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Interdisciplinary Research with Primary Sources (Workshop, Summer 2024)

This is the companion guide for the Summer 2024 mini-course workshop.This workshop provides an overview of how different fields within the Humanities and Social Sciences define and utilize primary sources.

What IS a primary source?

It sounds like an extremely easy and straight forward question, but is there a good answer that applies to every discipline?

Is there a good answer that will satisfy a historian, chemist, economist, and literary scholar? 

Can such a broad answer, if there is one, be meaningful?

Why does this matter?

  • Interdisciplinary research requires scholars to apply the evidentiary expectations and standards of multiple fields
  • If every field has slight difference in opinion on counts as a primary sources, how can we truly undertake multidisciplinary research?