Paula Findlen

History 213/313

Winter 2003

FINAL PROJECT

Identifying a project

Your final project should be on a topic of your own choosing developed in consultation with me. It should address a well-defined research problem that you have identified as being important to understanding the Scientific Revolution. Consult Dear’s Revolutionizing the Sciences for assistance regarding what some of the interesting questions might be, as well as the supplementary readings we are doing by other historians of science. Pick a topic that engages you and asks a good question that can be answered by a close reading of the sources of the period.

You should identify your research problem in relationship to a set of key documents that will provide the primary evidence on which your interpretation is based. The core of your paper should be a careful, well-informed reading of original sources (i.e. works written by natural philosophers in the sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries) for studying the Scientific Revolution. If you have an especially rich and complex original source (e.g. Galileo’s Dialogue) you might be able to build your paper around a single source. In other cases, you may find that using two or three sources, either by the same author or by different authors, allows you to explore a broader theme. I especially encourage you to consult the original version of your sources (in Special Collections if available) in relationship to the modern English translation. As we have discussed in class, by doing this you can often learn interesting things that the modern version doesn’t reveal.

Since you need my approval for your topic, do stop by during office hours or send me an email, once you have an idea.

Project proposal (due February 21; 2 pp. + bibliography)

Completing your research

Once you have established the sources for your project and the subject, you will want to supplement your reading with some research in the secondary literature (i.e. works written by historians of science) on your subject. Dear’s book offers a good starting point for potential bibliography as does the list of books I gave you for the first assignment. You are also welcome to use any of the readings we do in class if you find them helpful and they may lead you to further bibliography. Let me also recommend that you do some research using the “History of Science and Technology” database on the Stanford Library website. It catalogues recent books and articles in this field for the past 10-15 years. Of course you should also feel free to ask me or Daniel Stolzenberg (stolzius@stanford.edu) for recommendations. The History of Science curator in the library, Henry Lowood (lowood@stanford.edu), can also be of assistance if you have specific bibliographic questions.

From research to writing

A good research project should exhibit care in its execution on multiple levels. First, it should ask a well-defined and interesting question. Second, it should offer a well-considered response based on good, persuasive evidence, i.e. a careful, contextual, and creative reading of your sources so that readers can see how your knowledge of the topic and this period informs your interpretation. Finally, it should demonstrate your ability to organize your information in an attractive and readable fashion that allows your argument to unfold carefully. For instance, you should give your project a title that encapsulates your argument and makes the reader want to read it.

I encourage all of you, whether you are taking this class for WIM credit or not, to take advantage of the fact that we have a writing tutor. Daniel Stolzenberg will have office hours on Tuesday 1-2 in 200-312 and by appointment (stolzius@stanford.edu). Show him your outline while writing as well as your rough draft (N.B. Students taking this class for WIM credit are required to turn in a rough draft on Tuesday, March 11 by 5:00 pm. Send this directly to Daniel via email). He is here to work with you in developing your project and translating that work into writing.

Project submission

There are two components of your project submission. I will ask all of you to present your project to the group the last week of class

Short presentation (March 11, in-class time for undergrads, 2:15-4:05;

graduate students: I hope we can do this over dinner, ca. 6-8 pm)

Your presentation should be approximately 7-8 minutes. Provide the group (8 copies) with a one page handout that contains the most important information you would like us to have. This should include: an outline summarizing the structure of your paper and its argument (put your main question at the top and your preliminary conclusions at the bottom); one or two key quotations from your sources that best encapsulate the material you are trying to analyze and provide your readers with a sense of the subject. A good handout will allow you to be brief in the verbal part of your presentation, giving us time to ask you questions.

Your final paper should be submitted in two forms: a paper copy to the Main Office of the History Department (due on March 18 at 5:00 pm) and an electronic copy on the class web site by midnight on March 18. Each student has a space for their paper at:

/afs/ir/class/history213/WWW/papers/YOURSUNETID

The host server name is transfer.stanford.edu. Only you can write to that space, but all can view it. If you have any trouble uploading it, send it to the HPS administrator Rosemary Rogers (rrogers@stanford.edu) by the deadline, and she will do upload it.

Technical details

Your paper should be typed, double-spaced and proofread (undergrads: 13-15 pps; grads: 18-20 pp.). A research paper should use endnotes or footnotes (not parenthetical citations). The first citation of any work should have complete bibliographic information, while subsequent citations can be shortened (e.g. Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, pp. 35-37; Shapin, “House of Experiment,” p. 45). If you have any questions about proper citation format, check a standard reference work such as the Chicago Manual of Style or the MLA Reference Book. More readily, you can simply look at how the historians whose work you have read cite their sources.

It’s important to understand, for instance, the difference between citing a book, an article in a book, and an article in a journal. You should also know how to use “Ibid.” correctly, and why not to use “op.cit.” (an old citation that has gone out of fashion because it’s harder to read than, say, the short citation format above), and remember that pp. = multiple pages and p. = a single page. All quotations should be in quotation marks “…”), save for longer quotations (rough rule of thumb is more than three lines) which should be indented and set off from the main body of the text.

The most important thing to keep in mind that all quotations, key points of information derived from other sources, and sections of your essay that paraphrase another historian’s argument need footnotes or endnotes that draw the reader’s attention to your sources of information, primary and secondary. It is possible to footnote too often, so if you find yourself putting a footnote on the end of every sentence, you are perhaps quoting too much, not allowing enough room for your own ideas to emerge in relation to the work of others, or not understanding how to use notes to convey information. It is also possible to footnote too little, leaving the reader uncertain as to where you got your information. Better to err in the former direction than the latter, but you should easily find a happy medium.

If you include any images, please provide each image with a caption (short descriptive title) and a source (where did you take it from).