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I have created a document based on one of your posts from Facebook: Analyzing Census Data—Part 3: Context Matters! The document is rather long and covers 4 cencus years (Federal Population Census found on Ancestry.com) for a particular family and I cite each census with the document (even for those that have the same surname for which I extracted information). In that document I created a summary of all the information gathered and would now like to share the summary. Should I cite the document or try to cite the census? I am finding it rather difficult to cite within the summary because some statements reference several years of the census or each census is reference several times within the paragraph. I don't want to have citation overload. If I should site the document that I have created, would I use EE 3.44 to build the citation?
Thanks in advance!
apruitt78:
apruitt78:
I'm not sure I understand you correctly. As a starting point: EE would not use the word "document" for a piece of writing that you or I did—unless we were creating an official record for a court proceeding or a government agency. As historical researchers, we use documents, but the material we write is more correctly identified as an essay, a proof argument, an article, a report, a biography, a book, etc. From your description, it sounds as though you have created an analytical report or perhaps a proof argument. For the purposes of answering your question, let's say it is a report that you title "Milwaukee Census Analysis."
On this basis, let me alter your question slightly—i.e., "Should I cite
the documentmy report or try to cite the census?" This is where we're confused. Where will you be creating that citation?While you are preparing that report, "Milwaukee Census Analysis," you would cite—in that report—each individual census and each other item that you use.
Later, if you were writing something else (say, "A History of Foundry Workers in Milwaukee") and you reported there a conclusion that you had reached in your census analysis, then your "History" would report that conclusion in its narrative and you would support the narrative's assertion with a citation to your earlier report "Milwaukee Census Analysis." Of course, in your "History," you could cite the censuses that you had used for your "Census Analysis." That would do no harm and would help some readers. But when you cite conclusions taken from your earlier analysis then you must cite your analytical report because those conclusions are not in any one original census.
Are you perhaps asking what you should cite when you enter a conclusion in your database? If so, then the principles are the same. If you are entering in specific data that appears on a census, you cite the census. If you are entering a conclusion that you had reached in some piece of writing that you, yourself, did, then whatever assertions you take from your own analytical writing should be cited to you.
Thnaks for the quick response
Thnaks for the quick response! Yes, I created a census analysis report on one of my family groups. I apologize for the confusion; I called it a document just simply because it was created in Microsoft Word. Within the report, I have already cited the individual census and each other item used. The narrative that I am sharing is the conclusions taken from the analysis with reference to what is on the original census. It sounds as though I can cite both as long as the citations are attributed to the right source and distinguishes the assertions from my own analytical writing from the data that was obtained from the actual census. Correct? To cite my own writing, am I correct in using EE 3.44? ~AmyC.
Absolutely, correct! And yes
Absolutely, correct! And yes, EE 3.44 works fine for you. And, yes, Microsoft's engineers don't speak the historian's language. :)