Methods & Sources of Historical Research

Notes from a course on methods and sources of historical research at IHR, 11 July 2016 - 15 July 2016

The Nature of Archives and Primary Source Material

• Notion of difference between primary and secondary sources... but its quite fuzzy
• Primary = unmediated access to past (not processed by another mind)
• Newspapers = a report of what has been told. testimonies are primary but the reporter has chewed thru the material.
• Historians make statements about things which should be believed - by people who don't have access to primary sources
• Having looked at the primary sources = is the reason why people listen to historians
• Does digitization undermine the authority of the historian who derives his/her authority on basis on having the ability to find the primary source material? - should not be - because the historian should define his/her role based on his/her ability to contextualise
• Primary sources tend to be gathered and held in institutions called archives. historians tend to be interested in written material. others look at other types of materials , objects, material culture, etc.
• archive - gatekeepers? destroyed by organisations because deemed not of interest?
• uk? governments destroy 90%? of records - horrifying but also liberating
• previously history was dead white male europeans, now there is a broadening of history
• an archive is a set of staff to administer a procedure of cataloguing and ordering
• the diff between archival and library catalogue is that libraries have certain systems which attempt to divide human knowledge into recognisable chunks
• archive - institutional procedure orders it rather the dewey
• archive - not published material
• library - published
• brick and mortar reality to an archive (not pure virtual)
• talking about it in relation to organisation / but also there is question of power of access / gatekeeper

• point is that we will need to apply a different method of accessing / searching when using archives (compared to libraries) as they are accessed differently

• surrogacy: what is an original? today we like copies, we think of them as being useful.
• digitisation processes
• money, power, etc

• archives -> state / nation building --> even church was doing this

• newspapers - pdf ocr - things missed out: compositor (context of what was around this article, what else would be seen by a real reader of newspaper with many articles), marginalia, emphasis, etc

• Qn to ponder: what is a public record?

Notes

• DEBBIE'S NOTES: copies of letters, drafted until perfect....