JOURNALS

March 29 2017, We decided to do "Does history have empirical evidence” for our knowledge question it is very arguable to see if primary sources can be considered as empirical evidence. We decide to tackle the project through a debate between Marina and Federico. Federico believes that for empirical evidence needs direct observation for it to exist. Meanwhile, Marina believes that empirical evidence through primary resources. Currently I am not sure where I stand in this debate. This seems to be one of those question that can be answered in multiple ways.

March 29 2017, Today, we discussed how we are going to execute our project. We will be giving a presentation in slide format. Then I will lead a class discussion with the use of a google form just asking the class if they think empirical evidence is found in history. They will be emailed a simple yes or no form so it should not take much time. I also have a side I have picked for my presentation. I have decided that it is really hard to achieve empirical evidence because although we can look through primary sources we have our own biases towards these sources. This changes our view of history and historical events may not be 100 percent accurate when we explain them to someone else as we put our own bias on it.

March 31 2017, Our presentation will focus on trying to differentiate between the possibility of there being empirical evidence or non. Today we listened to a talk of James Basker giving a presentation about a summer program abroad. Personally although I am not interested in the summer program, the second part of the presentation about history was very interesting. Many great questions were asked leading to some complex responses. When we returned and got back to class we did not have time for our presentation so we will be presenting our debate next class.

April 4 2017, Final Today we gave our final presentation. Although we had a bit of a problem managing our time we still were able to fill out the google form asking the question of empirical evidence. Even though we did not get to do a discussion regarding the topic we were able to see how different people answered our question. Like my hypothesis the results were close nearly 50 50. This shows how debatable our topic is. It shows that our topic can be interpreted differently by different people. After watching the next 2 presentation it become more noticeable that history is really fallible and for us to understand it without much change from the original event coherence is necessary.

EXTENSION PROPOSAL

This video would be a great extension proposal because it shows how much bias can impact history. It talks about how Genghis Khan could be viewed in 2 different ways. Although they are both not wrong, they both have a different view of history It then creates the argument of who is right? Well this question wold be very difficult to answer because neither of the sides are wrong. History is changed through our own biases for good or bad. But, we have no control over such things. To understand history in its purest form one must look into primary sources without any biases, it can be said that such thing is near impossible to accomplish. Overall, the main point of this extension would be to show that bias is really hard to avoid and we should try our best to avoid it in order to understand history in its purest form.

DOCUMENTATION

Google Forms

Presentation