Data for: The structure of description: Evaluating historical description and its role in theorizing

This is an Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) data project. The annotated article can be viewed on the publisher's website . This data overview first briefly discusses the paper’s data generation and analysis elements that Annotation for Transparency Inquiry (ATI) tries to foreground. It then elaborates more fully on the paper’s logic of annotation by identifying two broad annotation categories that encompass seven distinct annotation sub-categories. 1.1. Data Generation: The generation of data can take several forms. A conventional hypothesis testing paper will generate data to test the empirical implications derived from its theoretical predictions as well as those of its main challengers. Such data is generated by drawing on existing data sets, conducting experiments, or doing original field or archival research. This paper takes a slightly different path given that it does not test hypotheses. It pursues what could be call a quasi meta-analysis and uses as its data the book reviews, scholarly exchanges, historiographical assessments, and archival “replications” that together comprised the so-called Goldhagen controversy. It treats the qualitative findings of other scholars as evidence and thus can be said to resemble a meta-analysis. As a result, my date generation involved little more than downloading PDF or articles or checking books from the library. The paper’s reliance on such secondary, easily accessible, and copy-righted material also means that it makes little sense to included original textual passages as is the standard in the ATI. However, such a meta-analysis involves a sufficient number of different research judgments that should be made transparent because their complexity makes them unsuitable for conventional footnotes. For those instances, I choose to add ATI. The logic of annotation section below elaborates more fully on the nature of those judgements. 1.3. Data Analysis: I reviewed 45 distinct contributions to the debate that varied in length from short book reviews to detailed, longish journal articles. Of those 45 works, I ended up citing nine (20%). The selection was largely dictated by what I deemed to be their relevance in helping me evaluate Goldhagen and Browning’s descriptive inferences. It might be worth recalling that I am not trying to settle every last facet of the Goldhagen debate nor am I interested in the wider public reception of his work which received a lot of attention. I am strictly interested in using the d