How to Pick Annotated Sources

[Justin_L]

Hey everyone!

I was just wondering how to decide which sources are best to annotate in the context of the major work.

Are there any particular characteristics that make sources suitable for annotation?

For my project, I'm looking at social media and so the "primary" sources I'm using are historian tweets and publications, with "secondary" sources being third party news and media articles. I'm not sure if I could write 200 words for any of these.

Thanks!

EDIT: Removed example

[owidjaja]

Hey there,

I don't think there's a criteria set on what type of sources you should annotate, and this is coming from someone who did a Major Work on history-based video games so majority of my sources were video games, blog posts written by academics and quotes from the game developer's tweets lol. When you're annotating a source, just make sure you can cover the following ideas:

- Why is this source relevant to your topic?
- How did this source help you develop your own ideas?
- Who is the composer of the source? Are they reliable and why?
- What is their agenda?

Majority of your annotation should be explaining why this source is important to your topic so make sure that you have a few dot points covering this before actually writing the annotation. Once you start writing, you'll find that 200 words isn't a lot

Hope this helps!

Edit: I'll also add that I did source annotations last (i.e. once I finished writing my essay) because I was able to judge which sources I found to be the most useful and did my annotations based on that.

[Justin_L]

Hey there,

I don't think there's a criteria set on what type of sources you should annotate, and this is coming from someone who did a Major Work on history-based video games so majority of my sources were video games, blog posts written by academics and quotes from the game developer's tweets lol. When you're annotating a source, just make sure you can cover the following ideas:

- Why is this source relevant to your topic?
- How did this source help you develop your own ideas?
- Who is the composer of the source? Are they reliable and why?
- What is their agenda?

Majority of your annotation should be explaining why this source is important to your topic so make sure that you have a few dot points covering this before actually writing the annotation. Once you start writing, you'll find that 200 words isn't a lot

Hope this helps!

Edit: I'll also add that I did source annotations last (i.e. once I finished writing my essay) because I was able to judge which sources I found to be the most useful and did my annotations based on that.

Thanks for the advice, that definitely helps! I couldn't find any other posts which talked about sources like tweets and games so I'm glad that I'm on the right track and not completely off the rails.

Funnily enough, our source annotations are due week 3, wayyy before our essays. I think that for my case, third party historians and commentators would probably be my best bet.