Chapter 20
Working with Secondary Sources
Laura J. Mitchell
Whether you’re reading for academic or other purposes, primary and secondary sources work together to provide information and opinions that help you form your own conclusions about the topic at hand. As you’ve read in other chapters, primary sources provide first-hand accounts of events, ideas, or processes; secondary sources typically rely on a range of different kinds of information to provide synthesis, interpretation, and analysis.
From a journalist’s perspective, a front-page news story about efforts to contain a wildfire is comprised of many primary sources: the reporters’ interviews with firefighters, local homeowners, and other witnesses. The editorial in the Sunday paper is a secondary source. It reflects on the week-long story, creates a coherent chronology of events, identifies the major turning points in the containment efforts, and offers opinions about the degree of damage or the best way to fight fires is clearly a secondary source. The editorial relies on information gathered from many primary sources—which might be reporters’ interviews or the resulting news stories—to offer a synthesis and an interpretation of the week’s events.
In this example, the daily news stories could be categorized as either primary or secondary sources. They function as primary sources because the daily reports offer a direct view of the events in question, and they serve as the basis of information for the weekend editorial writer. But these news stories can also be understood as secondary sources because the reporter has taken information gathered from witness interviews, direct observation, and police reports. She then sifted through this data to select the most relevant information and order it into a coherent story. In doing so, the reporter is doing work of synthesis and interpretation, but usually without much time for careful reflection.
Thinking about the intermediate status of a news story is helpful because it shows that there is not a strict division between primary and secondary sources. As a reader, it is up to you to think carefully about
While it is important to notice differences between primary and secondary sources, it is more productive to move beyond trying to apply hard and fast rules for differentiating between these categories and to interrogate more directly what a specific source can tell you. Whether primary or secondary, the source doesn’t tell you anything if you don’t ask it questions.
The Six-Cs principle of analyzing primary sources—content, citation, context, connections, communications, and conclusions—is also a useful starting point for thinking about secondary sources. The synthetic, interpretive aspects of secondary sources encourage some adaptations of these analytical starting points, however. As discussed in Chapter 19, the Six-Cs worksheet is available at:
http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/themed_collections/pdf/6cs_primary_source.pdf
Content is straightforward, because basic comprehension is the foundation for any kind of source analysis: What is the source (text, image, film, object) about? But scholarly books and articles—secondary sources you will encounter throughout your academic career—require an additional layer of questioning here: What is the author’s main argument? Why is this a significant topic?
For example, Erwin Panofsky's On Perspective in fall quarter describes the move toward linear perspective as being an entry into modern systematic space. In discussing how Panofsky helps us read Renaissance perspective, Prof. James Herbert asked, "What are the implications of regarding space as being systematic, homogenous, and regular (isotropic)?" and, "How does this affect how we view items depicted in the painting?" These questions were significant to Prof. Herbert because he was primarily interested in what these perspectival shifts meant historically and theologically, not just aesthetically or formally. He also used Panofsky in order to read these formal developments as an extension of the domain of the self, and as moves to internalize the supernatural dimensions of religious art.
Citation asks you to think both practically and abstractly. Good academic practice requires that you provide full citation information for all the sources you use in your academic work—author, title, date and place of publication, and specific location within the source. If you capture this information methodically as you read and take notes, it will save you lots of time later in the assignment, saving you return trips to the library or frantic internet searches trying to trace your way back to an obscure digital reference. Whether you keep track of your citations with software like Zotero, in a bound notebook, or on 3x5 cards (you can read more about Zotero and other digital resources in Chapter 21), as you perform the mechanics of noting the citation data, think also about the larger implications of this information. Who was the creator, and what do you know about him? What is the basis of his authority or expertise to form and communicate an opinion on this topic? When and where was it created? Do you know why?
This line of questioning leads directly to issues of context. As with primary sources, you want to consider the events that might have influenced the creation of this source. Context for secondary sources also means explicitly engaging with wider scholarly conversations. Academic writing is invariably in dialog with other work. Although an author’s footnotes will tell you about points of debate by citing other authors, these issues are not easy to see when you first begin reading about a topic. Authors use the space they have to make their own arguments, not explain the position of other scholars.
For example, in Spring quarter you will grapple with the aesthetic and symbolic meaning of rock art in Southern Africa. You will read a paper by archaeologists John Parkington, Tony Manhire and Royden Yates that argues material culture artifacts and knowledge about the lived experience of San peoples provides the best framework for understanding the paintings they have documented. Part of the context for understanding this academic paper is the work of another archaeologist, J.D. Lewis-Williams. He asserts that San spiritual belief, trance practices, and basic human neurology offer a better explanation for the rock paintings.
Although you cannot see the full contours of this debate by reading just one article—or even by reading one that represents each position—you can be aware that every secondary source you read is part of such larger conversations. You’ll become familiar with many of them as you get deeper into your major.
This scholarly context and the principle of connections are closely related. In order to get the most out of reading a secondary source, you may need to know more about conversations to which it contributes, or you may just need to connect the source to what you already know about modern paintings, or World War II. The most important thing to remember about connections, as with context, is that a source is unlikely to stand on its own. It will undoubtedly make more sense when you can connect it to events, ideas, or processes that you already know something about.
Being aware that a secondary source was produced by an individual (or a group) at a specific moment in time and space to convey an argument or make a point in an ongoing debate might make you skeptical about its reliability—and rightly so. Like primary sources, secondary sources have a goal, so they are likely to have an identifiable point of view. The presence of a bias should not automatically make you discredit a source, however. Rather, it is an occasion to hone your critical thinking skills in an effort to differentiate verifiable evidence from opinion, determine what aspects of a source are reliable, and where you should ask more questions. The elements of communication, such as writing style, rhetorical strategies and venues for publication or other dissemination are valuable clues to help you accept a source’s “truthiness.”
In an era where the lines between fiction and non-fiction, news and entertainment, facts and assertions are becoming increasingly blurred and genres harder to differentiate in popular media, Stephen Colbert’s notion of “truthiness” gains traction. The sources you will engage with, both scholarly and popular, are likely to have some elements that are strongly reliable, and other aspects that are less credible. Your task as a critical reader is to apply principles of citation, context, connections, and communication to evaluate a source’s claim to authority and reliability in its use of evidence. In other words, you should ask yourself: What’s the “truthiness” factor in what you’re reading, and how do you know?
These questions allow you to come to conclusions: What does this source contribute to our understanding of the topic? What have you learned from it? What questions remain open, or unasked?
Practical methods for working with secondary sources
Having established guidelines for working conceptually with secondary sources, it is worth thinking about some practical suggestions for keeping track of your insights and incorporating them into your assignments. The first challenge is taking good notes—especially citation information—in a way that you can easily retrieve your ideas. There is no single system that works for everyone. Marking up text and taking notes directly in your books (but not in library books!) ensures that your ideas are connected to the source that prompted them. Taking notes in a program like Zotero lets you create tags for later searching, and also keeps track of citations.
When you work with secondary sources, it is completely appropriate to use ideas from the sources you read, look at, watch, or listen to—and to build on those ideas. As you create your own work, you need to give credit to the source of your ideas. Citations are the appropriate form of credit in academic writing. And good citations come from good note-taking habits.
As you take notes—whether you’re writing them longhand or typing in a word-processing or other program—it is crucial that you differentiate between direct quotations and paraphrasing. No matter how clear it seems to you at the time, when you go back to look two or three weeks later, it is not always easy to tell the difference between ideas you paraphrased, direct quotations, or your own comments—unless you develop a system and stick with it.
The most straightforward way is to always put quotation marks around passages you copy verbatim, and include page, line, or bookmark/anchor reference directly in your notes. This method ensures that when you copy from your notes, you will be able to provide appropriate citation information in your assignments and papers and avoid inadvertent plagiarism.