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larobertson's review against another edition
5.0
This rigorous and clearly written book is a must read for doctoral students. Though Abbott prefers offline to digital tools, his reasons are clear and compelling. Written mostly for social science writers, his principles are usefully translated for the humanities. His writing advice in the final chapter is the best I've encountered. I'll be assigning this in my graduate bibliography and research class.
alexander0's review against another edition
3.0
This book is a very good start to organizing research with documents/artifacts found online or in a library. In fact, I think this is a good follow up reading to _Still Life with Rhetoric_ by Gries. While Abbott may feel otherwise, Gries offers a much more close textual case of how to do this kind of research while implying more general applications. What this book does instead is offer a strongly historically library studies focus to research. This book is a little more dogmatic about the language structures and tools of library studies research projects. It is not bad at explaining library well, but in doing so and in assuming a lot (incorrectly) about the differences between library research and general social science, this book rhetorically attempts to alienate a lot of people who could find value in it. You actively have to read this with an eye for arguing against the dogma if you are not a library scholar.
That said, the author claims to be fairly general, and claims serious nonlinearity is important to the library approach (and that this is fairly non-existent in social science literature methodologies... which is total nonsense), social and anthropological approaches such as trace ethnography, Actor-Network studies, and to some extent, Social Network Analysis very explicitly does this more radically than this book suggests that makes this approach unique to that of a "librarian" scholar. In addition, anyone who has done supervised machine learning would outright laugh at how linear this approach appears to them.
TL;DR: This book approaches a qualitative methodology that is useful in a very particularly difficult space, but the author needs to get off his high-horse about social science methodologies that he doesn't understand.
That said, the author claims to be fairly general, and claims serious nonlinearity is important to the library approach (and that this is fairly non-existent in social science literature methodologies... which is total nonsense), social and anthropological approaches such as trace ethnography, Actor-Network studies, and to some extent, Social Network Analysis very explicitly does this more radically than this book suggests that makes this approach unique to that of a "librarian" scholar. In addition, anyone who has done supervised machine learning would outright laugh at how linear this approach appears to them.
TL;DR: This book approaches a qualitative methodology that is useful in a very particularly difficult space, but the author needs to get off his high-horse about social science methodologies that he doesn't understand.
cchartier's review against another edition
5.0
Wonderful structured and ultimately, quite beautiful in its theoretical and moral positions. Recommend for all embarking on major research projects, in the humanities and social sciences alike.
matttrevithick's review
4.0
Excellent - more than a great collection of tips and recommendations for conducting research, it is also a thorough exploration of the research journey written by a man who has spent his life thinking about the topic, with some great thoughts on knowledge and learning (and reading, writing, memorizing, etc).
strickvl's review
4.0
Really useful for researchers who have to deal with a large mass of documents/sources. (So, almost everybody). Abbott lays out a way to process these sources, to think about how they fit into an ongoing research project, and how they should be organised. Strongly recommended for anyone doing a PhD.
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