History Research After College
May 11, 2012 9:57 AM   Subscribe

I am graduating this weekend with a BA in History. I wrote a senior honors thesis and really loved the process of conducting research. Is there a way I can continue researching next year, while I'm not in school?

This may seem like a dumb question, but I cannot seem to find the answer through googling.

During college, I had a great idea for an independent study that unfortunately never materialized, but I would love the chance to still do the research I wanted. This would mostly involve conducting interviews over skype or the phone. If I was in school I would write this all up in a proposal, get the funding for it, and then write a capstone project and maybe an article or two on it.

How do I do this now that I'm graduating? Is this kind of project possible outside of school? I have a full-time job, so my project would be on the side. I don't know what the expectations and possibilities are here. In college, I had to go through the IRB process to interview people. If there a way for me to do academic-type research without violating researching rules? Can I put this on a blog or publish articles anywhere?

I really don't want to give up on my project, because it's something that I know I am good at and I enjoy a lot. I also don't want to put it off until I make it to grad school, given how bad the job market after grad school is looking right now and I might not go back.

Thanks for any help you can offer!
posted by sockysocksock to Education (15 answers total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Is this kind of project possible outside of school?

Yes, in theory. There's no inherent reason why anyone can't do serious, rigorous, academic research. Aside from a lack of inclination or talent, the main barrier to this sort of thing is simple lack of time. You've got a day job. Doing this sort of thing on the side is difficult simply because serious research takes serious time. I've got an academic paper I've slowly been putting together for the better part of four years now. I hope to eventually get it done, but side projects like writing a book and, oh, getting married, have made it hard to make rapid progress.

In college, I had to go through the IRB process to interview people.

You are, presumably, doing history research. I've never heard of any kind of IRB process for anything that didn't involve testing on human subjects, e.g., biomedical or psychological research. It seems that a few historical societies have held that oral histories and interviews specifically do not count as "human subject research" and are not subject to IRB review. The fact that you had to do this in college may have something to do with where your funding came from, but I've never heard any professional historian even mention this as a possibility.

Can I put this on a blog or publish articles anywhere?

Sure. You can try anyway. There's nothing stopping you from getting your own blog, to be sure. But getting something published in a respectable journal will likely prove difficult. Most of them have strongly biased against publishing anything not written by a professor or grad student. This is partly quality control and partly self-interest, i.e., if anyone and their brother could publish in a journal simply because they do good work, professional historians' positions, precarious enough as it is, get that much weaker.
posted by valkyryn at 10:17 AM on May 11, 2012 [2 favorites]


My advice is just go ahead. You don't need a license to be a historian, and while it is good practice to follow the ethics standards required by funding agencies, if those agencies aren't funding you then you don't need to worry about the paperwork they would require. And if you need some inspiration, read "How Harvard is failing its students", especially this bit:
These kids are vulnerable to Wall Street investment firms and to things like Teach for America because they have application processes at all. But life, normal adult life, doesn’t have an application process. You actually, at some point, need to figure out what you want to do and what makes you happy. You need to take a leap of faith that your native talents and desires will end you up at a reasonable and interesting place.
posted by caek at 10:18 AM on May 11, 2012 [7 favorites]


I don't know what your research is, but could you frame it as a kind of investigative journalism and see if a publication that accepts longform-type articles will accept your query? It is hard to go through IRB without belonging to an institution. Approaching the topic from a journalistic standpoint will be different than academic research but the parts that you enjoy might be similar.
posted by newg at 10:18 AM on May 11, 2012 [1 favorite]


Sounds like journalism to me. Journalists don't have IRBs, but there are a lot of white papers on journalistic ethics that you'll find at places like the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the Poynter Institute.

You can certainly write articles, blog, submit to conferences as an independent scholar, what have you. Reading some magazines that publish articles about historical topics (for US history, Smithsonian is really the gold standard) to see how other people are doing it is a good idea.
posted by Sidhedevil at 10:19 AM on May 11, 2012 [2 favorites]


By "articles" I had assumed you meant "magazine articles." If you are thinking about writing articles for scholarly journals, the National Coalition of Independent Scholars is a helpful resource.
posted by Sidhedevil at 10:21 AM on May 11, 2012 [3 favorites]


Maybe this is less relevant in your area of expertise, but one useful element of having a blog or a personal website or something else as an online site for your research is that you're going to be losing one of the best, easily understandable intros for getting people to talk to you: "hi, I'm a student at [Placeholder University], and I'm doing some research on [area X]." Losing your academia credentials can sometimes mean respondents require more backstory on who you are and why you want to talk to them - not tons more, but if you're approaching people cold, especially by email, it can be worthwhile to think about how best to frame the question of who you are and what you're doing.

Note: This written from the perspective of a part time student & full time consultant who has to do a lot of calling of experts for both commercial and academic projects.
posted by deludingmyself at 10:30 AM on May 11, 2012 [2 favorites]


Join the associations! My work involves public history, so I love to follow the activities of National Council for Public History, Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, the American Studies Association, the American Folklore Society, and the Popular Culture Association. Each of these groups offers things like ListServs and LinkedIn groups where interesting discucussions take place. In addition, they all also have annual conferences which I highly recommend attending. Conferences are a blast - yes, they center around people in academia but you will find it's not exclusive to academia. There are authors, museum professionals, journalists, and the curious. You can develop paper ideas, submit them during calls for proposals, and they'll be reviewed by whatever jury the conference has set up - each will give you its criteria. Some require that you be a graduate student or MA level or above, but not all of them do.

You also probably would like to poke around HNET. HNET is the portal site to tons of listservs in the humanities, featuring specific areas of interest. Some of the lists require you to be approved, some don't, some scroll faster than others, so mileage varies, but ti's a great resource.

Finally, there are also tons of smaller associations that center on subtopics in history. It's worth Googling your interests + association to see what turns up. Things like African-American studies, queer studies, labor studies etc often have their own associations. You mentioned an interview-based indepdent study, so you may want to connect with the Oral History Association, for instance.

But yeah, stay involved. There are tons of people like you. if you stay involved in the world of history, you may find yourself inexorably drawn back to grad school, as there are few other ways to really understand the historiography and theory of the field in a direct, relatively efficient and comprehensive way, and not having an advanced degree can become a barrier to getting serious research done and presented. But in the meantime, you can do a lot through simple participation in associations.
posted by Miko at 11:10 AM on May 11, 2012 [7 favorites]


Dan Carlin seems to have made a pretty nice career / hobby out of independent history research.
posted by COD at 11:52 AM on May 11, 2012 [1 favorite]


It sounds like you're interested in an oral history type of project, but just in case you're wondering about the secondary/primary sources side of things: some public universities make their entire library system open to the public. The University of Washington, for example, has guest computer stations where you can just walk in and sit down and you've got access to most of their online databases and their entire library catalog. For a donation (I think it was $100/year) you can get a UW library card and check books out, although I think you can't get inter-library loans, and you can't get access to the digital databases unless you're in the actual library.

There's also a pretty good chance that local museums and archives will let you do research there without requiring you to jump through tons of hoops, even when you don't have any institutional affiliation. The people there can also be good sources of knowledge and information, because they'll know about other local resources that you didn't know to look for.
posted by colfax at 12:37 PM on May 11, 2012


I would suggest using some kind of participant consent form, just to CYA. (There are a ton online to choose from via Google.)
posted by smirkette at 1:49 PM on May 11, 2012


The real problem with trying to do work without IRB approval is that no reputable journal will take the manuscript if they think it needed approval and didn't have it, at least that's how it is in my corner of the world with human subjects research. It's not like the journals just think your work is sub-par if you worked independently; they actually have requirements for publication that are hard to meet outside an institutional setting.
posted by slow graffiti at 2:22 PM on May 11, 2012


To answer slow graffiti's question -- almost no one I know who has submitted an article to a reputable historical journal has been asked about their IRB status (this might vary according to the journal, but I haven't heard about this happening). Most historians believe that oral history should be exempt from IRB review -- the American Historical Association has been fighting this fight for quite some time, and continues to. Since there are a significant number of independent scholars publishing articles in historical journals who don't have an IRB to even go through, I don't think this will be an issue here. That doesn't mean that the OP doesn't need to be an ethical researcher -- disclosing what the project is about, what is going to happen to the tapes/transcripts of the interviews, letting interview subjects read and comment on transcripts/articles, etc., is key, both in terms of protecting him/herself and in not being an asshole.
posted by heurtebise at 3:07 PM on May 11, 2012


You could write books based on your research and self-publish them for Kindle. This guy seems to do pretty well out of it.
posted by Perodicticus potto at 3:45 PM on May 11, 2012


Hey Socky, I'll be in a similar boat when I finish my Master's later this year -- my project has so much more potential but I'm not able to move on to PhD work quite yet. I'm going to try to get some funding from outside sources that will support my research (otherwise this extra-curricular research is going to take a long, long time). Someone mentioned above about joining some professional societies that might offer some funding -- I would definitely check those out. Something that I'm looking at is a grant through my state's historical commission. There is a program -- and I think most states have this (at least they do in PA and DE) -- where you can be eligible for a state grant to do historical research as long as you are affiliated with a historical society. You would basically be doing the research work for the society and they would use their affiliation to fund your project. Here is the website for this program in Pennsylvania just to give you an idea of what PA offers.

My advisor mentioned to me the organization Imagining America, which she said could be a potential source of funding for me during the summertime, though I have not looked into it. Apparently, they offer funding to public scholars who can add to the story of America through personal interviews and accounts. My advisor did something similar to this at my university, though I don't believe that they opted for any outside funding since it was a class project over several semesters.

Also, take a look at foundations geared toward historical scholarship. There are tons of foundations out there that have plenty of money. Check out this list. You can certainly get your work published if you submit it to a professional publication, though you'll have a better chance of publication and you'll be given more credence if you're attached to an organization (like a historical society, university, etc.). I think the important thing is to stay affiliated with an organization. It's much harder to make the connections (professionally and funding-wise) when you're on your own. But, if you can get a good chunk of your work done and then submit a proposal to one of the myriad of foundations, organizations, or state departments that might support it, then you could certainly get funding through them. Honestly, I would check with the professors in the history department at your university to see what they say about the logistics of continuing your research work in the interim between graduating and heading to grad school. They should also be able to give you some clear ideas of how you can finance your research. From one social/historical researcher to another: Good Luck!!! :-D
posted by paperclip2000 at 7:01 PM on May 11, 2012 [2 favorites]


Hi, I'm a Certified IRB Professional but IANYCIP, so take this with several tablespoons of salt.

If you're on good relations with one of your former professors and want to continue doing research under the auspices of your alma mater, you may want to look into an Individual Investigator Agreement (warning: byzantine government guidance doc). Essentially it allows your old university to cover you under its legal auspices as a sort of independent contractor. You'd still need someone at the school to serve as PI, but it might be worth looking into. I've seen more than one student project that had a faculty member serving as PI-in-name-only, this wouldn't be too different.

FWIW, my office fields research requests from 2 hospital systems, a VA medical center, and a pediatric hospital (in addition to investigator driven studies from our own School of Medicine), so we tend to give things like oral history projects the benefit of the doubt. The 2nd link in heurtebise's comment talks about some of the legal wrangling that is going on in anticipation of some of the most sweeping changes to human subjects research regulations in decades. In this case, though, having some sort of IRB review might actually be beneficial as it would give you a definite association with a recognized institution. People tend to react better to "Hi, I'm Person from Institution, want to talk?" than they do to "Hi, I am Random Stranger, want to talk?"

Final note, you are actually free to conduct the kind of independent interview-based research you are proposing without any IRB oversight. Universities and similar institutions require IRB review because federal law requires it of institutions that receive support from the government. Essentially, if the University wants to receive NIH or NSF grants it needs to have IRB review of research. Institutions or individuals (like yourself) that are not planning on applying for federal support are actually free to conduct non-medical research without IRB approval (most medical research would fall under other legal requirements, particularly FDA code), assuming no other laws are broken. So you're free to interview people as an independent research. As others have noted though, getting something published in any reputable journal as independent non-IRB approved researcher could be onerous to say the least.

Hope that helps, I just covered a broad swathe of fairly murky issues, so if you have questions you can MeMail me.
posted by Panjandrum at 12:14 PM on May 14, 2012


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