Historical Research

Course Supervisor:
Muhammad Hassan Akhlas
 A. Definition and Areas of History

What is the first thing that comes in to your mind

when
you hear the word history?

The word history originally means the search for

knowledge and truth.
 B. Views on the Value of Historical
Research

Historical investigations help broaden our

experiences and make us more understanding
and appreciative of our human nature and
uniqueness.

By knowing our past, we know the present

condition better.
 C. Historical Research as a Modern
Undertaking

Most of those who engaged in historical writing

intended for the most part to entertain or to
inspire their readers. (Van Dalen, 1972).

He considered history as somewhat aiming for

truth. (Thucydides)
D. Characteristics of Contemporary Historical
Researches
Present historical investigations primarily aim for
critical search for truth.

In making your historical report the actual events

and the conditions of the time are not
violated,exaggerated,or distorted. The critical
used by historians maybe useful in providing you
the guidelines in your historical study.

You may use them to assist you to judge

objectively the conditions which led to their results
of the studies undertaken previously.
 E. Methods of Historical Research
1.Formulating your problem

There are several motivations for undertaking a

historical research.
●
One of these is your doubt about some
event,development or experience in the past.
●
Another reason for a historical study may be your
discovery of new source materials the meaning of
which will supply answers about past events when
you make your interpretations.
●
Another source of your problem maybe a
question regarding an old interpretation of an
existing data;you may want to evolve a new
hypothesis which will offer a more satisfactory
explanation of past events.

You may have to take your time to look one by

one at the important motives or reasons which
caused you to doubt or to get interested about
certain gaps in knowledge in relation to past
event or experience. From here you may now
draw a simple,clear,and a fairly complete
description of your problem.
 2. Gathering your source materials
One of your important initial tasks as a historical
researcher is the gathering of the best available
data to solve your problem.

It is useful to look out for the many varied

evidences of the activities engaged in by people
who lived in the past.

It is necessary at this point to be familiar to the

different types of historical sources which you may
avail of as you conduct your data collection.
 A. Classifications of Historical Sources

Historical sources maybe classified as primary or

secondary(Fox,1969)

A Primary source is regarded as the source of

the “best evidence”.This is because the data
come from the testimony of able eye and ear
witnesses to past events. They may also
consist of actual objects in the past which you
can directly scrutinize or examine.
Secondary sources,on the other hand are
informations supply who was not a direct
observer
or participant of the event,object, or condition.
Another classification of historical sources is based
on whether the recording of the data was
deliberate or inadvertent.

Deliberate sources provide data which have

been recorded with the conscious effort to
preserve information (Fox,1969)

Inadvertent sources supply information also for

your historical study even though that was not
the original intention of the source.
Good and Scates (1972) give two broad divisions
which classify existing historical sources. These
are:

(1) reports of events called documents, which are

composed of impressions made on some human
brain by past events:these impressions have been
consciously recorded with the aim of transmitting
information.

(2) Physical objects or written materials of historical

value: these are called remains or relics and are
produced without deliberately aiming to impart
information.
Van Dalen (1979) enumerates the types of historical
records which may be available in written, pictorial,
and mechanical forms. These include official records,
personal records, oral traditions, pictorial records like
photographs, paintings, sculpture, movies, microfilm,
slides, and coins; published materials like news
papers, journals, pamphlets, literary and
philosophical works and periodicals; mechanical
records like tape recordings of interviews and
conferences, phonograph records of speeches and
reading activities; remains, which include
physical remains, printed materials, and hand written
materials.

You now choose the evidence which is relevant to

your problem.
B. Places where the sources are located

After the source materials have been

classified and describe to you the next
question will be “Where are this material
located?”
 C. Systematizing your note-taking

This is necessary because of the presence of

full bibliographical information in your notes
system is your basis for your proper
documentation when you write your data in
narrative form.
 3. Criticizing your source materials

The terms external and internal refer to the

purpose or objective of criticism and not to
method or procedure in dealing with the
sources (Good and Scates, 1974)
 A. External Criticism
External criticism involves finding out if the
source material is genuine and if it possesses
textual integrity (Gay, 1972)

There are several procedures which you can

do to check the genuineness of the source
material.

The techniques you may do include

authenticating signatures, chemically
analyzing the paint, or carbon-dating the
artifacts.
There are essentially two common tests that you will
have to do in a historical investigation.

1. Establishing authorship

2. establishing the place and date of publication of

the source material.

Undoubtedly, you wanna check against forgeries,

rule out plagiarism, pinpoint materials which are not
accurately identified, or put back a document to its
original form.
 B. Internal Criticism

To check on the meaning and trustworthiness

of the data within the document.

Much of your work in internal criticism is

textual criticism. However, your other
concerns pertain to other factors like the
competence, good faith, position, and bias of
the author.
 1. Literal vs. the real meaning of the author's
statement
The meaning of the many words in older
documents is different from the meaning they
have today. Some words do not have the same
meaning to all people. Different cultures and
different eras have different beliefs and attitudes
about certain things.

Even in modern documents, the real

meaning of a word or statement is difficult to
ascertain owing to allegory, use of symbolism,
irony, satire, jests, allusions, hoaxes, implications,
metaphor, hyperboles and other rhetorical figures
and literary ways of speaking.
 2. Competence of the author or observer
There are several tests which you may use to
determine the competence of an author.

These include his status as a trained observer or

eyewitness, the extent to which his position for
making observation was favorable, to which
memory was used after a lapse of time, and the
use of original sources.

The current issues at the time he wrote the

document, as well as the level of the moral
standards existing at the time will help you check
his stand and convictions.
 3. Testing for truthfulness and honesty

You may ask several questions to test the

truthfulness and honesty of an author.

Was the author motivated by personal or vested

interest in producing the material?

To what race, nationality, religion, ideology, social

class, party, economic group, or profession did he
belong, which might led him to have biases and
prejudices?
Was he writing seriously, ironically, humorously, or
symbolically, or was he voicing his real convictions?

Was he presenting the views of the establishment

for public notice, using conventional language, to
write what he did not know or to conceal his own
views?

Was there evidence of vanity or boasting by the

author?

Did he make distortions, exaggerations, and

embellishments, to achieve colorful effects?
 A. Special problems in writing and
interpreting your data

These problems include:

1. Determining the major problems to be aswered

2. using inductive reasoning
3. Formulating and testing your own hypothesis
4. Causation
5. Historical perspective
6. developing a guiding thesis or principles of
synthesis
7. framing your generalization and conclusions
 F. Strengths and Limitations of Historical
Research
Historical research can only give a fractional view
of the past; its knowledge is never complete and
is derived from the surviving records of a limited
number of past events.

History also depends on valuable materials which

are difficult to preserve.
Some scholars contend that history requires a
different method and interpretation because of
its elusive subject matter – the past.

Another Weaknesses is the absence of the

technical historical terminology in historical
research.
THANK YOU FOR LISTENING!