Participant Resources
Using Primary and Secondary Sources for Your Research
Research Materials and Citations
When composing material for inclusion in this volume, we ask that you use relevant and trustworthy secondary materials as the basis for any historical claims you make. In this case, “relevant and trustworthy” doesn’t mean that you need only cite academic monographs or scholarly journal articles–although it’s fine if you do so. You are also welcome to base claims on facts included in reputable educational or general-interest sources. The Recommended Resources section below includes educational and general interest websites that may be useful in this respect.
Likewise, you are welcome to base some of your claims on primary sources published in the late 1840s through 1860s. Which edge of the spectrum you lean in this range will depend on whether you’re making a claim about Wilkie Collins’s serial readers (1859 to early 1860s) or the characters in The Woman in White (set in 1849-50).
We don’t expect you to always find primary sources from the exact years in question, but we trust you to use your best judgment when deciding whether a primary source article from, say, the year 1850 persuasively captures something relevant to Collins’s readers ten years later. To draw an example from the twenty-first century, if someone were writing about my own day-to-day life, it wouldn’t be appropriate to use photos from catalogs published in 2009 to represent my attire. (Or at least, I hope it wouldn’t. I try to keep up with the times.) However, if a writer’s statement was carefully phrased, it could well be appropriate for them to use an article about the economy that was published in 2009 to provide context for my recent experience. This is because the 2008 recession was an influential period where I live in the US.
At this point, you may be asking “What doesn’t count as ‘relevant and trustworthy?’” There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, but there are general guidelines you can follow. The first step in assessing a source is to ask yourself what motivation the creators may have for producing this content and what expertise they might be drawing from. A general-interest or clickbait article you find online may provide accurate information, but its approach may be too general to support the kind of claim that would help your readers engage with this project.[1]
The British literary world looked very different in 1830, 1860, and 1890–just as it did in 1930, 1960, and 1990–so a source that doesn’t include any chronological distinctions will probably not be precise enough in its claims to suit your purpose. Look too for sources that include traceable citations of their own. If a resource doesn’t include reliable citations, be wary of using it unless you have another compelling reason to believe it is authoritative.
Citing fellow 19th-Century Open Pedagogy Project contributors:
Note that if you are building off of a point that another contributor m