Research Questionnaire

Research Questionnaire

ARHS 1325

The purpose of this assignment is to prepare you for doing research with trustworthy scholarly resources.

All your references and the bibliography should be written according to the current Chicago Manual of Style or the MLA style. For the Chicago manual see http://www .chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

To begin, look back at either one of your visual analysis papers. You may use the same object you worked on as the basis for this assignment, although you may use a different example. This should be an artwork dated between 1400 and 1840. In contrast to the visual analysis paper, where you were not supposed to bring in any extraneous information to bear on the artwork, here you can let your research skills shine! Please fill out all information in this word document and upload to Canvas.

1. Your Object

Provide all of the details for your artwork including the title (or alternative titles when applicable), artist, date, medium/materials, dimensions, current location, and provenance (if known).

2. The Artist

a) Write a short paragraph (150-200 words) on your artist’s career. In order to do this, explore museum websites to see whether they contain any information about your artist. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Prado Museum, Rijksmuseum, National Gallery of Art, Washington, and National Gallery, London are all good examples, which often have a lot of information available. Do NOT use wikipedia, blogs, personal websites, or websites such as abcgallery, art encyclopedia, Olga’s gallery, Encarta, webgallery, or webmuseum for this section. You may also begin looking for books or articles (more on this below).

But what if your work is anonymous? Or what if you can’t find anything about your particular artist? No worries! Instead, write 150-200 words about the city or region with which the artwork is associated. Make sure that you focus on the historical period and location in which your artwork is made. For instance, if you are working on a 16th century painting from Mexico City, don’t write about the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Equally, don’t write about a 16th century object that is from Paris. Again, the websites above are rich sources of legitimate information. The Metropolitan Museum’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History is particularly useful in this regard.

b) Which websites did you use? Cite them correctly using Chicago Manual of Style or MLA formatting, and provide a 1 to 2 sentence description of each website and why it is useful.

c) Identify two other artists who are in some way associated with your artwork (these might be artists who worked in the same period or place as the maker of your artwork). List them and describe how they are related to your artwork in 1 to 2 sentences.

3. Timeline of Art History

a) Using the Metropolitan Museum’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/) identify one essay that is in some way relevant to your chosen artwork. This could be an essay that describes the same period, medium, technique, or place that also characterize your artwork. Cite the essay below using Chicago Manual of Style or MLA formatting, and list two other artworks that it discusses or that are related to it.

b) Use the Timeline of Art History to name two relevant historical events that took place within fifty years of your artwork being created. Make sure that they also occurred in the region where your artwork was created. For instance, if you are writing about a Peruvian textile, don’t write about events that took place in Russia. Do your best to identity events that occurred as close as possible to the dates of your artwork. Please write three sentences about each event and hypothesize about how could influence your research into your artwork.

4. Scholarly books

Using the SMU library website, or library websites of other universities (Harvard University’s Hollis catalog is one of the largest in the world), identify two scholarly books devoted to your artist. Scholarly books that are devoted to single artists are known as monographs. But again, what if your artist is unknown? Don’t fret. Identify a scholarly book that deals with the period and region where your particular artwork was produced. Try to find a book that will shed light on your artwork. E.g. if you were writing on a silver chalice from Byzantine Constantinople, a book on silver mining in the Byzantine Empire might be very relevant. If the book does not appear to directly relate to the artwork, please make sure to explain how you think it might.

Sometimes it can be hard to identify legitimate sources. If a book was published by a university press (examples include Johns Hopkins University Press, Cambridge University Press, University of Minnesota Press, or University of Texas Press), this is a good indication that it has undergone a thorough vetting process (known as peer review).

Provide all the relevant details for the book (author, title, date, place of publication, and press) below, using Chicago Manual of Style formatting. Please write three sentences about what you hypothesize the book might bring to the study of your particular artwork.

Here’s a conundrum: you chose a painting by the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Diego de Silva y Velázquez. There are a LOT of sources on him. How do you know which ones to choose?

If you go to worldcat.org and type in “Velázquez” there are approximately 104,000 positions that come up. The first ten all refer to the painter, so you know that you’re in the right place, but, with the exception of one, they all date to before 1974. Keep looking! You want to make sure you are working with recent, up-to-date scholarship. This doesn’t mean that these older sources are invalid or unimportant. It’s just that their findings and approaches may have been updated, and they will often be cited or otherwise referenced in later scholarly works.

The one position that is more recent looks promising, but then you notice that it’s published by Dorling Kindersley. This is certainly a reputable press, but it specializes in books for children and young adults, or ones that reach a very wide audience. It’s unlikely that you’ll find the most cutting-edge scholarly interpretations here. Keep looking!

5. JSTOR

Now log in to your library account on the SMU library website and find the JSTOR research database. A librarian can help you find this resource if you have difficulty doing so, and can also help direct you to other resources for your project. Once in JSTOR, search for two scholarly articles from research journals that relate to your artwork, its maker, or, most broadly, to the culture and historical period from which it comes. Provide a one-paragraph summary (150-200 words) of each article’s main points and describe how it helps you understand your chosen artwork. Cite each article correctly, using Chicago Manual of Style formatting. Journals that are peer reviewed are particularly valuable.

JSTOR is one of the most powerful research tools we have, as it archives scholarly articles in many fields. It includes both new publications and older, classic ones. You will need to try different combinations of keywords to find relevant articles and remember: you want to find articles that include original research. To ensure that you don’t get bogged down with, for instance, book reviews, you can select the resources you want your search to exclude or include, in this case ‘articles only.’ Also, consider the date of the articles you choose. If you have to choose between two articles on the same subject, one published in 2007 and one published in 1923, choose the more recent one. Just like the books discussed above, there’s a good chance that it cites the earlier article, while providing updated research.

6. Bibliography

List all of the references you have used in a full bibliography. This should be in alphabetical order, using Chicago Manual of Style or MLA formatting. Please make sure that you use all of the guidelines you can find on our library page for the course for writing a correct bibliography.