Skill reference: humanities-chicago

Skill reference: humanities-chicago

The humanities-chicago skill authors one document genre: an argumentative humanities essay in Chicago Notes-Bibliography style — a scholarly argument advanced through close reading and interpretation, carried by an Introduction with an explicit thesis, thematic argument sections, a Conclusion, and a full citation apparatus of numbered footnotes plus an alphabetized Bibliography. This reference describes what that document type is, how the skill produces one, when it earns its place, and the provenance behind it.

Property	Value
Authors	An argumentative humanities essay in Chicago Notes-Bibliography style
Purpose group	Scholarly writing
MIF conceptType	semantic
Target MIF level	3
Primary source	The Chicago Manual of Style, Notes-Bibliography system

What this document type is

A Chicago Notes-Bibliography essay argues a humanities reading rather than reporting a study. It opens with an Introduction that states the essay’s thesis, develops the argument across thematic sections that each move from claim to evidence to interpretation, and closes with a Conclusion that draws out what the argument establishes without introducing new evidence. Its center of gravity is the citation apparatus: every claim carries a numbered footnote resolving to a human-readable source citation, and the back matter carries a full, alphabetized Bibliography listing every source cited. There is no Method and no Results section — this is what separates it from an empirical study, and from the academic genre’s IMRaD structure.

A Chicago essay is therefore not a single immutable decision, not a requirements document, and not the same argument recast with author-date in-text citations — that citation convention belongs to a sibling genre (humanities-mla), not this one. It projects to MIF as semantic content at Level 3.

How the skill produces one

humanities-chicago is a genre skill: it carries the argumentative-essay pattern as durable instructions plus exemplars, and writes the artifact over a MIF floor so the result is at once a human-readable essay and a machine-conformant unit.

• Pattern, made operational. The skill encodes the Introduction-thesis, thematic-sections, Conclusion, Bibliography shape, and treats the citation apparatus as mandatory — every claim carries a numbered footnote, and an essay with footnotes but no Bibliography, or a Bibliography with no footnotes tying claims to it, is not conformant. Uncertain interpretations are hedged rather than over-attributed, and a strong counter-reading left unaddressed is treated as a defect.
• Exemplars set the bar. Like every genre in the suite it ships good-l1.md (the MIF Level-1 floor), good.md (the Level-3 target), bad.md (a counter-example that asserts claims with no footnotes and no Bibliography), and evals/evals.json. The check-exemplars gate proves good-l1.md validates at L1 and good.md at Level 3.
• MIF projection. The document is authored with MIF frontmatter (via the shared mif-frontmatter substrate) and a conceptType of semantic, reflecting that the essay is declarative argument-and-evidence knowledge. Each footnote may resolve internally to a MIF finding @id for traceability, but that @id is never printed in the note or the body text. mif-validate proves the Markdown ↔ JSON-LD round-trip is lossless before the document is considered done.

When it is beneficial

Reach for humanities-chicago when the deliverable is a humanities argument advanced through close reading — history, literature, or the arts — and the reader needs a scholarly citation apparatus in footnote and bibliography form, not an empirical study’s Method and Results.

Do not use it for the same argumentative shape with author-date parenthetical citations instead of footnotes — that is humanities-mla: same claim-evidence-interpretation structure, a different citation apparatus (in-text (Author page) plus a Works Cited list). Do not use it for an empirical study reporting a method and results — that is academic, which follows IMRaD rather than arguing a reading. Do not use it for a practitioner decision built around a mandatory comparison table — that is engineering.

Example

The skill’s own exemplar, “Butler’s Restraint: Unreliable Narration in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day,” argues that Stevens’s unreliability as a narrator is a disciplined performance of professional dignity rather than a lapse of honesty. The Introduction states that thesis; “Dignity as Rhetorical Armor” develops it through Stevens’s flattened diction at emotionally charged moments, drawing its analytic frame from Wayne Booth’s account of the unreliable narrator; “Free Indirect Access and Its Withholding” contrasts Ishiguro’s withholding of first-person feeling with James Wood’s account of free indirect style, and reads the omission itself as evidence. The Conclusion draws out what this reading establishes without introducing new material, and the Bibliography lists Ishiguro, Booth, and Wood alphabetically, each tied to a numbered footnote in the body.

Provenance & citations

• Genre source — The Chicago Manual of Style: the Notes-Bibliography system’s citation and argument conventions, the standard for history, literature, and the arts, https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/.
• Skill provenance: authored by the humanities-chicago skill in the mif-docs plugin, https://github.com/modeled-information-format/mif-docs-plugin; the skill’s exemplars and evals/ define and verify the pattern.
• MIF conformance: the document projects to canonical JSON-LD under the MIF specification, https://mif-spec.dev, and is proven lossless by mif-validate.
• Index: this skill is one entry in the skills by purpose catalog; its scholarly-writing siblings (academic, humanities-mla, computing-paper, systematic-review) share the purpose group but are documented separately.