Today, we will be taking a trip to the Sioux City Public Museum and Archives. Here, we will do research to gather information for our research papers. The archives are an important place to gather information, especially about Sioux City. For our class, I will be using the museum and archives to look at the literature of Sioux City authors around the turn of the 20th century. Specifically, I will be looking at the concerns of authors of different social classes.
There are a few different questions that I’d like to ask Tom Munson.
- How can I research the demographics of Sioux City and how they have changed?
- Where can I find fiction by Sioux City writers?
- What genres (historical fiction, romance, etc.?) should I be looking at?
For my topic, I was going to write about how the concerns of women differed according to social class. I believe that this is an incredibly important topic because literary recovery works best when you know which groups of people are underrepresented. This knowledge tells you where you can find some of your best material.
During class today, I’m going to fill out my research proposal and get it turned in. I’d like to be able to find some works from relatively unknown authors that I could incorporate into my piece. I have not consulted with a librarian yet, but I will probably end up doing so. It would be foolish to waste such a valuable resource.
I feel very confident about where I am with my topic so far. There is plenty of material available for me to look at, but the topic isn’t so broad that it’s completely out of the scope of this research project. I look forward to visiting Lincoln next week (by the way, I’d like to know what the travel schedule is like) and exploring the archives there. I know someone who works in the archives, so doing research will go very quickly for me.