From 700 to 1: Using Limitations to Create New Knowledge

At first glance, who would imagine a connection between the quixotic Danish film director Lars von Trier’s 2003 documentary The Five Obstructions, the Food Network TV series Chopped, and production papers from the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Who would further envision these apparently unrelated productions as inspiration for teaching undergraduate students to use primary source materials and conduct original archival research? While seemingly disparate, the unifying connection between all three is the notion that specified limitations are useful. In a consumer society, the seemingly counterintuitive notion that limitations can be more beneficial than boundless choices is a powerful idea. In what follows, we discuss how our approach to teaching archival research in Authorship and the Archive: Exploring the Film, Theater, and TV Collections of the U of M Special Collections Research Center, a 400-level course in the University of Michigan Department of Screen Arts and Cultures, evolved and improved as we fully embraced the pedagogical possibilities of well-chosen limitations. In 2013, enrolled students in this class had their pick of more than seven hundred boxes, but when we taught the course in 2018 and 2020, we began with just one.

As teachers, limits may seem like a potentially shortsighted pedagogical strategy. We are taught to give more to our students, to provide them with anything and everything that we think might inspire them to learn and create. The reputations of institutions like ours are based partly on an ability to attract top faculty and students by offering them extraordinary resources. Our experience at the University of Michigan shows that particular limits, however, can help students acquire entirely new competencies while fostering collaborative public-facing course outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, undergraduate students experience the unexpected joys of archival research while realizing that the ability to “create new knowledge” is very much within their grasp and can even be accomplished within a single semester.

Indeed, the possibility of creating new knowledge arrives on the first day of class, when we plop an archival box in front of the students and ask them to open it and look inside. Students are surprised to come into contact with unexpected materials (this past semester, they commented as much on the onionskin paper on which some correspondence was typed as on the content of the letters). Their task is to find something new, work to explain its significance, and thereby show us something we don’t already know. Rather than being asked to formulate and answer research questions (a “top-down” approach that corresponds with the way most use online search engines), students in Authorship and the Archive are tasked with generating new knowledge from the contents of a carefully circumscribed archival collection in “bottom-up” fashion.¹ This disrupts their notion of how learning in a humanities course might occur and inspires them to dig in and try to make sense of what they find—or else to drop the course immediately, as several have done. Like the cooking contestants on Chopped who are forced to figure out how to make an appetizer in twenty minutes using watermelon, canned sardines, pepper jack cheese, and zucchini (the actual ingredient list in one episode), we use limitations to try to create something that is novel and satisfying. The goal is to jostle the mind and stimulate creativity rather than encouraging students— either explicitly or implicitly— to reproduce received knowledge. Perhaps, like director von Trier has suggested, obstructions is a better term than limitations.

At a time when research has become synonymous with entering a few key terms in a search engine, we are teaching our students archival research skills in an active learning environment. Instead of being asked to analyze films, master course content, write term papers, or take examinations, our students are learning “information literacy for primary sources”— a fundamentally different skill set than other forms of information literacy.² Archival research is largely immune to the word searches on which online research tends to rely. Indeed, finding aids can be frustratingly imprecise, and hypothesis-driven research rarely fares...