documentary_research_flashcards
What is authenticity in documentary research?
Authenticity concerns whether a document is genuine and actually what it claims to be.
Why is authenticity important?
Ensures that researchers analyze genuine documents, avoiding misinterpretation of historical or social data.
How does originality affect authenticity?
Original documents are preferred; copies may introduce errors or distortions.
What problems can arise from copied documents?
Copies may contain errors from human or mechanical processes, such as misspellings or missing content.
What is Langlois and Seignobos’ definition of ‘soundness’?
Soundness is a document’s closeness to the original; researchers must be wary of corruptions introduced by copyists.
What are two methods for detecting corruptions in documents?
Conjectural emendation (educated guesses) and genealogical analysis (tracing copy relationships).
What challenges do incomplete documents pose?
Reconstruction may lead to inauthentic results; comparing independently produced copies improves accuracy.
What are fraudulent documents?
Documents with deliberate falsifications, such as forgeries (e.g., the ‘Donation of Constantine’).
How can authorship of a document be misattributed?
Ghostwriting, incorrect attribution, or satirical writing may falsely identify an author.
What techniques help detect forgeries?
Handwriting analysis, material tests, chemical analysis, and provenance investigations.
Why must context be considered in authenticity checks?
Satirical or misleading documents must be analyzed in their production context to prevent misinterpretation.
What is credibility in documentary research?
Credibility assesses how distorted a document’s contents are and whether the author sincerely tried to record an accurate account.
What factors affect an author’s sincerity?
Personal interests, political motives, financial incentives, self-justification, or exhibitionism.
Why can official documents lack sincerity?
They may be influenced by political motives, propaganda, or institutional pressures.
What factors influence a document’s accuracy?
Temporal and spatial distance from events, memory lapses, misobservation, negligence, or lack of expertise.
Why are primary sources not always more accurate?
They can still be biased, based on faulty memory, or misinterpret events despite proximity to them.
Can inaccurate documents still be useful?
Yes, if recognized as inaccurate, they provide insights into the author’s perceptions and experiences.
What is the role of critical scrutiny in credibility?
Researchers must analyze document conditions, author motives, and biases to assess sincerity and accuracy.
What is representativeness in documentary research?
It assesses whether the consulted documents fairly reflect the total body of relevant documents.
Why is representativeness important?
Unrepresentative documents can lead to biased or incomplete conclusions in research.
What factors affect document survival?
Documents may be lost due to aging, mishandling, deliberate destruction, or accidental loss.
How does availability affect representativeness?
Some documents survive but remain inaccessible due to legal restrictions or private ownership.
What challenges arise from missing catalogs?
Researchers may struggle to identify relevant documents if catalogs are incomplete or nonexistent.
How can sampling improve representativeness?
Sampling ensures that a subset of documents reflects broader trends when full access isn’t possible.
What biases can arise from selective survival?
The facts constructed from available documents may be skewed due to historical losses or censorship.
What final consideration should researchers keep in mind?
Researchers must be aware of biases in surviving documents to avoid drawing misleading conclusions.
