Historical Research

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!

Reporter's:
APHRODITE BRILLANTES
ESTHER MARIE SINGSON