Making Choices in Research

I have recently switched to almost full-time reading of early postwar Korean newspapers. I’m avoiding those newspapers (조선일보, 동아일보, 서울신문) from this period that I have easy access to back in my library in the US or through online databases. There are two bound and published collections with copies of early postwar newspapers easily available to me in Yonsei’s central library and in the 국학연구원 that I am affiliated with. I’m sure microfilm or other versions of these newspapers exist in other libraries, including the national library, but these bound volumes serve well for now.

I launched right in without much thought, as I usually do with an exciting new source, beginning somewhat arbitrarily with one of the newspapers I have often seen cited in secondary works from the period which was only around for a few years, 自由新聞. The series with this collections of newspapers is a “mere” two dozen volumes or so with about 550 pages of newspapers (usually 2 pages per issue) in each volume stretching from 1945-1950.

I’ll just cruise through them all, I must have been thinking—you know—get a feel for the lay of the “media” land and the period. I scan through each issue of the newspaper, take pictures of articles directly relevant to my topic for later use noting down their titles, dates and topics, and read some of the more important articles immediately, all while taking a notes on what issues dominate in the newspaper at the time. After just a few days of this I forced myself to make a reality check. At the pace I was going, I calculated, it would take me 23 weeks to go through just the single collection of newspapers I am looking at and this is only one of many kinds of sources I want to look at while I’m Korea. Doubling my daily pace would still take about 11 weeks, which is still too long. While it is very likely my pace will increase naturally as I become more familiar with the materials and improve my reading/scanning skills this will just not do. Clearly I have to change strategies.

This is really a classic research problem, one that all of us face in doing research for even high school or undergraduate history papers (and in many related fields) and as a teaching assistant I have had to advise my own students on this problem in the past. Somehow though, the much larger scale of the project and time available to complete it has a way of making us forget the scarcity of time available.

More experienced historians surely know better than I, but it seems to me that there are a number of approaches one can take to surveying a large quantity of potentially useful primary materials such as this collection of Korean newspapers from 1945-50.

I have an issue, a problem, and certain historical questions I want to answer. I believe that, if approached with care, this particular collection of sources can help me get answers to some of those questions, or at the very least, help point me towards specific places, people, or events that I can explore in other sources that will help me answer some of those questions. Here are a few approaches that come to mind that might be used for a newspaper collection like this:

The lazy scholar approach: Read all the academic work related to your problem, note down all citations from the primary source you are interested in, look up those citations, read the originals, and use them in your own work.

Seal off a perimeter approach: Make a list of events or key periods of time when things happened or when you think things might have happened which are relevant to your issue. Then, depending on the quantity of primary materials and your time available, read or scan through issues within a fixed range around that period of time.

Headline lightning scan: Make a very small list of keywords, and blaze through the entire collection in the time period you are working for, stopping only to photo articles with your keywords in the headlines.

Section focus approach: Look through a few issues of each newspaper from across the span of your period of interest in order to get a good understanding of the way the newspaper is organized, what articles appear where, where articles which may be of interest to you are likely to appear in the paper, and take note of specific regular columns or editorial sections which may be relevant to your research. Then look only at only these sections or columns for the whole span of time.

Locked in the tower approach: Go through it all, starting with the most important works and then just keep going until you suddenly run out of time.

There are advantages to all of these approaches. It is tempting to conclude, taking the lazy scholar approach, that all the other poor bastards that have worked through the same materials in roughly the same field were locked in the tower and found everything that might be remotely of value. Pillage their citations and move on! Why must all this work be repeated? The problems with this approach are legion, and makes a number of horrible assumptions. My questions are different, my scanning eye, not native in the Korean language though it is, is not always looking for the same thing. It also assumes that the only thing to be gained from reading a source is to find those fact-fragments worth citing or pursuing further. This is simply not the case. The language of the articles, both internally and relative to the rest of the newspaper, and a whole range of patterns that appear once you begin to become familiar with a particular source are all useful for better understanding the period, your own issue of interest, and its coverage in the newspaper in question. On the other hand, a quick list of citations I had made from two key secondary works helped me find some interesting articles that I actually missed when first going through in a more methodical way because the passages of interest were buried in otherwise seemingly unrelated articles.

There are huge advantages to the “seal off a perimeter” approach, but there is always the risk of missing out on context – the historian drops in, like an alien, into a particular time, and the smaller the range you choose, the more difficult it is to understand the context in which certain articles appear and issues are discussed. Having good background knowledge in the period can help mitigate this somewhat.

The headline lightning scan can be very fast but there are a number of risks: The keywords you choose may never be “headline” words, and we have surely all come across wonderful gems of material in articles that have completely unexpected headlines. The section focus too can be risky with the nature of the risks depending on how it is carried out.

The “locked in a tower” approach is ideal, if only time was unlimited. I have always been amazed with scholars who dedicate many years to the study of a very manageable period of time or geographic location and ultimately develop an amazing depth of familiarity with their object of study. Whenever they set out upon a new project, or ask new questions, they have an enviable ability to know exactly where to look, judge the feasibility of any approach, and their intuitions are often dead on. It is tempting, when given a year or two dedicated to dissertation research, to simply forget that time is ticking and sink ever deeper into the materials immediately at hand, assuring oneself constantly that the holistic benefits outweigh those gained from more efficient approaches.

Ultimately it seems to me that if you need to look at a lot of newspaper or media materials (and much of what I have said here is applicable to working with all manner of sources) the best historian is someone who can concoct an effective mix of these approaches; who knows when to stop reading, knows what to throw away and what to keep, knows when to walk away, and who never counts his money when he’s sittin’ at the table, oh wait, that’s someone else.