This module is a guide to the process of identifying what type of work you are researching and using that information to expand the potential of different research projects. You will be introduced to the process of categorizing the works you find in your research, locating similar and divergent works and using them in concert to contextualize the "Egyptian Red Book," a satire of the British government Sudan policy included in the Travelers in the Middle East Archive.
Introduction: decoding historic documents
When you're doing historical research, you
often encounter documents that are difficult to categorize. Without knowing more about suchworks, it's difficult to advance a knowledgeable argument about them.
For instance, the
Egyptian Red Book" (1885), a satire that is part of the
Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA) ,
reveals little about itselfdirectly. It includes no author, introduction, table of contents, statement of purpose or even
references to the figures represented in the text and the images. Few of the cartoonshave named figures or artists. The pamphlet presents itself to the reader like the
political cartoons it contains: an overt message with very little background, a visualsermon to the converted with little consideration for those outside the know. If you
would like a synopsis of the story addressed in the Red Book you may skip to our
sketch of the historical events .
In order to understand both the intended and historical meaning of the
text and the images, it is important to find out what sort of work the "Egyptian RedBook" is. We will use the following questions to guide our research:
What is the significance of the term "Red Book" in the
title? To answer this question, we will look up the term in dictionaries and examine other
red--and green--books.
How do we categorize the work? We'll see how librarians have descibed it by using the catalog.
How does this work compare with others that come from the same period
and/or that address a similartopic? Let's analyze the "Red Book" in relation to newspapers and magazines from the same time
period.
Defining key terms: "red book"
Often the first clue to a document's significance is
its title. To begin, then, we should define what is meant by"Red Book". What is the significance of "Red" here--why not blue or green? The adjective
"Egyptian" indicates that the work focuses on a particular country, but it's not clearhow. Time to head to the library to find more information! We will use online reference
materials to begin our sleuthing. For the purposes of demonstration, we will describehow to conduct this research using Fondren Library's resources, but a similar process
will work at most other research libraries.
From the
Fondren home page select the Collections option and then the Online Reference Sources option that
appears next to it.
Then select General Reference at the top of the screen.
You will find a list of online dictionaries and encyclopedias here to choose
from. By selecting
Dictionary.com and entering red book we are offered this definition:
This resource is great for a quick reference, but it is important to understand
its limitations. Any two dictionaries published within a few years of each other willprobably provide you with similar, but not identical, definitions for a common word. The
meanings of words change over time, however. The best way to observe the way Englishwords change and the importance of identifying not only how, but when the word you're
investigating was used is by looking it up in
The Oxford English Dictionary .
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Source:
OpenStax, Studying political satire: "the egyptian red book". OpenStax CNX. Sep 19, 2006 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10290/1.6
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