Module: HIS5117-20 The practice of history - Archives, analysis, evidence

Level: 5

Credit Value: 20

Module Tutor:

Module Tutor Contact Details:

1. Brief description and aims of module:

This module will equip you with the skills and knowledge to be an independent researcher in a variety of contexts: understanding how to find and interpret data is an invaluable skill.

It examines various historical source materials, from manuscript and printed documents to images, objects, oral history, landscapes and buildings, exploring the strengths and limitations of these types of evidence and considering their authorship, intended audience, reliability, representativeness and context. How do we as historians use physical and online archives, how do the selection and survivability of evidence, and the priorities of archives themselves, shape our view of history, and how do we deal with gaps in the record? What happens when gaps become matters of, almost literally, life and death, and the archive becomes political - or is understood to have always been so?

This module will encourage you to engage in your own independent archival research and support you in framing your own research questions. It will ask you to look beyond the use of the archive by the historian, and to think about its wider value and meaning, and the application of archival skills across a range of other disciplines and activities.

2. Outline syllabus

Conceptions of history and the idea of the archive

Selection and survival - how does this shape our view of the past?

Whose decisions, whose gaps?

Digital archives and their discontents

How does archival material become evidence: the archive and the historian

Manuscript and printed sources

Letters, diaries, life writing: the personal becomes public

Oral history, testimony and witness

Material evidence

Landscapes and buildings

Framing a research question and creating a research project

3. Teaching and learning activities

Lectures, Seminars, preparatory reading and other activities; field trips to the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Somerset Heritage Centre and Bath Archives

Assessment Item 1:

• Assessment Type: Coursework

• Description: Group poster presentation on a genre of source material (2000 words equivalent)

• % Weighting: 40%

Assessment Item 2:

• Assessment Type: Coursework

• Description: An independent research project on an archival source (3,000 words).

• % Weighting: 60%