 What is a Source

 The first kind of sources relies or remains, offer the researchers a clue about the past
simply by virtue of their existence. The wooden columns found at the date of a prehistoric
settlement testify for example to the existence of people and tell to historians something
about their culture. The pegs or dowels they used to fasten building materials further
enlighten scholars about their technical skills and artistic capacities. By comparing their
articrafts with those with other places historians can further learn something of their
commercial or intellectual relations.
o In contrast the testimonies are the oral or written reports that describe an event,
weather simple or complex such as the record of property exchange. The author of
such testimonies can provide the historians information about what happened,
how and what the circumstances the event occurred and why it occurred.
o The primary responsibilities of the historians to distinguish for readers carefully
between information that comes literally out of the source itself.

 Primary Sources

o Primary sources are materials produced by people or groups directly involved in

the event or topic being studied.

 Formally, there are eight examples of these primary sources:

 Photographs that may reflect social conditions of historical realities and everyday life.
 Old sketches and drawings that may indicate the conditions of life of societies in the
past.
 Old maps that may reveal how space and geography were used to emphasize trade
routes, structural build-up, etc.
 Cartoons for political expression or propaganda
 Material evidence of the prehistoric past like cave drawings, old syllabaries and ancient
writings.
 Statistical tables, graphs and charts
 Oral history or recordings by electronic means of accounts of eyewitnesses or
participants; the recordings are then transcribed and used for research.
 Published and unpublished primary documents, eyewitness accounts and other written
sources.

 Secondary Sources

o Gottschalk simply defines secondary sources as the testimony of anyone who is

not an eyewitness – that is of one who was not present at the event of which he
tells.
 These are books, articles and scholarly journals that had interpreted primary sources or
had used them to discuss certain subjects of history.

 Source of Typologies

o Their evolution and complementarity Written source are usually categorized

according to a tripartite scheme as narrative or literally as diplomatic/juridical or
as a social document. Sources are traditionally classified as narrative or
literally includes chronicles or tracts presented in narrative form written in
order to impact particular message.

 The Impact of Communication and Information Technology on the Production

of Sources

o The availability of the sources general, very much determined by technology

that is by the conditions under which is given culture received and collected
information. In the first information was transmitted by people who walked or
ran with the news as the rate probably never exceeding six miles per hour. The
second phase of information was transported using pack animals. This phase
began about 20000B.C.E.in central Asia about 10000B.C.E. in the
Mediatarian area and sometimes during sixteenth century among the Incas in
Peru.

 Three categories of information were transported in this period each of which

required slightly different technology of literacy. The First included secret
correspondence of various kind of diplomatic military which had to be written in
code. The second general correspondence which in time was taken by the newspaper.