Primary source

The record made inside the event: a royal decree, a court ruling, a wire report filed the same day, a constitution, a trial transcript, a survey’s own published dataset. It is how you know a thing happened, as distinct from what anyone later argued it meant.

In this course primary sources carry extra weight for a second reason. Documents old enough to be out of copyright can be read aloud on camera with no rights clearance, which is why the Blair and Robertson volumes and the Rizal texts on Project Gutenberg keep coming back.

A primary source is not automatically true. A government statement issued during a news blackout is a primary source, and it is also the party with the strongest interest in a particular number.

Source: Standard historical-method distinction, in general scholarly use rather than owned by any one author. Applied here in the form used across the course research maps, where every claim is tagged by what kind of record stands behind it.

First used in: 0.2 · How we will know what is true