I have had a LOT of conversations with students – undergraduate and graduate alike – about how to shape a research project in history. These students have generally faced challenges that fall into four big categories: 1) they have picked a very specific research question that might be interesting but will be impossible to research because there aren’t a lot of sources available and/or it will require them to do a form of intensive research that they do not have the time and resources to manager, 2) they have picked a super interesting research project that is just too “big” for the program in front of them (i.e. they’re in a Master’s program that requires completing two smaller projects in 2 years but they have asked a question that sounds more like a PhD dissertation or beyond), 3) they are asking questions that are too broad or vague, and/or 4) they are asking questions that have already been answered by previous researchers and it’s not clear what new insights they would bring to those questions.

Ultimately, all of these challenges point to a flaw in the process. Often, we tell students that they need to come up with a research question, but we don’t often tell them how to do that. Students working in the field of African History face a particular set of challenges. We are often working with a limited number of and access to primary sources. Colonial officials only documented things that were interesting and relevant to themselves within the archive, and postcolonial archives in countries like Ghana are often quite limited. Colonial-era newspapers are often only held in the UK, if they still exist at all, and have often not been digitized or are behind paywalls. Postcolonial newspapers have often not been digitized and, if available outside of the hard copies in Ghana’s PRAAD or the Padmore Library, for example, may still require a microfilm machine and a long wait while they are shipped from the Center for Research Libraries via Interlibrary Loan. Topics not covered in the archives may conceivably be engaged through alternative sources including oral histories and popular culture, but collecting those sources takes both time and access. Some people, for example, may no longer be alive, and it might be difficult to find comprehensive collections of popular culture materials. As the film The Eyes of Ghana has documented, the country’s rich film archive has been almost completely destroyed. The process of shaping a research project, I would argue, is much more complicated than professors often make it seem. There’s some invisible work that happens to get to a well-informed and well-crafted research project.

I call that work contextualizing the question, and I argue that it is probably the most important part of a research project. So what does that entail? In order to contextualize your research question, I argue that you need to back up.

First, ideally, you take an honest look at what kinds of primary sources are actually available to you. You can only make historical arguments based on the evidence you have. So you must start there. What actually exists? But, more importantly, what can you actually access from where you are in a reasonable amount of time. Sometimes there is more available to you than you think. For example, Trevor Getz has worked to digitize 19th and early 20th century West African newspapers on the platform History Genie, which has transcribes the newspapers and makes them searchable. We also put the Watson Commission files up there, and they are available for use. There are other digital collections out there. It’s important that you don’t take shortcuts though. Especially when you are new to research, you don’t really know what’s there or the context in which it was produced – what words did people use, what themes emerged, what other kinds of topics were these ideas in conversation with, etc. There might be other topics that you miss or never know exist because you weren’t aware. If you “save time” by using the search function, in other words, you’re missing an opportunity to learn what the archive contains and to deepen your understanding of the context in which people were writing (and living), even if you do find your topic easily. Even if you don’t find a lot of evidence to support your work within the newspapers, they can be an important way to develop a sense of historical context, awareness, and empathy. As a historian, you ultimately, have to put yourself in the perspective of people in the past – to understand the way that they thought at that time. It’s far more than assembling facts in chronological order. You can’t take shortcuts if you want to do it well.

Approaching the archive with curiosity is important. If you go in assuming you know what you want to find, you will miss so much else that is important. Our arguments come from the evidence. We don’t get to imagine or invent them. Let the evidence speak. Stay curious.

Second, once you have a sense of the materials available to you, identify the themes that emerge from those materials and begin to read existing literature related to those themes and time periods. Read widely. Read far more than you think you need to read. Read work that covers the same time period that you’re interested in. Read work across time periods that addresses the themes that you are interested in. Don’t think about your themes too narrowly. If you’re interested in education, don’t just read things about schools, also read about literacy and social clubs and modernity – the concepts connected to education. Here you are reading for two things: 1. You’re reading for the historical details that help inform your interpretation of the past. You can’t possibly research everything. Building on the research of people who came before you is important. You just must make sure that you cite their work clearly and thoroughly every time you draw on it. It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s the sign of a well-researched project and a responsible scholar. 2. You’re also reading for the historical arguments that scholars have made about the time period/topic. It is entirely possible to use the same source in completely different ways depending on the kinds of questions you ask and the particular kind of insight (from contextual understanding) that you bring to the interpretation of that source. What have other scholars said about the themes that interest you? Is there something interesting that you noticed but they didn’t talk about? Often students look for a gap in coverage, and that’s fine. But filling a gap in and of itself is not particularly interesting or significant. It’s far more interesting and far more likely to be successful if you focus on a story within your broader topic to explore.

Let me give you an example. I have received many emails from students telling me they want to do a master’s project on the history of roads in colonial Ghana. I suspect they do that because they read my book and found it interesting. I suspect they also do it because they’ve been told that they need to flatter a potential supervisor and show a connection to their work (I will come back to that another time). But I am reading your message to learn about your project, not mine. I am not so cocky as to think there is nothing that can be written about the history of roads in colonial Ghana, but, as I have said to a few students, there were limited sources to begin with and I basically squeezed those sources for all they were worth. Maybe I did miss something in the archive or there’s an opportunity to explore a topic further, but your project should say that and explain why it matters. Remember that you’re writing to someone who knows that archive and that topic very thoroughly. Undoubtedly much more thoroughly than you if they have written a book on the topic. It’s much more interesting to pick up on a theme within the broader topic and explore it more thoroughly. Writing big broad histories of things is hard – researching and writing Ghana on the Go was hard – because I was creating the foundation myself out of fragments rather than building on an existing strong foundation. Especially for a Master’s project, no one is expecting you to found a new field. Build on the foundations of what is already there to explore an interesting story that I could not have done. Think about what unique insights and perspectives you have to bring to the project. Whatever you pick will have to sustain an entire research project.

Articulating the significance of your argument is often the hardest part – especially when you’re early in your education/career. Making a compelling case for significance requires that you have read and understood thoroughly what other people have written. Ask yourself – why should someone care about this topic? What do we learn about it that we didn’t know before? You can only answer that question by reading what’s been written to date. And you must read much more than you think you do. Articles and books. Often historians make one or more arguments related to one of these six historical thinking skills, in conversation with the existing literature:

Third, once you have a sense of the kind of questions that you want to ask about the sources, you start to actually do careful reading of the sources. It’s important to note here that all sources are both true and not-true. It is true that A said X to B. What A said about X might not have been accurate or their understanding or interpretation may be been flawed or limited in some way. In colonial archives, for example, it is true that British officials wrote about a wide range of topics related to African peoples in the Gold Coast. They were very often wrong in the way that they understood or interpreted those topics, however. We should never take sources at face value. We have to ask ourselves – What can they tell us? and What can they not tell us? In the case of the latter question, then, what other kind of research do you need to do to fill in those holes or to better understand the source and its subject? Knowing what the archive actually does say, however, matters enormously. We can only read between the lines of the archive when we know what it actually says. Literally.

Fourth, now, having looked at the primary sources more closely, you go back to your question again and refine it further, sharpening the scope of the question and further refining your statement about its significance (i.e. what it helps us understand that we did not understand before).

Now you have a really good research question. You still have to do the writing. You will need to identify themes and sub themes, chronology, periodization, characters, and any number of other things. But you have the foundation of a good (i.e. informed and thoughtful) research project.

It takes time. It all takes time. Don’t give into the temptation to skip steps. Do the hard work so that you lay a stronger foundation. It impresses (potential) supervisors, but more importantly, it sets you up for success later as your project develops.