Syllabus for Inco 7: Historiography--The Philosophy and Methodology of History and the Place of Historical Methods in Communication Research

This syllabus describes a course in the philosophy and methodology of history, focusing students' work on creating strategies for data handling rather than on data collection, storage, or manipulation. The first section of the syllabus is divided into eleven parts related to the methods and purposes of historical inquiry: general orientation to the course, the task of methodology, the historical method of inference, the empirical basis of historical inference, the detection of events, the structure-patterning-blueprinting of historical events, heuristic flair, the grand strategy of historical explanation, intellectual universes and the plurality of systems, telling the story, and the place of the historical method in communications research. The second part of the syllabus outlines briefly a series of historical problems whose events have been computer programed. The five programed problems are designed to give the student experience as a practicing historian, controlling a large number of interacting variables and a large data base, without the time commitment usually required for data collection and handling. (AA)