A HIIT of History

Analysing Historical Sources Podcast with Leo Wang

Intro: This podcast features a former student who produced a first class IA and really understood how to analyse sources. Hopefully it will shed some light on the process of source analysis. Q1: Hi Leo, could you tell the audience a little bit about yourself? A1: Hello, I’m Leo, a graduating student from 2020 class. As the current experience suggests, non-exam works that’ll be submitted to the IB is quite important so I’m here to give you some insights, hopefully they’ll be helpful. Q2:  Have you decided to talk about your Extended Essay or your Internal Assessment? A2: I believe that it would be better for me to share my experiences for my IA. Q3: Can you briefly explain the outline, investigation and findings of your IA? A3: For my IA I looked at the Cod Wars between Iceland and Great Britain, especially the result of the third Cod War, attempting to investigate the factors that resulted in the Icelandic success in the conflict. My investigation started by reading secondary sources such as discussions about the topic in academic journals, then while utilizing these to construct my arguments I had a clear direction to find primary sources supporting these arguments. Eventually I concluded that the determining factor of the British failure or Icelandic success in the third Cod War was the indecisive policy by the British due to the paradox of wanting to guard the British privileges in Icelandic exclusive economic zones while trying to promote the idea of exclusive economic zones for the British themselves. Q4: You used a number of sources in your IA’s investigation; what particular source would you like to talk about? A4: First I’d like to discuss a secondary source focusing on a published article by Guðmundsson on Scandinavian Journal of History. Q5: How did this source fit in with or contribute to your IA? A5: The source was quite interesting in terms of analysis in part A. I may discuss the value of the source by stating that the source is made reliable by being published in rigorous academic papers and therefore being subject of peer review; while in addition I can claim that the article being written in contemporary time suggests that the sources from government archives from Iceland and Britain. I may also suggest its limitations by discussing the sources the article used: an interesting part that I noticed about the article is that it consists the use of private papers in the references, which are sources that would be valuable to historians yet the reliability of these papers would be questionable since it is hard for them to be accessed by scholars when the papers are in private possession.