"Working Methods" is a lovely essay by Keith Thomas in the London Review of Books (10 June 2010) describing how (some, classical) historians (and other researchers) work (sometimes). In brief, they (often) try to:

• read a lot of relevant material
• take lots of notes
  • marginal scribbles, dog-eared pages, bookmarks, etc in a document itself
  • clippings (sometimes physically cut) from printed materials, pasted into a collection
  • thoughts written into separate notebooks
  • passages copied into commonplace books under various headings
  • notes and excerpts on scraps of paper or uniform-sized cards (sometimes with multiple copies to be filed in multiple places)
• when it's time to write
  • pull out subsets of the notes that seem relevant
  • look for patterns and hypotheses
  • do further research in promising areas
  • arrange the materials in a tentative order, and then
  • commence drafting!

What's most funny-true in Thomas's essay are his descriptions of how real people work — "... error-prone human beings who patch together the results of incomplete research in order to construct an account whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence ...". And hilarious are Thomas's descriptions of chaotic piles of materials, spilling into one another, overflowing into wastebaskets, and (often, eventually) left to be rummaged through and discarded by a later generation ...

(cf comments by Language Hat et al, and Commonplace Books (2010-05-10), Great Conversation (2020-04-23), ...) - ^z - 2023-07-11