WEBVTT Kind: captions; Language: fi 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.110 The purpose of this video is to teach you some fundamentals about history 2 00:00:06.110 --> 00:00:12.050 and then provide you with concrete instructions of how to do your project. As historians 3 00:00:12.050 --> 00:00:17.340 say: This video guides you to get your hands dirty. 4 00:00:17.340 --> 00:00:22.500 The tasks involved to complete your project consists of 5 00:00:22.500 --> 00:00:27.660 five steps. First, however, we need to learn some fundamentals 6 00:00:27.660 --> 00:00:33.100 about history. I will first clarify you the ground assumptions 7 00:00:33.100 --> 00:00:37.840 of doing research. Thereafter, the first task is 8 00:00:37.840 --> 00:00:42.960 to select your case company that you will independently research from a list of 9 00:00:42.960 --> 00:00:48.110 free-standing companies from the 19th century. The 2nd task, then, 10 00:00:48.110 --> 00:00:53.110 is to determine the basics about the company. The excel file 11 00:00:53.110 --> 00:00:59.370 from which you will select your case company provides a lot of information. 12 00:00:59.370 --> 00:01:03.270 I will show you how to interpret it. 13 00:01:03.270 --> 00:01:08.640 With the third task, you get started with the actual empirical work. 14 00:01:08.640 --> 00:01:13.330 I will show you how you will collect empirical 15 00:01:13.330 --> 00:01:18.690 evidence from historical newspaper archives. To be very clear here, 16 00:01:18.690 --> 00:01:23.090 we study empirical evidence from the time period that 17 00:01:23.090 --> 00:01:28.010 the company existed. That is, the 19th century. 18 00:01:28.010 --> 00:01:33.470 The fourth task then is to make sense about this historical 19 00:01:33.470 --> 00:01:38.500 evidence. I will show you how to apply "source criticism." 20 00:01:38.500 --> 00:01:43.600 Source criticism is tool to evaluate 21 00:01:43.600 --> 00:01:48.450 evidence/data critically. This is useful for 22 00:01:48.450 --> 00:01:54.310 not only for historical research but for any kind of data. 23 00:01:54.310 --> 00:01:58.600 Then, we also look at the steps involved when we 24 00:01:58.600 --> 00:02:03.680 interpret data in light of conceptual assumptions. 25 00:02:03.680 --> 00:02:08.750 That is, for example, Wilkins’ company perspective 26 00:02:08.750 --> 00:02:13.330 or Jensen-Erikson's society perspective. 27 00:02:13.330 --> 00:02:19.940 Finally, we will briefly look into how you transformed your research, 28 00:02:19.940 --> 00:02:24.910 your findings into your final report. 29 00:02:24.910 --> 00:02:30.440 So that is the overview and now let’s look into 30 00:02:30.440 --> 00:02:35.590 the first part: the fundamentals about history. 31 00:02:35.590 --> 00:02:41.740 So what's history? In principle, 32 00:02:41.740 --> 00:02:45.910 everything is very very simple. 33 00:02:45.910 --> 00:02:50.860 We "quote-unquote": we do history if we are situated 34 00:02:50.860 --> 00:02:56.240 in the here and now, look back at the past and interpret 35 00:02:56.240 --> 00:03:00.960 events that we assume to have happened. 36 00:03:00.960 --> 00:03:05.700 However, let's make it bit more complicated. 37 00:03:05.700 --> 00:03:11.130 To repeat, a simple definition of history conceives it as 38 00:03:11.130 --> 00:03:16.700 the activation and the use of the past in the present. 39 00:03:16.700 --> 00:03:22.340 In terms, the past refers to what “objectively” happened. 40 00:03:22.340 --> 00:03:27.040 However, we do not have a clear window into the past. 41 00:03:27.040 --> 00:03:31.100 Only an indirect one. 42 00:03:31.100 --> 00:03:36.370 What historians then do is to search access to the past via 43 00:03:36.370 --> 00:03:42.020 historical sources. Sources here are documents 44 00:03:42.020 --> 00:03:46.970 produced in the past. Think of, for example, 45 00:03:46.970 --> 00:03:51.410 the email that you might have written this morning. This 46 00:03:51.410 --> 00:03:56.540 email can become a historical source for future historians 47 00:03:56.540 --> 00:04:01.580 to learn something about the here and now. So historical sources are 48 00:04:01.580 --> 00:04:06.450 often just the residuals of our times. 49 00:04:06.450 --> 00:04:10.990 As I said, this window to the past 50 00:04:10.990 --> 00:04:14.700 is always an imperfect one, 51 00:04:14.700 --> 00:04:19.820 and we as interpreters bring ourselves into the 52 00:04:19.820 --> 00:04:24.530 interpretation process, as a qualitative scholars do. 53 00:04:24.530 --> 00:04:29.550 The history then that we create is always partly 54 00:04:29.550 --> 00:04:34.750 biased or "presentist." This means that it is biased 55 00:04:34.750 --> 00:04:39.230 towards the present as you're interpreting the past from 56 00:04:39.230 --> 00:04:44.500 the vantage point of today. Note here that 57 00:04:44.500 --> 00:04:49.930 histories about a particular past change over time. 58 00:04:49.930 --> 00:04:53.950 And this change is because the interests of 59 00:04:53.950 --> 00:04:59.070 the ones involved in the production of history might change over time. 60 00:04:59.070 --> 00:05:03.740 And this is for the better or worse, of course. 61 00:05:03.740 --> 00:05:08.780 Then finally, the product, the output of our historical interpretation, 62 00:05:08.780 --> 00:05:14.340 is a historical narrative. And here simply defined, 63 00:05:14.340 --> 00:05:18.990 it is a “sequence of logically and chronologically 64 00:05:18.990 --> 00:05:24.370 related events, organized by a coherent plot”. 65 00:05:24.370 --> 00:05:28.590 And this narrative can be told orally 66 00:05:28.590 --> 00:05:33.190 or written down in book or a journal article. 67 00:05:33.190 --> 00:05:35.360 So, 68 00:05:35.360 --> 00:05:41.380 the problem, however, is that the narrative can be structured 69 00:05:41.380 --> 00:05:45.450 or plotted in different ways. Consider, 70 00:05:45.450 --> 00:05:50.290 for instance, as depicted in the picture on 71 00:05:50.290 --> 00:05:54.920 the right-hand side, that we can tell the 72 00:05:54.920 --> 00:06:00.460 stories differently. Consider the red event in the center. 73 00:06:00.460 --> 00:06:04.650 We can contextualize this event relative to 74 00:06:04.650 --> 00:06:09.270 the green line of developments -- or the red one. 75 00:06:09.270 --> 00:06:14.460 And, of course, the decisions to plot the narrative of the red event in different ways 76 00:06:14.460 --> 00:06:18.660 might be biased as I said before. 77 00:06:18.660 --> 00:06:23.800 Having said this, what we'll do with this project is to 78 00:06:23.800 --> 00:06:28.970 construct an analytically structured historical 79 00:06:28.970 --> 00:06:34.020 narrative. This is a term coined by Rowlinson and his 80 00:06:34.020 --> 00:06:39.360 colleagues in a seminal Academy of Management Review 81 00:06:39.360 --> 00:06:44.490 article. Basically, this means that we use a 82 00:06:44.490 --> 00:06:49.780 pre-given conceptual lens to illuminate and explain 83 00:06:49.780 --> 00:06:55.780 the historical events and their relationships over time. 84 00:06:55.780 --> 00:07:00.130 So, in our case: the company perspective or the 85 00:07:00.130 --> 00:07:04.590 society perspective, respectively. 86 00:07:04.590 --> 00:07:08.660 Now 87 00:07:08.660 --> 00:07:13.230 one last note on historical truth. 88 00:07:13.230 --> 00:07:18.470 I have mentioned it several times now that the narrative that you will create or 89 00:07:18.470 --> 00:07:24.380 other historians create may be biased by our times, 90 00:07:24.380 --> 00:07:28.520 by our interests or conceptual assumptions. 91 00:07:28.520 --> 00:07:33.380 Is this problematic? Partly, yes! Because the 92 00:07:33.380 --> 00:07:38.070 historians’ job is to tell the history 93 00:07:38.070 --> 00:07:43.040 of things "how they actually were", as 94 00:07:43.040 --> 00:07:48.570 the German historian Von Ranke claimed. 95 00:07:48.570 --> 00:07:52.800 The problem, however, is that, from an epistemological 96 00:07:52.800 --> 00:07:57.350 point of view, this is impossible. 97 00:07:57.350 --> 00:08:01.930 Because, as I said earlier, we do not have a clear window 98 00:08:01.930 --> 00:08:07.310 into the past but only incomplete sources scattered around 99 00:08:07.310 --> 00:08:11.360 somewhere and, perhaps, we don't even find any. 100 00:08:11.360 --> 00:08:16.450 The goal that we can achieve 101 00:08:16.450 --> 00:08:21.620 must be a much more modest one. In this project, 102 00:08:21.620 --> 00:08:26.050 we strive for a plausible historical 103 00:08:26.050 --> 00:08:30.740 narrative based on verifiable historical 104 00:08:30.740 --> 00:08:35.270 sources and also based on 105 00:08:35.270 --> 00:08:39.770 an explicit conceptual frame. 106 00:08:39.770 --> 00:08:45.250 That means, we cannot tell just any history of 107 00:08:45.250 --> 00:08:50.370 the company you’re researching because there is something called the 108 00:08:50.370 --> 00:08:56.180 “veto power of sources” that prevents us to make 109 00:08:56.180 --> 00:09:00.970 up the past as we wish. We will 110 00:09:00.970 --> 00:09:06.800 explicitly also acknowledge our conceptual perspective 111 00:09:06.800 --> 00:09:11.500 that may bias our narrative. In this 112 00:09:11.500 --> 00:09:17.670 way, others can try to interpret the sources and make a judgement 113 00:09:17.670 --> 00:09:20.940 whether the narrative that you tell is plausible or not.