reflection week 1

This week we discussed histography, or the "science of history". Histography refers to the philosophy and methods of doing history (Benjamin, 2009). We also discussed the various types research used to examine history. The three types of history that we discussed were archival, oral, and quantitative methods. Each type of history has its own advantages and disadvantages and we must examine all three in order understand history as completely as possible. It seems to me that it must be very hard for historians to gain a clear picture of history because each of these forms of research have a lot of loose ends. With archival data it can be hard to obtain and translate if necessary. Even if the works are complete and legible, it is impossible to debate or question the creator of the works. This leaves a lot up to the interpretation of the reader. With oral history it can be hard to obtain a uniform story because perception and time can change peoples memory and their story. Finally qualitative methods are not exact and only provide a general idea about relationships.
After discussing these types of research I really have a lot more respect for historians. They clearly have a very difficult and time consuming job. Another hard aspect of this type of work is there is no measure to ensure that you are right, so much is left up to interpretation that two historians could potentially have a completely different analysis of the same set of data.
We also did an interesting experiment to demonstrate the just noticeable difference. JND is very important in psychology because it was the first comparable unit that could be determined experimentally. The experiment demonstrated that the amount of change necessary increases as the compared stimulus becomes stronger/more intense. When we originally started the experiment I thought that it would be harder to detect the chasnge in weight for the lightest and heavesist weights, but that the same change in weight would be easy to identify among the middle weights. After the experiement I applied the same idea to lifting weights and it made perfect sense. As the weight increases it takes a greater increase in order to detect that a change as occured.