This summer, I’ll be researching the relationship between environmentally focused city planning and emerging computer technology in the 1970s. I will be using my IDEA grant funding to travel to two archives to research this project: the Library of Congress and the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania. This will be my first time visiting an archive outside of FSU’s Special Collections. Even before visiting, I have been learning about the process of conducting archival research.
For example, I’ve learned that sometimes when conducting archival research, you need to already have a strong understanding of your topic in order to know what materials to request. Many archives have hundreds of boxes, and it is too labor intensive for you and the librarian to sift through the entire collection. I’ve had to dive deep into my secondary sources in order to determine what materials will be most relevant to my project.
The biggest challenge of this project is the size. I am conducting an Honors in the Major thesis, of which the average length is 56 pages! As such, I hope to further develop my ability to craft an argument over several months and many pages. A big part of this is being able to effectively organize my thoughts about each source through notetaking. I am using some of the methods I’ve used for previous, shorter, research papers, but it will be a rewarding challenge to apply these methods to such a large project.
The biggest resource I’ve used is professors in the history and geography departments of FSU. One piece of advice I’ve received from a few professors is to allow your sources to speak for themselves; how you should adapt your argument to your sources, not the other way around. Already, I’ve had to apply this advice in that I’ve broadened my research question from analyzing geographic information science (GIS), to computer technology’s relationship with environmental planning.
As someone who has taken classes in history, urban planning, and GIS here at FSU, I have some familiarity with my research topic already. In addition, during my summer internship in a city planning department, I was exposed to how much computer dependent calculations and data are used in the urban planning decision making process. In fact, my manager at this internship mentioning to me that the first computerized urban transportation models were created in the 1950s was one of my inspirations for this project. It feels like I already have a little bit of knowledge about several related subjects during my study period: technological developments, critiques of urban planning, highways and urban renewal, the environmental movement, and a case study of an environmental suburb. Through this project, I hope to strengthen my analytical skills by demonstrating the connection between these historical topics.
Accordingly, I think that my biggest area for improvement will be the writing process itself. I sometimes struggle between wanting to know exactly what my argument is before I begin writing, and the fact that the relevance and specificity of my claim only become clear once I write. To work on this, I have been trying to write a little bit each day after I conduct research, reflecting on what the source said, how it answers or doesn’t answer my research question, and how it relates to my other sources (I got this method from an online handbook from Harvard called “A Guide to Writing a Senior Thesis in History and Literature”). After applying this method to countless books from Strozier, I’m excited to see what I find working with archival documents soon.
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