Abstracts
Small stories, great meanings. Narration, identity and interaction in hand-written newspapers
Kirsti Salmi-Niklander
The article is based on hand-written newspapers as an alternative medium in 19th and early 20th-century Finland. The focus is on local event narratives, in which writers depict recent events in their communities. The purpose of the article is to relate the analysis of local event narratives with recent narrative research oriented to “small stories”. As a case study I analyze three stories about local fairs, which were published in the hand-written newspapers of student organizations and popular movements in 1886, 1891 and 1906. “Small stories”-oriented research has focused on contemporary case studies based on interviews and fieldwork. The application of this methodology to historical and written materials is challenging and requires modification of the analytic model. However, focusing on small stories and local event narratives provides possibilities for innovative re-readings of historical materials and the analysis of interactive processes.
Research between historical and social sciences – confronting interdisciplinarity, its challenges and future
Maria Salmela-Mattila
The article discusses interdisciplinarity from a theoretical and historical point of view. The problemacy arises from the writer’s personal experience and connects to her dissertation project, in which she aims to study the Finnish university-environment relationships both from a historical and sociological perspective. The first part of the article addresses the topics of differentiation of the scientific disciplines, conceptualisation of the relationships between the disciplines and the phenomena of scientific identities and cultures. The second part presents an overview of narrativity and theory in history and sociology and the role of these two disciplines as social sciences and sciences in society. In the closing paragraph the author discusses the present state and future of scientific disciplines in a society, which increasingly stresses cooperation between different disciplines in societal problem solving.
The Survey as a Method for Researching Historical Consciousness
Pilvi Torsti
The article discusses the survey method as a way to analyze historical consciousness. It presents the theoretical background of both; the survey as a quantitative research method and historical consciousness as a concept defined as a connection between the past, the present and the future. The article concentrates on two major studies on historical consciousness utilizing survey; a pan-European Youth and History research project from 1990s and a current research project Historical Consciousness in Finland presenting the principles as to how the survey method has been applied, what have been its strengths and its weaknesses. The article closes with the discussion about the limits and possibilities of the survey method in applied history or education research.