How To Read As A Student (And Looking Back At Three Of My Own Texts When I Was A Student)

I like this a lot. When I was a student this was exactly the kind of thing I was struggling with. I was in the history field so my problem was basically always: How do you tell something about a certain series of events if don't read the whole thing? And so I read, ineffectively throughout my whole university time. I got okay at it, but while I was listening to these two videos I thought to myself that I didn't do a good enough job of making my topics well-defined. I give you three examples.

My first ever "historical essay" - I studied history of science and technology - was written about the old london bridge. I got a very good grade for it and I was a very happy student because of that for the whole day when I got it back. I had just given up on a digital media (computer science) program where grading was handled much harsher.^[1] But thinking about it now: what made this text about its history and ultimate demise a somewhat successful one was that it told the story of the bridge and how it was inhabited in a concise fashion. It didn't have any real thesis attached to it, but it was readable and compressed a few longer or hard to find texts and I think my professor of historical urban studies back then appreciated it for that. It didn't get lost in too much detail or tried to do too much at the same time. It was a simple 10 page (or so) document that focused on telling the story of that bridge, no more no less.

My bachelor's thesis was written about the botanical garden in Berlin. It was also kind of a general history of it. If I recall correctly, it was kind of boring and mostly written from secondary sources and didn't really have any opinions about the history of this botanical garden. There a bunch of different reasons why botanical gardens were of interest to me back then - like there network-like connectivity to other gardens and researchers far away (connected through letters and ships and so forth), the tools used to transport specimens (like the wardian case), the connections to colonial world exploration, the citizen science aspect - but most of all I liked hanging out there and the most others didn't seem to care too much about botany. It was a quiet place with a lot of history and it was just kind of neat to hang out there by myself in an otherwise bustling city. I was lucky that I was still writing my bachelor's thesis back then, so I got a good grade as well. Looking back at it now I know that the work lacked depth. A thesis, even a bachelor's one, should have a point. And this one didn't have one. It just assembled years and dates, put them in an order, introduced headings to demarcate different eras of the garden but otherwise had nothing to say. I just found it so wonderful that an institution like this existed and how it still exists to this day, but I didn't even write about its standing power (surviving two World Wars while being situated in Berlin is kind of impressive), I just assembled a chronology.

My master's thesis was about (ostensibly) the colonial aspirations of the botanical garden in Berlin. But it was also kind of about the 100 years before that and how the methods and approaches and theories changed over time (but kind of also stayed the same^[2]) and how all of that could be seen as "a history of science as a history of recombination of ideas". I think my thesis could've have been so much stronger, if I had focussed on the colonial botany aspect and leave the recombinational history aspect for another time (or the other way around). Regardless, my grade was still good - although the worst of these three examples - and I got to admit that I am not super proud of this work. Part of it is that I got access to some of the archival materials of the botanical garden's/museum's archive to research the colonial botany aspect but... I think I just didn't know how to do it! And so I gave the materials back without ever having really read them in the way you're supposed to. I never really thanked the director of the library of the museum for getting access either.^[3] Looking at it through the lens of the video linked above I realize now that I had half of a right thought back then: I knew that just delivering a chronology was not enough, but I didn't get that talking about two topics at the same time - I still remember it: make on part about its history (chronology) and the other about what it means (the recombination idea) - that didn't even really relate to each other was bad. And what's more, I ended up writing a chronology about the 120 years or so in which the botanical garden in Berlin really mattered anyway: If I could do it all over again, I would probably try to focus on one of the two aspects that I tried to smash into one master's thesis.^[4]

I think it's great that these kinds of videos are made because they do communicate an important aspect of the work of writing a researched text (and to me that's seems applicable in or outside academia) and point to something that might get lost in writing alone: Everyone struggles with this. And it is really about not reading all of a particular source, but the parts that are important to you, that strengthen your argument - you do have an argument right? Right? Right?^[5]

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