for some funding. I thought it might be advantageous to gather all of the sources I found into one place. Here is a list of funding source I have found:

http://www.acls.org/programs/comps/

http://www.ghi-dc.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=208&Itemid=101

http://www.ghi-dc.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=77&Itemid=61

http://www.ces.columbia.edu/awards/awards.html

http://us.fulbrightonline.org/home.html

http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/fellowship/

http://www.daad.org/

http://www.ssrc.org/fellowships/all/

http://www.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/

 
Dr. Robert Goddard, Father of American Rocketry
Bumper 2. V-2 rocket with WAC Corporal on top.
 

How to footnote a blog post?

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Update: It appears that most people come to this page looking for how to properly attribute a blog post in their footnotes, not how to do footnotes in a blog post. 🙂 So, a different search shows how to do the former, while this post shows how to do the latter. Search tip, add the style you are looking for when you type in “how to footnote a blog”. So it would be “chicago manual style how to footnote a blog”. Below is the proper way to footnote a blog in your paper using the Chicago Manual of Style, taken directly from their site linked above:

Blog entry or comment

Blog entries or comments may be cited in running text (“In a comment posted to The Becker-Posner Blog on February 23, 2010, . . .”) instead of in a note, and they are commonly omitted from a bibliography. The following examples show the more formal versions of the citations. There is no need to add pseud. after an apparently fictitious or informal name. (If an access date is required, add it before the URL; see examples elsewhere in this guide.)

1. Jack, February 25, 2010 (7:03 p.m.), comment on Richard Posner, “Double Exports in Five Years?,” The Becker-Posner Blog, February 21, 2010, http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/2010/02/double-exports-in-five-years-posner.html.
2. Jack, comment on Posner, “Double Exports.” Becker-Posner Blog, The. http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/.

 

So the first hurdle I have come across, is how to do the footnotes on these pages and posts. I tried two different approaches before settling, with still some insecurity, on a plug-in to handle the formatting for footnotes. There are two options, and I’m kind of leaning on going back to the first option after writing this.

Option 1: By Hand

Zotero Adding a Citation
Zotero - Adding a Citation

Hand code the footnote numbers as links and the footnotes they link to. Well, you don’t actually have to format and code it all by hand. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice Writer actually do a pretty decent job of creating the links and formatting the footnotes to look and act decently. It’s a simple copy from the word file and paste it into the “Visual” editor in WordPress. After that I would switch to the “HTML” editor, copy the text and plug it into my trusty terminal using Vim to do some quick search and replace of unwanted things (like styled span tags for every paragraph and some CSS formatting). You can use any text editor that has the search and replace ability. Then I pasted the text back into the “HTML” editor, and I was good to go.

Option 2: Use a Plugin

Simple Footnotes Plugin
Simple Footnotes Plugin

This option has some benefits and drawbacks. I tried a number of different plugins but settled on the Simple Footnotes plugin by Andrew Nacin. The benefits are that you don’t have to hand code or edit anything. You just add in a [ ref] tag and put in anything you want to be as a footnote, and close it with a [ /ref] tag.[ref]This example has a space after the first square bracket so that it does not render as an actual footnote.[/ref] The plugin automatically takes care of formatting, and puts the footnote at the bottom of the post or page. Another benefit is that it adds the footnote text to the “alt” field of the anchor tag so it “pops up” when you hover the mouse over the footnote number in the body of the text. The big downside, and the reason I’ll probably switch back to hand coding it, is that this method is not very portable. If I ever need to grab the text out of the WordPress database, then I’ll have the footnote text in the middle of the text body. It is also that way as you are writing, so it kind of gets in the way. This is especially noisome when the footnote is rather large. True, you can copy and paste the displayed HTML or source HTML and have it turn out OK, but it is really a pain to have the footnotes in the body of the text as you try to write or edit.

Those were the options I see for adding footnotes to a WordPress blog post or page. It would have been really helpful to have a zotero plugin for WordPress that allows you to add a citation just like a Word or Writer document. I know there’s a way to export a “bibliography” from zotero with the selected works, but it doesn’t take care of formatting, adding the numbers and links and such. Hmmm, I wonder if that’s possible, and if I could/should write it…

Nazi Tunnels

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This here will be the digital home for my dissertation research and resources. Ideally I will be able to scan all of the documents I look at and post them here in an Omeka archive.

There will be two software applications that run this site: WordPress and Omeka. The WordPress install will be a digital replication of my prospectus which will serve as a light introduction to the dissertation. As the dissertation progresses, it will also provide the digital publishing platform (via Anthologize, if it’s still around in two or three years) for the dissertation.

The Omeka install will be the digital archive for all of my resources I use and find throughout the process. I’m hoping to get permission from the various archives (especially the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) to be able to put the documents I scan on this site.

My goal is to have everything I do during this dissertation process available on the Internet.