Hank Herzfeld is a Bodenhamer Fellow studying history and political science from Benton, Arkansas. Last month, he was part of the Next Gen(eration) Humanities Conference hosted in Little Rock, where his research poster presentation received second place.
Introduction
In early March, I participated in a research poster competition in Little Rock hosted by the Arkansas Humanities Council during the first annual Next Gen(eration) Humanities Conference. The conference aims to bridge the gap between career development and education for humanities students and provided a laundry list of career services, workshops and events around Little Rock from Wednesday to Saturday. On Friday, March 8, I presented my research poster in the morning and returned in the evening for an awards ceremony where I won second among the dozen undergraduate and graduate research presenters from across the state. The presentations ranged from civic engagement projects to digital humanities video game development and displayed the variety of great research that Arkansas universities produce.
Me giving a brief description of my research and poster when accepting my award.
Diving into the Research Process
I began my own research process early sophomore year, starting with an idea of what I wanted to learn more about. In a political science class taught by professor Jeffrey Ryan called Authoritarianism, we discussed regimes across time and place, and my interest was piqued when we began talking about East Germany and their Ministry for State Security. I had never even heard of the Ministry, commonly referred to as “Stasi”, shortened from the German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, and it fascinated me to learn the expanse of surveillance networks and control systems they developed under the East German government up until as recently as 1990.
Having my topic, I began asking around to find a research advisor and eventually was connected with professor Laurence Hare, who has done extensive research in German and Central European history. He agreed to advise my thesis research on the Stasi, and I began the process of researching by building up a general knowledge base of the literature and background of the Stasi. A challenge of undergraduate research is that it is easy to come up with a broad idea—in my case the Stasi—however it’s difficult to refine that into a researchable topic. This last step of choosing a topic requires first a fair knowledge of the subject and the existing body of research about it and finding a gap in what has already been established. I found this picture from Dr. Hodge’s “How to find a research topic” presentation especially helpful for visualizing this. For my research I narrowed the topic of the Stasi down to the field of historical memory and from there I narrowed it further into memory displayed through film.
Next, you build up a bibliography of relevant resources. Conversations with a librarian, several professors familiar with the topic and searching with the library’s online tools allowed me to build out a wide base of resources. Then the research can begin! The individual methods for research vary from project to project, but I had to build a list of films to analyze which were both culturally significant and included the Stasi. To select these films, I did a simple online search and then sent some inquiries to German film archives. I got back a great list from one particular archive with East German films and have mostly used these along with publicly available films. With these films I would watch through and note the presentation of the Stasi and then compare how those are presented over time.
Gaining Presentation Experience
After I had good amount of research completed, Dr. Hodge informed me of the opportunity to participate in the Next Gen(eration) Conference Poster Competition, and I registered by submitting a research abstract. I didn’t hear much about it again until the week before the conference when instructions were sent out. I made plans with professors and my supervisor at work to go that Friday, and I began putting together my poster.
Humanities research posters are an interesting phenomenon: they require turning ideas that are usually presented in long-form text format into a visually appealing format and often include analysis that is difficult to visualize. When building my poster, I decided to get creative and tried to include as many pictures as possible and I even threw in a chart to visualize my findings. I printed my poster with the Honors College, and I drove home to Benton on Thursday night.
Registration for the conference day began at 8:00 in Little Rock, so I arrived on time and started to set up my poster. The night before, I had bought a tri-fold poster foamboard that I could attach my poster to, which ended up saving me a lot of trouble. I could put my poster up on a display easel while other presenters often had to lay their posters on their tables. The ten projects set up their posters in their stations, and then we waited until the judges came around to talk about the content. Meanwhile we were able to grab snacks and coffee and mingle with our fellow researchers. When the team of four judges came around—including the University of Arkansas’ own professor Trish Starks, director of the Arkansas Humanities Center—I gave an overview of my research and poster. They asked me a couple questions about my presentation and research, then headed off to the next poster.
The panel of four judges to whom we presented our posters
After all the presentations were given around 11:00, we were told to come back at 3:00 to hear if we will be awarded at the student awards ceremony. When 3:00 rolled around I returned and learned that I would be in the awards ceremony at 5:30. My poster was among five posters prominently displayed on easels. I was up against some really good-looking posters, two from our campus and two from Arkansas State. Each of them were incredibly well thought-out, and I was impressed with the breadth of research being done. When the ceremony began, professor Starks presented each of the winners: two honorable mentions and a ranking of the top three. I received second place, and first place went to the University of Arkansas’s Jessie Brown, whose master’s research in comparative literature and cultural studies examined modern representations of the Chacmool and other indigenous art.
Conclusion
I am extremely glad I took the opportunity to participate in this new event. At first I was hesitant to miss class and do the extra work needed to prepare, but the experience ended up being well worth all of that. My advice to students considering research is to start early and research something you’re passionate about! There is an unlimited number of topics you can research, and you may be surprised at the amount of research that hasn’t been conducted yet. It can take a lot of time to narrow down a topic and to get through literature review, so get started with an idea and make sure the topic is something you can engage with because you’re going to have to think about it often and for a loooong time. For students currently doing research, find opportunities to present! There are loads of research presentation opportunities like this that you can participate in, and often times posters don’t have to be made at the end of your research, it can be in the middle or even beginning stages. This process helped me flesh out my ideas a lot better and gave me a lot of insight into other humanities researchers’ processes.
The other competition winners and me with our trophies