| Art | Primary source:
Original artwork |
Secondary source:
Article critiquing the piece of art |
| History | Slave diary | Book about the Underground Railroad |
| Literature | Poem | Treatise on a particular genre of poetry |
| Political Science | Treaty | Essay on Native American land rights |
| Science or Social Sciences | Report of an original experiment | Review of several studies on the same topic |
| Theatre | Videotape of a performance | Biography of a playwright |
Primary or secondary? Depends heavily on how the source is being used:
Whether something is a primary or secondary source often depends upon the topic and its use.
A biology textbook would be considered a secondary source if in the field of biology, since it describes and interprets the science but makes no original contribution to it.
On the other hand, if the topic is science education and the history of textbooks, textbooks could be used as primary sources to look at how they have changed over time.
From: http://umb.libguides.com/c.php?g=351019&p=2367357
Primary sources are records of events as they are first described, usually by witnesses or by people who were involved in the event. Many primary sources were created at the time of the event, but can also include memoirs, oral interviews, or accounts that were recorded later. Visual materials, such as photos, original artwork, posters, and films are important primary sources, not only for the factual information they contain, but also for the insight they may provide into how people view their world.
…
It can be difficult to determine if a particular source is primary or secondary because the same source can be a primary source for one topic and a secondary source for another topic. David McCullough’s biography, John Adams, could be a secondary source for a paper about John Adams, but a primary source for a paper about how various historians have interpreted the life of John Adams.
From: http://libguides.bgsu.edu/c.php?g=227153&p=1505675
So it depends on how the source is being used. But it can also depend on the age of the source:
In the humanities, age is an important factor in determining whether an article is a primary or secondary source. A recently-published journal or newspaper article on the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case would be read as a secondary source, because the author is interpreting an historical event. An article on the case that was published in 1955 could be read as a primary source that reveals how writers were interpreting the decision immediately after it was handed down.
Lisa Nakamura, “Media”
Nakamura spends a good deal of the early part of the essay using as primary sources what we would normally think of as secondary sources:
Walter Benjamin, probably in the 1930s, hard at work theorizing and philosophizing about the “new media” of his time
–Benjamin’s thesis: the decline of the “aura” (aura being a characteristic of art from the age before mass reproduction); new media (mass media: art/media in the age of technological reproduction), such as film, offering vehicle for collective innervation and political revolution >> Nakamura isn’t engaging with Benjamin concerning the rightness or wrongness of his thesis (as she would if she was using him as a secondary source); rather, she’s using Benjamin as a primary source exemplifying a particular opinion or theory of media that developed in European academia in the 1930s (he “ushers in the study of the media as an academic discipline,” as Nakamura puts it)
How to find primary sources? Depends on the kind you’re looking for.
For video sources (e.g. a particular that exemplifies or reflects some broader historical phenomenon that you’re writing about, e.g. “America” or “Globalization”), a good place to start would (obviously) be YouTube, but also take a look at primary sources used by any secondary sources that you find (this is an example of what’s called internal research-I’ll demo this later on today). For magazine and newspaper articles, I would use the UM-Dearborn library website, specifically the Proquest Research Library database. (How about a demo by way of revising/improving Nakamura’s ethos?)
What about secondary sources?
For this kind of source, you’re most likely going to be engaging with contemporary peer-reviewed scholarship about the phenomenon exemplified or reflected by your primary sources. (E.g., if you were writing an essay about globalization, and used the international hit movie Slumdog Millionaire as a cultural artifact and primary source that reflects and provides an interesting piece of direct evidence of the phenomenon of globalization, as a secondary source you might cite a scholarly article or book about Slumdog Millionaire, or even about something more general like international films that have seen cross-cultural success in America). Best library database for this kind of source: Academic Onefile. (How about another demo? Plus internal research: for secondary sources, this involves just browsing that source’s references list; for primary sources, look additionally at the index, if you’re dealing with a book, but you also might need to read through in detail and catch the primary sources as you work through the reading. Google Scholar, by the way, is also pretty useful for internal research.)
Rhetoric & Writing II 