Archival Research

While commonly associated with history and historians, archival research can be equally fruitful across a range of disciplines. This course will examine what we mean by archives and archival methods, the sort of inquiry and perspective this research entails, and how to incorporate archival sources among other types of data and insights, particularly for research in the social sciences.

Dates

This one-week, 17.5-hour course runs Monday-Friday, July 1-5, 2025. The course is scheduled for 9:00 am-12:30 pm.

Instructor

Meredith Weiss, University at Albany

Detailed Description

Archives are specialized repositories of generally historical materials, ranging from documents to maps to recordings to, increasingly, digital records. Such resources may be invaluable as primary resources for research across fields. This course introduces students to archival research as a part of field research especially in the social sciences.

This introductory course will move from exploration of perspective, representation, and other issues necessary to assessing and contextualizing archival materials, to the nuts-and-bolts of conducting archival research and citing the materials so gathered. On a practical level, students in the course will learn how to plan for work in archives and what to do once they are there. But they will also address issues of selection bias in the materials available, the ethics of conservation and access, and the challenges of navigating contemporaneous versus post-hoc knowledge as well as of moving from historical particulars to theoretically engaged abstraction and generalization.

The course will begin with big-picture questions on archival research and the advantages and challenges of engaging meaningfully with history and with primary sources. Over the course of the week, we will shift our focus, from why to how questions, addressing everything from locating archives, to time management, to data storage. Students will have the opportunity to sketch out a plan for archival research on a project of their choosing.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course. However, it will help to have a possible project in mind.

Requirements

Participants should be prepared for at least one collective site visit to an archival collection in Singapore.

Core Readings

Symposium on “Comparative Politics and History.” 2019. APSA Comparative Politics (APSA-CP) Newsletter 29(2).

Diana Kim. 2022. “Taming Abundance: Doing Digital Archival Research (as Political Scientists.” PS: Political Science and Politics, 55(3), 530-538.