Overview

Book title: Using documents in research: when, where, why and how

Editors: Aimee Grant and Helen Kara

Deadline: 24 April, 12 noon BST

Word count: no more than 500 words, including up to five references

Please include: chapter title, lead author’s contact details

Aims

This edited collection will address a sizeable gap in the research methods literature. There is at present no edited collection demonstrating why and how researchers around the world are using documents in their research. In recent years some well-reviewed single-authored texts on the subject have been published (Grant 2019, Tight 2019, Grant 2021). This edited collection is the next step in collating and publishing practical and transferable real-world accounts of using documents in research. Our aim in partnering with Policy Press is to make the book affordable to individuals, rather than only being affordable for institutions.

The primary audiences for this edited collection will be Postgraduate Researchers and Early Career Researchers and it will also be a useful resource for Masters’ students, practice-based and mid-career researchers. Policy Press has worked with us on this call and expressed an interest in seeing a proposal for the collection.

Focus

We are interested in chapters about innovative uses of documents in research, primarily in two categories: case-study based or theme-based chapters. Case study-based chapters should be practically focused, explaining why, when, and how you used documents in your research. These chapters should include, as a minimum, information about your ethical approach, search strategy, data collection, quality assessment, and data analysis. Theme-based chapters could be on an aspect of doing research with documents such as: ethics; reflexivity; methodology; epistemology; ontology; quality; working digitally; archival work; with a practical emphasis. We are open to proposals that take a different approach, as long as a reader could learn about the how and why as well as the what of your approach.

Support

The editors will be happy to provide writing support to marginalised authors, authors from the Global South, and doctoral students or early career researchers.

Contact

Please send proposals to Carol.McIntyre@swansea.ac.uk.

Any questions may be directed to Aimee.Grant@swansea.ac.uk.

You can download a pdf of this call for chapters here.