1. Questions

This chapter helps you navigate the first challenge you will face in your research process: How do you transform broad and vague “topics” of interest into a set of concrete and (for you, at least) fascinating questions? In the earliest phases of research, most people don’t have specific questions in mind. They have topics of interest. You have already started recording some of your own in the introduction. The main challenge is not identifying potential topics of interest, but in moving from these generic topics to a specific set of questions. While seemingly straightforward, this surprisingly demanding process requires a mix of confidence and vulnerability.

A Topic Is Not a Question

Topics are wonderful things to have. They’re useful at the beginning of any research project. A topic suggests a field or scope of inquiry. It empowers. It gives a sense of identity and purpose. I work on . . . the Harlem Renaissance, Soviet history, women’s studies, experimental poetry, urban planning, environmental history. Having a topic makes one feel solid, self-aware, oriented.

Topics can be deceptive, however. They are immense and abstract categories. They organize universities, businesses, and research organizations—the Department of Topic X, the Institute for Topic Y. They show up on business cards: Professor of Topic Q. They shape how we think about the world. But their use to the researcher is limited for one very obvious reason: a topic is not a question.

How do topics and questions differ? Let us count the ways (see table 1).

Table 1. DISTINGUISH BETWEEN A TOPIC AND A QUESTION

A TOPIC	A QUESTION
Is a noun, perhaps with a modifier	Is a sentence with a question mark at the end
May be broad or specific	May be broad or specific
Indicates an area of curiosity	Indicates an area of curiosity, and some sense of how you will satisfy that curiosity
Raises innumerable questions, but often ones that pull in a thousand different directions	Raises more specific, related questions
Has no answer	Has an answer—and sometimes several

You can see already how topics can even be obstacles to the research process. When a researcher tells you what topic they’re interested in, more often than not they leave you wondering which of the many possible pathways and potential questions about that topic they intend to follow, or why the topic matters to them. Simply put, when we speak about topics, we could be speaking about anything (and thus nothing) at all.

Harlem Renaissance what? Soviet economic history how? Environmental history where? When someone tells you what their topic is, you actually still know very little about what drives them as a researcher, much less what direction their research takes. A study of the Harlem Renaissance might turn out to be about urban migration. But it could just as readily be about poetry, intellectual history, or housing markets. A researcher working on Soviet economic history might be interested in the history of steel production technology, labor relations during World War II, or perhaps the development of economic think tanks in Moscow. Likewise, research on environmental history might be interested in invasive species, hydroelectric dams, or fire-stick farming. There’s simply no way to know. All of these avenues (and many more) are equally probable, yet some might be of no interest to the researcher—some of these potential avenues might even bore them to tears. A person working on environmental history might have more in common with a scholar of the Harlem Renaissance than with their “fellow” environmental historians. By themselves, topics are not very good guides for the research process. That’s why they can be dangerous.

When you have a topic and are struggling to turn it into a project, the common advice you will hear is “Narrow it down.”

We call this the Narrow-Down-Your-Topic Trap.

Its seemingly straightforward logic—a “narrow” topic is easier to work on than a “broad” topic—leads many researchers, especially inexperienced ones, into dead ends. A more discrete scope that reduces the volume of sources you need to analyze can, to be sure, answer the when and where questions. But a topic alone—even a “narrow” one—is insufficient, because it still leaves unanswered the how and why questions. Tell someone your “narrow” topic, and they may still have no clue what you’re doing. Even a “narrow” topic cannot tell you what to do.

Simply put, you cannot “narrow” your way out of Topic Land.

Every researcher needs to figure out what to do and how to do it. And—assuming that you want to devote your time and energy to something worthwhile—the question that comes before what and how is why.

A brief example: a student sat down with Tom to discuss potential paper topics for a history course. The topic of the paper, the student explained, would be Chinese geomancy, or feng shui. In feng shui, the landscape and the natural environment are understood to be energetically alive, with this energy having the capacity to affect—for better or for worse—the fortunes of the living, as well as the afterlives of the deceased. By building one’s home or city in harmony with the logics and flows of these energetic forces, one can improve one’s fortune. Neglecting or violating these logics can bring ruin.

Feng shui is a promising and potentially fascinating topic, to be sure, but Tom was still unclear about the student’s concerns. What were the student’s questions about the topic? What was at stake for them? Why feng shui?

The student was equipped with a “straight-A” vocabulary, and had clearly rehearsed prior to the meeting, using key terms and concepts from the course. Feng shui offered a way to examine “Chinese modernity,” the student explained, to examine “knowledge production” during China’s transition from “tradition” to “modernity.” Everything about the presentation was polished.

Something was still missing, though.

OK, but why feng shui? If the main motivation is to understand “Chinese modernity,” your paper doesn’t need to be on feng shui. You could just as easily have chosen to work on education reform, the development of chemistry, or perhaps the history of translation. There are an infinite number of ways to “get at” the issue of modernity.

The student tried again, pulling out all the stops by using as many “smart-sounding” justifications as possible. There were “gaps in the literature,” they explained, using an academic code word to mean “important areas in our map of knowledge that have yet to be filled in.” Feng shui had the makings of a powerful “intervention” in the historiography, they suggested, using another word commonly heard in the academy. In other words, the student was trying to speak in code with Tom, using terminology they assumed would resonate with an academic mentor.

It all still begged the question. To say that there is a “gap in the literature” is to assume that the topic in question is of unquestionable importance and needs to be addressed. But important to whom, and why? Besides, “gaps” in human knowledge are infinite. Why fill this particular gap?

The impasse cannot simply be blamed on the student being “inexperienced.” Most researchers (even seasoned ones) instinctually try to justify their incipient research ideas using the vocabulary of “importance” or “significance”—as defined by an imaginary, external judge. But at the outset, external judges are not what we need. Instead, what every researcher needs in the earliest phase of a project is to answer a question that is profoundly personal: Out of the infinite number of potential topics of interest, why am I drawn to this one? If I had to guess, what is my connection with this topic? Why is it so magnetic to me?

There was a noticeable pause in the conversation, and the student’s entire disposition shifted. The tone and volume of the voice softened. Even the posture relaxed. Suddenly, the conversation felt less like a performance, in which the student was trying to impress the professor. Instead, the exchange became more open, even vulnerable. The student allowed themself to share more fundamental concerns, to stop acting intelligent and just be intelligent.

My mom is a lawyer, the student continued. She’s highly educated and is the most rational person I know. She’s not superstitious at all. But she also believes in feng shui—truly believes in it—and I just can’t understand how.

All of a sudden, the room was full of new questions. What else might a “rational” person not believe in, do you think? Meditation? Yoga? Reflexology? Numerology? What about psychiatry, or perhaps economics? Who or what defines this “rational/irrational” boundary? Is this boundary the same in all parts of the world? How and when have views about rationality taken shape in history? Why? What might I find if I looked at primary sources from other time periods, or other cultures? What do I mean by “rational” anyway? Why am I using that word? Is it because “rationality” depends on logic, and I think feng shui is illogical? Or is there another reason I think feng shui and rationality are incompatible?

It was like getting away from the glare of the city lights—suddenly, the sky was filled with stars.

The questions went on, filling the student’s notepad.

A few key aspects of the discussion led to this breakthrough. Here’s how we’d phrase them for a researcher trying to move from a topic to questions:

1. Make yourself vulnerable. The student sounded unpolished (as they had initially worried)—but that’s a good thing. The questions one generates during this early phase are not final products. Many things in our lives coach us against opening up. We want to appear mature and professional, and we hesitate to ask questions that might make us appear unpolished or naive. But at this stage, our questions don’t need to be polished or even coherent. All they have to be is honest, to the best of our knowledge. Trust yourself.
2. Keep the conversation affirmative and nonjudgmental. Neither the researcher nor the Sounding Board said anything to denigrate the researcher’s assumptions about rationality. At the brainstorming stage, it’s easy to shut down lines of inquiry prematurely, with inhibitory thoughts or statements like Your assumptions are wrong: there is nothing inherently irrational about non-Western practices! Or perhaps by chiding oneself with high-level language like My concept of rationality is clearly a “social construction.” Resist the temptation. Far better is simply to allow the questions to proliferate, no matter how seemingly unimportant, naive, incoherent, scattered, or biased they might seem. Whether you’re working alone or with someone else, the goal at this point is simply to generate questions. We’ll discuss how to use them later on.
3. Write down your ideas. The researcher and Sounding Board wrote down all the questions as they spilled out. Ideas can come rapidly, but they can be forgotten rapidly too if not recorded. As we will emphasize again and again, during this early phase of research, thinking about things is not enough. You need to get things down in writing, to create traces of thought that you can later use for other purposes.
4. Generate questions internally. In the conversation described above, it was the student who was producing questions; the Sounding Board barely needed to chime in. The questions you should be aiming at now are those driven by your own knowledge, assumptions, and curiosities. At this point, don’t try to think from the “outside in” by trying to generate questions you think might satisfy some imaginary judge.

This particular student was in a more fortunate position than most, having clearly done a great deal of self-reflection in advance of the meeting. They were already aware of why their topic mattered to them personally and simply had to overcome reluctance to share those reasons.

For most of us, the challenge is greater. We might be drawn to a particular topic without having any idea why. Or, perhaps more accurately, some part of us knows why, but the rest of us—the part of us that has to field questions like “Why does that interest you?”—still has absolutely no idea.

As we progress through the stages of Self-Centered Research, we’ll discuss several ways to close the distance between these two parts of ourselves. You will learn how to bring together

• the intuitive part of you that knows, but cannot speak;
• the executive part of you that speaks, but does not know.

Questions lead us in specific directions—whether toward specific answers or to primary sources that we need to answer the questions or to the work of fellow scholars who are grappling with similar questions (i.e., secondary sources) or, more often than not, to more and better questions. Questions force a self-reckoning.

Questions have another virtue. Every question a person asks about the world is a piece of “self-evidence” about the researcher—evidence that helps the researcher reflect on their own intellectual, emotional, and personal motivations for asking the question in the first place. The goal here is to explain, rather than simply assert, one’s interest in a topic.

Consider the following example:

Soviet history is fascinating.

Questions give much more self-evidence:

Given the Soviet Union’s vociferous critique of capitalism, did it develop its own form of accounting practices? The USSR must have had accountants to keep track of economic data, and yet most accounting theory to that point had been developed in capitalist contexts—was that a problem for the Soviets?

Now you have more clues to answer the obvious question, Why are you interested in that? Your questions place you in the hot seat. They require you to ask probing questions about yourself, without falling back on vague and tautological responses like “The topic is interesting, which is why I’m interested in it!”

TRY THIS NOW: Search Yourself

The goal: To use a list of primary-source search results to figure out the aspects of your topic that most interest you, and draft questions based on these interests.

You already know how to search the internet. This exercise prompts you to use the results of an internet search to search yourself.

This exercise offers one way to get from a topic to questions.

Here’s a quick summary of the steps of this exercise, before we dive into details about each:

1. Based on the “Try This Now” exercise you completed in the introduction, write down any and all of the research topics you are drawn to. Feel free to be as general as possible, and to include more than one.
2. Select one of the topics on your list and run a search using at least three (or more) of the web-based databases listed below. (You can find more on whereresearchbegins.com.)
3. Click on a few of the search results that interest you—say, five to ten.
4. Don’t read the search results in depth. Instead, your goal is to dedicate (a) perhaps 20 percent of your mental energy to scanning the list of search results (and perhaps the contents of a few) and (b) the remaining 80 percent of your mental energy to self-observation. You want to read yourself as you read the results.
5. In particular, pay close attention to how your mind and body are responding to different search results: Which ones seem to jump out at you? Which ones cause you to linger just a split second longer? Which ones quicken your pulse, even slightly?
6. Write down at least ten entries that attract you, without worrying about why they do.
7. Based on this list of ten entries, answer the three questions on page 31 about those entries, to generate self-evidence.
8. Sleep on it (take a break of at least twenty-four hours).
9. Return to the answers you wrote out and ask yourself: If I didn’t know the person who wrote these answers, or flagged these search results as “interesting,” what kinds of guesses would I make about this researcher? What story does this “self-evidence” seem to tell about the researcher, in terms of their concerns and interests?
10. Write down your thoughts on these questions, getting as much down on paper as possible.

Let’s dive in a bit deeper.

Step 1 is straightforward enough.

Step 2: Select a database. We list a few good choices here, and you can find dozens more at whereresearchbegins.com.

• WorldCat: www.worldcat.org
• HathiTrust: https://www.hathitrust.org
• Trove: https://trove.nla.gov.au
• Online Archive of California (OAC): www.oac.cdlib.org
• Archives Portal Europe: http://www.archivesportaleurope.net
• Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure (CENDARI): www.cendari.eu
• Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL): https://www.cerl.org/resources/main

Don’t worry about choosing the “right” database for your topic. For the purposes of this exercise, it really doesn’t matter which one you choose. (You’ll see why in a moment.) And don’t worry about where the library is located, geographically. If you imagine you’re unlikely to find anything in a New Jersey–based archive about, say, Armenian politics, or anything in a Kansas-based archive on Etruscan pottery, you might be surprised.

Familiarize yourself briefly with how the search engine works, and then run a basic query. Enter your search term—your topic, or some variation thereof—and see what comes up. If your search yields zero results, try a more generic search term, or perhaps a related but different one. If all else fails, go to a different site and try again. The database itself is not the vital part.

Step 3: Once you get a set of search results—any results—your work is simple. Just scroll through and scan the results to see what you find. Click on a few and read them. On most of these sites, you won’t be able to view the original source, only the catalogue entry. But even if a site does offer full text results, try not to get caught up in any one source for too long at this point. This is not yet the time for close reading.

Instead—and this is key—while scrolling through your search results, try to imagine that you are strapped to an EKG machine that is recording the electrical pulses going through your system as you read. Which primary sources raise your heart rate, even slightly? Write them down. Which ones have no effect on you one way or another? Take note of them too (since, a bit later on, we will also be taking stock of things that bore you!).

The goal right now, as we said above, is to “read yourself” as you read other things. As you read through the search results, only 20 percent of your cognitive energy should be dedicated to clicking on links, reading snippets of sources, and the like. The other 80 percent—and the critical part—should be dedicated to paying attention to yourself as “you” pay attention to the sources.

Why bother? How does this get a researcher any closer to discovering their research direction?

Well, consider this: every day our physical senses are so bombarded by stimuli that most sights, sounds, and smells go unnoticed. In fact, if we tried to pay attention to all of these stimuli all the time, our systems would get so overloaded that we would be incapable of carrying out even basic tasks. As a consequence, our bodies have evolved into refined filtration systems that decide what to ignore. Our bodies and minds have evolved into amazing not-seeing, not-feeling, not-smelling, not-hearing, and not-tasting machines.

Given how efficient we are at ignoring stimuli, it follows that when we do take notice of something—however small or insignificant—we should take notice that we’re noticing. This form of self-evidence gives a potential clue about our underlying concerns and curiosities.

Put plainly, whenever your mind takes notice of something—anything—you can be certain that there is a question there, even if you are not sure what that question is.

Learn to pay attention to these clues, and then to uncover the questions whose presence they indicate, and you’ll be able to move quickly and effectively from generic topics to precise and generative questions.

“Noticing what you are noticing” can be surprisingly difficult. You need to listen very closely to yourself, since the act of noticing something is rarely a dramatic affair. Epiphanies are not always loud. You might utter a semi-audible Hmm. Moments of Eureka! can even be silent. You might simply grin or furrow your brow or linger on an image or a line of text just a little bit longer than normal. No one needs help to hear a sonic boom. Your job here is more akin to detecting the faintest of gravitational waves.

Step 4: Go back to your search results. Write down, circle, or asterisk the ones that seem to have any effect on you, however small. Write a list out by hand, copy and paste the titles of the sources into a text file, or click a checkbox to save those sources in a folder or email. However you choose to do it, take notes.

To repeat: take note of anything that jumps out at you, even if it seems completely unrelated to your topic.

Let’s say you run a search on the Ottomans or New Jersey or China, and in addition to “relevant” materials pertaining to the empire, the state, or the country, your list also includes what appear to be fluke materials about Ottoman furniture, Jersey cows, or porcelain china. Do not dismiss these out of hand. Scan them too. If any of them make you pause or wonder about something, make a note just as you would for any other item. Don’t worry if your list seems incoherent or inconsistent. Your only job at this stage is to listen to yourself, and to take note of everything that attracts you. The winnowing comes later.

Step 5: Once you have an initial list of at least ten items (don’t simply copy and paste everything, although definitely err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion), take thirty minutes or so to ask yourself three questions about each item, setting down your answers in writing:

• What does this make me think of?
• If I had to venture a guess, why did I notice this one?
• What questions come to mind for me when I look at this search result?

A few words per item will do. And keep in mind: at this stage, it is quite likely that you won’t know why each item attracted your attention. Some of your answers to these questions might end up feeling tentative or silly. That’s OK. Just remember: as in the case of the feng shui example, avoid the temptation to act smart or to use language designed to impress some imaginary, external judge. Your only audience is you, so allow yourself to be inarticulate, instinctual, and honest. Why did this jump out at me?

Step 6: Put your list away, and don’t look at it for a full day. We mean it. Close this book and your computer, and set a timer for twenty-four hours.

Step 7: Now return to your list with fresh eyes. Imagine for a moment that someone you don’t know wrote it. If this list was all you had to go on, what would you say this researcher is concerned with? If you didn’t know their topic, what would you guess is their primary concern? Since you do know the topic, does the list of “noticings” tell the same story or a slightly different story or an extremely different one? Are their concerns intrinsic to the topic? If so, which aspect of the topic? Or is the topic merely a case of or the vehicle for a different question? Write out your thoughts on paper.

COMMONLY MADE MISTAKES

• Not writing things down
• Getting bogged down in individual sources too soon
• Excluding “fluke” search results that seem unrelated to the keywords you entered in the database or unrelated to your topic
• Feigning interest in a search result that seems “important,” even if it doesn’t really interest you
• Only registering interest in search results for which you think you know why you’re interested in them, instead of being more inclusive
• Trying to make a list of noticings that is coherent and fits together
• When speculating about why a search result jumped out at you, worrying about whether or not the reason is “important,” based on some imagined external standard

TRY THIS NOW: Let Boredom Be Your Guide

The goal: To become attentive to your active dislikes, identifying questions that you “should” (in theory) be interested in based on your topic of interest, but aren’t. By understanding what you don’t care about regarding your topic, you accelerate the process of figuring out what you do care about.

In the exercise above, you took notice of all of the search results that appealed to you. But what about the search results that had a negative impact—that seemed boring to you? Quite likely, they also registered on your imaginary EKG readout, but not because they attracted you. Rather, they repelled you, and so it’s unlikely that you included them in your list. After all, the most common reaction human beings have to boredom is avoidance. We try to dismiss or ignore things that bore us.

Don’t. Boredom is a powerful teacher, and deserves our attention. Boredom is not the same thing as disinterest or lack of interest. It is not a passive experience. Boredom is an active sentiment, a rejection of something that, like excitement, provides you with more self-evidence through which you can understand your concerns and motivations more clearly. By taking note of your boredom—in precisely the same way you just did with your excitement—you will gain clues about what your real research questions and problems might be.

Imagine a conversation between you and a well-meaning friend:

FRIEND: What are you working on?

YOU: Institutional sociology.

FRIEND: Ah, how interesting! I read an article the other day comparing the managerial structures of different companies, to see which ones created the most opportune conditions for workplace satisfaction and productivity.

YOU (TO YOURSELF): Wow, how painfully boring. That’s not something I’m interested in studying at all.

Your friend rattles off more examples that, given your professed topic of interest, should in theory be of interest to you as well. They list the titles of books and summarize a few. The more you listen, the more confused you become. Everything my friend is listing here is all so boring to me. Why? All these examples are clearly related to my topic, and so I guess I should be concerned with them. And yet I just don’t care. What’s wrong with me?

A quiet terror begins to set in.

Maybe my topic is boring. Maybe I should switch topics. Or maybe this is just what research is like: a fleeting moment of excitement followed by the tedium of studying things you don’t care about. Maybe I shouldn’t do research!

Hold off on judging yourself (or your friend—they might actually be helping you!) and take a moment to reflect. Ask yourself: What about your chosen topic bores you? Among the potential questions or subtopics that derive quite naturally and obviously from your stated topic, which ones repel you, perhaps even unnerve you?

This might be the first time you’ve ever considered questions like these. After all, no one asks us what bores us. Everyone asks what interests or excites us. It’s easy to see why answering questions about interests might lead us to learn something about ourselves that we might not know in a conscious way. But how would you explain why something bores you—especially something that seems like it should align with your topic of interest?

Here’s what to do:

1. Go back to your search results, and scan them again.
2. Pay close attention to your EKG readout, focusing this time on the results that bore you. In the very same way that we spoke of not “outsmarting” yourself regarding your interests, you will need to be cautious during this process as well.
3. Choose a few “boring” results and write down answers to the same questions you answered before—this time for these different, boring search results:
1. a. What does this make me think of?
2. b. If I had to venture a guess, why did this one not jump out at me?
3. c. What questions come to mind for me when I look at this search result?
4. Now, for each search result, write some version of this sentence: “I’m more interested in [something else] than [search result].”

Steps 3 and 4 produce two types of self-evidence that can give you detailed clues about the interior, unspoken, often unconscious mental makeup with which you are constantly making sense of the world.

Taking account of your boredom is part of your conversation with your research-self. Besides helping the process of elimination, steering you away from unprofitable lines of inquiry, boredom can also help you to ask better questions and zero in on your Problem.

COMMONLY MADE MISTAKES

• Denying boredom, or feigning interest in something because you feel it’s “on topic” and demands your interest because it’s “important.”
• Engaging in circular logic. Don’t fall prey to explanations that go something like this: “The reason this thing bores me is because it’s boring!” Boredom is not something that “happens” to you. Boredom, like inspiration, is a dynamic process that happens between you and whatever it is you’re interacting with. The sensation of boredom is the by-product of reactions between the substance that makes you you, and the substances of the reality you’re encountering.

TRY THIS NOW: Go Small or Go Home

The goal: To generate specific, fact-focused questions about your topic before you’ve done in-depth research. These will lead to bigger questions later on.

You are now in a great position to start moving from a topic to questions. You have a set of notes about two things:

1. What you noticed about sources on a topic, and your best guesses as to why you noticed those things
2. What, among the “logical” or “obvious” aspects of your proposed topic, bored you and why

Using all of this as inspiration, try the following—as always, in writing.

In a stream of consciousness, write out a minimum of twenty questions related to your topic. The key is to make your questions as specific as possible, using the following prompts:

• What facts do you wish to know about your topic?
• Which data or information about your topic might you need to satisfy your curiosity?
• What telling details about your topic do you imagine might exist?

Some questions might be prompted by your initial contact with the sources you used in the “Search Yourself” exercise, or in “Let Boredom Be Your Guide.” Others might be new.

Try to avoid posing questions that strive to be profound or too big-picture. If you find yourself asking questions about the essential “meaning” or “significance” of your topic, chances are you are thinking too abstractly.

Remember, too that question means question—with a question mark—and not a statement or sentence fragment masquerading as a question. “The question of justice” is not a question.

Again, your goal here is not to justify the significance of your project to someone else. You need to start with questions about basic facts. After all, you are new to your topic, and what you don’t know about it far outweighs what you do.

An example: let’s say you are looking at a black-and-white photograph taken during the proceedings of the military tribunals held in Nuremberg, Germany, in the wake of World War II. You might well wonder about big-picture questions, like “What effect did the trials at Nuremberg have on post–World War II Europe?” or “What was the significance of these trials?” But when you’re trying to formulate a research project, it’s the specific questions that will get you there faster:

Which nations were represented at the trial?
Who was sent as the delegate of each nation?
How were the delegates chosen?
What were their roles in the proceedings?
Did anyone refuse to go?
Who were the judges?
How were they appointed?
Who appointed them?
Was this the first postwar tribunal of its kind?
If not, where were the earlier ones?
Were members of the media permitted to attend?
Who took this photograph?
How was the photo distributed, when, and by whom?
In what building and what room did the proceedings take place?
Did the trial proceed during one contiguous period of time—over the course of a few days, weeks, months—or were there different parts of the trial, spread out over time?
Was there a deadline by which the trial had to conclude?
Who created a transcript of the proceedings?
Where was the transcript kept, or how was it distributed?
Who paid for all of this?
Who paid to transport judges, lawyers, and witnesses to the city?
Who paid for their lodging, or for their lost wages?
While standing trial, where, and for how long, were the accused parties incarcerated?

Notice that none of these questions is profound. They are small-scale and specific. Specificity is the goal at this point, for two reasons.

First, it is only through small questions like these that you can begin to form a picture in your mind (and in your notebook) about the core fundamentals of the topic you are researching. To try and answer “profound” questions at this point—about “meaning” and “significance”—is premature, since you don’t yet have the facts, much less the opportunity, to analyze them. By contrast, the more facts you know about the physical space where the tribunal was held, or about the identities of the judges, lawyers, witnesses, onlookers, reporters, families, and others present, the greater command you begin to have of your subject matter. This, in turn, prepares you for the process of asking “bigger” questions—“profound” questions—when the time is right.

Second, lurking in one or more of those “small” questions may be an unexpected question that could, when you hear yourself ask it aloud, send your research off into an entirely new direction. For example: when asking a simple question like Who paid for the lodging, food, and transportation costs of witnesses? you might find yourself wanting to explore the history of international tribunals from a different perspective—not from the perspective of the courtroom drama itself, but, say, from the perspective of urban history, asking questions like How did cities like Nuremberg, Tokyo, and Nanjing handle war crimes trials logistically? How did war-torn cities, whose infrastructures lay in ruins, handle transportation, housing, security, and more for such important events?

Even from these few further questions, you can already see how you are moving toward a research project that might teach us something new and insightful about a grand topic like justice.

When you begin to ask (and then to answer) precise and seemingly mundane questions like these, you begin to liberate yourself from the confines of vague and unproductive “topics,” moving instead toward specific and coherent clusters of questions that will, over time, add up to something compelling, open-ended, and doable.

Asking precise factual questions is one key to escaping Topic Land.

COMMONLY MADE MISTAKES

• Asking vague, grand, abstract, or big-picture questions about “meaning” or “significance,” instead of specific and precise factual questions
• Not asking actual questions (with a question mark), but instead writing statements or sentence fragments—topics masquerading as questions
• Not asking a question because you think you couldn’t answer it, perhaps because you think that the data doesn’t exist or is unattainable
• Asking too few questions, resulting in an inadequate quantity of self-evidence

SOUNDING BOARD: Start Building Your Research Network

You’ve done quite a bit of work by this point, all on your own. You’ve been thinking through topics and questions, and have done three exercises to generate new questions based on a topical interest.

Now’s a good time to use the questions you’ve generated to start a conversation about research with someone you know. Start building your research network—a community of people you can consult with and seek advice from during the research process. Make a list of teachers, colleagues, students, and fellow travelers you think would be willing and available to discuss ideas with you on a periodic basis. Some researchers do a large portion of their research individually, but a reliable Sounding Board can be a catalyst.

Circle a couple of names on your list of potential Sounding Boards. Choose a few of the questions you’ve generated while reading this chapter, and make a meeting to discuss them. Keep things open-ended. You’re not asking your Sounding Board to tell you which of your questions is “the best.” Tell them you’re not trying to settle on a research question just yet. You’re in an exploratory stage. The goal is to get on their radar, and to start the process of communicating about your research ideas orally—since you’ve already done some writing.

You could send them your questions in advance, but strive to make it a casual conversation. Don’t ask them “Are my questions good?” but “What do these questions make you think of?” and “What other questions do these questions make you ask?” Spend some time generating questions about a topic together.

And say Thank you. You may well be seeking them out again.

You Have Questions

You’re now well on your way. You started with a general interest and identified an equally general “topic”—an object or focus of inquiry. You “searched yourself,” generating a preliminary body of notes—self-evidence—based on an honest exploration of your attractions and repulsions. By writing about why certain things jumped out at you, and why others bored you, you’ve gained a clearer sense of your own standpoint and concerns, and you’ve used those exercises to generate specific and narrow questions. If your questions seem scattered, fragmentary, and chaotic, that’s OK; in fact, that means you’re doing things right. (If you have only a few questions, however, you should take another pass at the preceding exercise.)

Most importantly, in formulating these possible research questions, you’ve set aside for the time being any concerns about whether or not your questions are Important, with a capital I. We’ll get to what other people think in part 2. Your list of questions contains questions that matter to you, even if you don’t know why yet. As a bonus, you also have an initial set of primary and secondary sources from your database searches.

You have begun the process of transforming a topic into questions.

In the next chapter, we will show you how to analyze these questions to determine how they all connect. And once you connect them, you will discover that, underlying many if not all of these narrow and scattered questions, there resides something deeper that drives your work: your Problem.

For now, close this book, and give yourself time to recharge. We’ll see you soon.