University of California Irvine Interrogating the Source Paper

I’m working on a history writing question and need a sample draft to help me study.

Micropaper #6

Interrogating the Source

As the 70B teaching team reads your weekly micropapers and mid-terms, we think you can work on getting more information from the primary source. This starts with reading every part of the source, including its metadata: the information about who wrote it, when and where. The point is that you can learn A LOT about a source and its perspective before you even dive into its narrative content. This metadata context is crucial for identifying the perspective and potential bias of a primary source.

Assignment: This is a two-step micropaper that draws on “Living between Cultures,” an oral history interview with Jozefina Milanovski. Please complete the steps in order and follow the format below:

• Open the link to the primary source (Links to an external site.) and click “all metadata” at the bottom of the webpage. In 2-4 sentences, describe all the information you can glean about the perspective of the source from the metadata alone, including who authored the source, when, where, why and what it may be about. This may require you to rely on existing knowledge about the time period or national context (see example below).
• Now read the entirety of the testimony and explain in 5-8 sentences what is the perspective of this primary source? What did you learn about the author after reading the source in its entirety; did the metadata help you to understand more? Why or why not?

Learning Goals: Analyzing perspective in primary sources.

Example: I draw this week’s example from a previously assigned reading from Week 5. The ‘metadata’ for the reading says:

Siegfried Mann, “How Do Foreign Workers Live in the GDR?” First published as “Wie leben ausländische Arbeiter in der DDR?” in the East German Newspaper Der Wahrheit (April 22, 1985).

• From the citation alone, I gather that this article was written by an East German journalist or newspaper correspondent in 1985. The title suggests that it will cover the living condition of foreign workers in the German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany. Because the East German media was highly controlled by the one-party state apparatus of the GDR, I can assume at this point that the article will offer a relatively complimentary portrayal of the state’s treatment of foreign workers. In 1985, foreign labor recruitment was ongoing in the GDR.
• Siegfried Mann’s article, published in an East German newspaper in 1985, portrays in a highly positive light the living and laboring conditions of foreign workers in East Germany. The author speaks with a number of Vietnamese men and women working and studying in East Germany. Though the voices of laborers are featured here, it is unclear whether the entirety of those conversations was reprinted in the article. We can therefore say that the source is written from the perspective of a state-media affiliated journalist. Precisely as I suspected, Mann – as an East German reporter – would have been under pressure to omit or exclude criticisms of East Germany. The pro-GDR perspective of the source is further amplified when the author denigrates West Germany’s treatment of foreign labor, in the process celebrating the allegedly superior treatment received in East Germany. The metadata allowed me to see that this source was published in an East German newspaper, signaling to me that I should be alert to the potential influence of the one-party state. This was confirmed after reading the entire source.

Rubric

4 – Student completed step one, using detail and background knowledge from the lecture to explain the potential perspective of the source

5 – Student completed step two, synthesizing the source’s metadata and its narrative content to explain the perspective of the source

1 – Student wrote clearly and persuasively

https://www.europeana.eu/en/item/2084002/contribut…

That is the website to read for write.