Week 2 Flashcards
Three groups for time scene investigation (TSI)
1) time travel
2) scene examination
3) case building
What is time travel in TSI?
You have to get to a point in time, and know when you are - what came before, what came after, and what else was happening at that time
Logical methods for analyzing and determining what happening when and why; and what changed versus what stayed the same, across different periods of time in the past
What is scene examination in tsi?
Identify the focal topic of your enquire (often a historical person and their work), and all the contextual factors that help you understand it
a cognitive and affective reasoning skill. An attempt to adopt the perspective and motivational set of a historical figure is made, to better understand their thoughts, actions, emotions, and the consequences they faced from others around them
What is casebuilding in tsi?
Gather evidence relevant to your enquire and prepare a historical account (exploration, description, narrative, explanation or argument)
What is time travel also known as?
Chronological reasoning
Historical thinking skills in the time travel (chronological reasoning) category
1) managing historical data
2) sequencing and relating data
3) establishing causal connections
4) identifying continuity and change
4) periodization
What is scene examination also known as?
Historical interpretation and analysis
Historical reasoning skills
1) defining contexts
2) Adjusting focus
3) Analyzing general context
4) Countering discrimination
5) intertemporal awareness
6) navigating perspectives
7) developing empathy
What is historical empathy
A value-neutral component of historical understanding and does not presume a favourable assessment of the person whose perspective is being explored
What is a historiography
Skills, procedures, values, and principles that go into historical research and writing
Establishing causal connections:
What are the different types of causes?
1) immediate - usually with large direct impact on the topic you’re discussing
2) proximate - important but less direct factors, sometimes indirect
3) long-term or distant - general factors influencing many things that the time, including the topic you’re focusing on
Continuity
The event is part of ongoing, continuous process of historical development, then:
- it will be similar to other events happening at the time
- there will only be incremental difference before and after
- if the event is unusual, its impact is neither widespread nor long-lived
Change
If the event marks a change, or is part of a moment of change, then:
- the event/moment is qualitatively different from events up to that time
- it’s impact is widespread and long-lasting
- there is a big difference before and after it
Diachronic
Analysis over time, or through time
- historical causation is understood diachronically
Synchronic
Analysis of a specific point in time
- historical context is understood synchronically
Immediate context
People, places, relations; situations, and forces that are in constant interaction on a regular basis
Surrounding context
Social, cultural, and economic factors that influence basically everybody in your immediate context
General context
Large-scale forces and trends that shape all of society
PEST analysis
Political, economic, socio-cultural, and technological factors
STEEPLED analysis
Social, technological, economic, environmental, political, legal, ethical, demographic
A longer PEST variant
Historic agency
The ability to instigate change and provoke new historic developments. Some historians believe individuals exert a great deal of history agency. Others emphasize contextual factors that drive individual actions and decisions
Historical significance
Significant actions and events that are meaningful. People refer to them repeatedly, making them influential. They become symbolically important
5Rs of historical significance
- Remarkable - the event is remarked on by people at the time, or since that time
- Remembered - people commemorate, cite, or in other ways repeatedly refer to it
- Resonant - people use it to exemplify ideas, As the basis for analogies, to illuminate experiences, and express beliefs or attitudes.
- Resulting in change - the event marked a turning point of some kind
- Revealing - several aspects or features of that historical time period become easier to see in light of this action or event
Historical impact
Impactful historical actions and events have the 5Rs of significance but are remarkable for the very great degree of change (aka the 4th R is unusually powerful)
4 criteria for historical impact
- Profundity - how deeply peoples lives and thoughts were affected
- Breadth - how many peoples lives and thoughts were affected
- Durability - for how long were peoples lives and thoughts shaped by this change
- Relevance - it was meaningful earlier in time and is still meaningful now
What is a zeitgeist?
Usually a key experience that becomes the metaphor for many things in life during a specific time period.
- you can talk about the industrial age or the age of exploration
- You can talk about an era where revolution was in the air
- the zeitgeist can have qualities (it can be gloomy, hopeful, apocalyptic, etc)
-It can be identified with a technology (like the age of the steam)
Marie Pape-Carpentier (1815-1878)
- awarded the halphen prize by the French academy of moral and political sciences
- conducted systematic observational studies of children in her schools and developed ideas of active learning we would recognize as progressive today
- widely known as a pioneering psychologist
Intertemporal awareness
- maintaining awareness that we are dealing with two historical time frames, not one
- sensitivity and alertness to the fact that we are always dealing with the assumptions and perspectives of two time frames when we think about history: the time we are studying, and our present time with its own preoccupations and biases
Presenting
We rely too much on ideas and values from today when interpreting the past, and thus we develop a very weak sense of historical difference.
Historicism
Understanding the past purely in terms of the values they held in the past. If people did things in the past we condemn today, or made silly mistakes in their work, a historicist would say we can’t judge them, because that’s how things were back then.
Causes of intertemporal tension between the context of now and the context of the past. We feel stuck between:
- Wanting to condemn things in the past that were wrong
- Refusing to pass judgement because that’s the way things were at the time, and people couldn’t have been expected to behave differently
We need to embrace the tension between temporal perspectives and make it productive. History is a multi-perspectival discipline and we have many ways of looking at things:
- Evaluate historical info relative to the context of its time
- Evaluate it from our own frame of reference today
- Adopt the frame of reference from the past and critique the present
- Construct a frame of reference as an alternative way to understand both past and present
