History of Science Literature Wiki

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Start at the top and work your way down as time permits, and eventually develop your own approach as you get more practice/experience at this. This all gets easier as you (a) practice more and (b) become more familiar with the wider literature and the patterns of history of science writing.

1. Start with a book from the Resource List for the week’s unit that you’re familiar with or whose argument you think you know. You will revisit this book to familiarise yourself with how information and arguments are organised in history of science books.

A. Jot down what you recall of the main argument and sources before you pick the book up.

B. Look at the table of contents and try to match it to what you remember of the book’s structure.

C. Turn to the introduction and skim until you find where the author lays out the key argument(s). Check these against your recollections.

D. Using the intro and the endnotes/footnotes/bibliography/images, identify the main kinds of sources used for the argument (any particularly key archives/collections/authors/documents?)

E. Using the intro and acknowledgements, identify the author’s key interlocutors. From what academic traditions/schools/etc do they come, on whom are they building, and against whom/what are they positioning themselves?

F. Go online and look up some reviews of the book. Jstor is a good starting point, and most major history of science books get reviewed in Isis at some point. Very quickly skim a couple reviews to confirm/revise your impressions of C-E.

G. With the information from C-F in mind, quickly skim the body chapters (practice identifying which parts of chapters are safe to skip altogether and what bits of text or other clues tell you to focus on a sentence or paragraph) and write down your confirmed/revised impressions of the book’s key interventions, sources, structure, and anything you think you may want to return to for your own research/writing. Don’t take notes or look things up as you go, but use post-it notes or some other way to flag points to follow up and collect these in your notes in the end. You’ll often find at the end they don’t seem so urgent to follow up or were explained elsewhere, so you’ve saved yourself some time. This will also help you stay focused on skimming and the big picture. Notes taken in one place after reading will in general be more useful to you than annotations in the book.

2. Identify a couple other books, familiar or unfamiliar, most relevant to your research/interests (e.g. corresponding in time period, region, etc.) where you are more likely to have a sense of the bigger picture in which they’re writing. Go through your process from step 1 (omit A and interchange the order of B and C; E and F can also be good to interchange if you’re less familiar with the terrain). Practice doing this with a set time limit, e.g. 2 hours but it really depends on the length/structure/style of the book, after which write up some notes then move on even if you haven’t gotten through all the steps.

3. Think about what aspects of this literature are most important to convey to someone new to the field and what key examples/sources from these books help demonstrate this.

4. Broaden your reading to less familiar books / topics from the resource list and modify your thinking from step 3 accordingly.

There are several variations on this method you can find online, but the basic approach is pretty consistent no matter who you ask. It’s often called “gutting a book.”

See e.g.:

https://cte.ku.edu/sites/cte.drupal.ku.edu/files/docs/portfolios/jahanbani/gutbook.pdf

http://www.artsweb.bham.ac.uk/NStanden/impchina/guttingabook.htm

http://karinwulf.com/efficient-reading/

https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/how-to-gut-a-book/

http://wcaleb.org/blog/how-to-read

A more relaxed reflection on the practice of book gutting is https://www.jstor.org/stable/41399968