Learning from reading reports
What's important?
Everybody's been reading (and commenting, regularly very perceptively and helpfully) on what they've been reading. I'd like us all to get a sense of what the main issues are as of now -- both in terms of where people are going with their knowledge and understanding of the period and its literature, and with their ways of finding out. So I'd like to do a round again, this time encouraging responses and questions as we go, and we'll see how far we get.
The focus, then, is on what seems to you most useful, most puzzling, most startling, about your experience of reading a number of these (quite informative) reports.
For Monday
It won't be a surprise that I think the next thing to do is post extended, elaborated, more exploratory and complete (and, of course, even more useful) versions of the reports people have already written -- extending, revising, reorganizing them in response to the comments and questions people posted in replies to them, but also in response to discussion in today's class. One of the things I expect you'll be thinking about is avoiding duplicating what someone else is working on (so people working on the same question need to focus them differently -- but clearly that's already happening). I also expect you'll be thinking of ways to extend or redefine inquiries that seem to be leading toward fairly narrow outcomes.
To make sure everybody can see where they are, I've set up a new forum for posting revised second reports.
A note on formatting
Most people have already begun doing this, but I'd like to see all of these reports follow the same format. So: