A. What is Source?

Prepared by Group 5

Sapida
Sayde
Simbi
Tede
Varias
Villa
Zarsadias
Sources
are artifacts that have been left by the past.

Kinds of Sources:
Relics or “remains”
Testimonies
RELICS OR REMAINS

• Objects of practical in daily life in the past.

• By comparing artifacts with those from other places,

historians can further learn something of their commercial
or intellectual relations.
TESTIMONIES

• Either written or oral

• Provide contemporaries proof of an act or of a right, or in order to inform

them a fact.

• Examples of testimonies are speeches or documentaries.

• Serves as a record either “intentional” or “unintentional” (not produced

with the historian’s questions in mind, they are, however, “innocent”.
• Both relics and testimonies were usually created for the specific purposes of
the age in which they were made.
• Only rarely were designed for the use of posterity, although that sometimes
occurred.
• In contrast to relic, the content of a testimony is thus usually more important
than its form.
• Testimonies and artifacts, whether oral or written, may have been
intentionally created or sometimes “unintentional”
• Sources that is done “unintentionally” is not produced with the historian’s
questions in mind.
 HISTORIANS MUST ALWAYS
CONSIDER:
HISTORIANS MUST ALWAYS CONSIDER:
• the conditions under which a source was produced
• the intentions that motivated it
• the historical context in which it was produced
• the events that preceded it and those that followed
SOURCE
• are thus those materials from which historians construct
meaning
• is an object from the past or testimony concerning the
past on which historians depend in order to create their
own depiction of that past
 HISTORIC WORK OR
INTERPRETATION
• the result of this depiction -is an argument about the
event
SOURCES CAN BE
• 1.Direct
• 2. Indirect
DIRECT SOURCE
• are those that provide first-hand information about events
• scientific disciplines, experiments are the most common
direct source; in other disciplines, surveys and interviews,
or research into written and oral records of events
INDIRECT SOURCE
• involve the reports and analysis of direct information by
other people.
• Reports, articles, and books by scholars are the main
category of secondary sources
B. Source Typologies:
Their evolution and
complementarity
Categorized into tripartite scheme

• Narrative/literary

• Diplomatic/juridicial

• Social documents

Note: although we see these sources as arbitrary or can distort the true
meaning, one should still think that not all sources have generic qualities
Narrative/ Literary

Includes chronicles or tracts presented in narrative form

Motives

• Scientific tract-inform contemporaries or succeeding generation

• Newspaper article-shape opinion

• Ego document/personal narrative- persuade justice of the author’s action

• Novel/film-to entertain/to deliver a moral teaching/further a religious cause

• Biology-in order to praise the subject’s worth and achievements
• Note: novela and poetry are subset in this category
• Pointers: not all diaries can be considered as reliable source, it may still depend on
the individual’s perspective
Ego documents

• Record the author’s perception of events.

Note: Most of the events written by the author may contain

subjective ideas and opinions as it tells the events on how
he experienced it based on his ideology and culture of the
age
Diplomatic sources

• Professional historians treat this as the “purest and the

best source”

• It contains documents with legal situation

Example:

Charter (legal instrument)

• This is a document, usually sealed or authenticated in some way

to provide evidence in the completion of legal transaction or
proof of the existence of juristic fact.

• It could also serve as evidence in a judicial proceeding in the

event of dispute.
Charters according to function

• Law giving- ordinances, declaration of law, statues

• Juridicial- judgment of courts and of other legal

documents
“ Urkunde in German and charte or diplome in French”
Social documents

• Products of record keeping by bureaucracies such as state

ministries, charitable organization, foundations, churches and
schools
Information of economic, social, political or judicial import

Note: although these sources are considered to be the exclusive pile of

historical data, it does not mean that it is the only kind of historical
data. Unwritten sources, both written and oral are essential element of
historian’s arsenal
Writing

• was invented in Mesopotamia, 3000 BCE.

• initiated the "historical" age in human history
• Greeks and Romans developed writing into an art.
• twelfth century, it achieved dominance even in the elite circle in
the Medieval period.
• invention of printing press at the end of fifteenth century. The
press permitted exact reproduction in quantity, of documents of all
kinds ( news, reports ,statutes, letters, fictions, poetry, drawings)
Oral communication

During the earlier middle ages, it became more important.

Nevertheless, historians do not rely entirely on written sources for
their knowledge even of those age in which the printed text existed.
Moreover the boundaries between written and oral. Today, most
scholars are using mixture of oral, written, and other material
sources as the situation requires. Scholars know about the people of
the "ancient regime" about their actions, ideas, beliefs and
fantasies--- comes to them through a wide variety of sources, some
originally written, some written only after the fact, song never
written.
• Takes their places alongside newspapers and diplomatic documents to
provide the material on which historians have based extraordinarily rich
accounts: • folk songs •monuments • stories and tales •miniatures
•drawings • other visual representation
• Technical innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• • have yielded new kinds of sources that continue to blur the boundaries
between written, oral and other "material."
• • to a certain extent, such innovation involved simply an improvement in
quality: the photograph and above all, the film provide representations that
are in some ways more realistic than the painted or drawn image.
• Thomas Wedgewood invented the photogram on silver nitrate paper in 1802.
• 1888 when Kodak introduced the film roll
• Joseph Plateau began experiments with moving film between 1832.
• In 1893 when Thomas Edison perfected the techniques, was the crucial age for the
development of technology for moving pictures.
• It was only around 1950, the technology became available to preserve film adequately.
• Until 1900, most films were what we call “documentaries”
• Dramatic films were made after that date.
• 1927, we had talkies.
• Sound recordings date from the late nineteenth century, at
least from Thomas Edison’s creation of 1877. The
Gramophone recording followed, and since the 1980s we
have had the compact disk. The information on a grand
scale began, the tape recording first made (out of metal)
in 1931. And around 1940 produced synthetically.
• Radio began in 1896 and was publicly available after
1902, regular transmission began in the United States
after 1920.
• Television saw the first experiments in 1927; in 1936 it
was made publicly available in London, in 1941 in New
York. Ten years later it came to most of the European
countries. The medium did not constitute a true source, at
least not in its early years.
• Tape or Celluloid film recording events had a much greater
chance of being saved, but it was only between 1940 and 1970
that these media were widely used. These tapes do not,
however, constitute a secure source. They have not lasted, as
they have deteriorated, information has been lost. Even the
saved information is sometimes inaccessible.
• Computer files that have the same problems on which a huge
quantity of recent decades, social documents are stored. (risk of
erasures or inaccessibility).
unwritten evidence

• artifacts, relics, remains

• Archeological evidences( jewelry or vases, dwellings, graves, roads,
churches or fortifications)
• Gives ideas about the culture, way of living, commercial and
sociocultural interconnections to other.
• Provide information about the form of government, economic
conditions, trade relations, fiscal policy (coins)
• Visual representation
oral evidence

• tales and saga, interviews, songs, rituals,

note: the degree to which historians uses oral or material

evidence depends to a large extent, on the period being
studied or on the particular subject undertaken.
• Oral report can provide a critically important evidence
• Interviews can be done if writing is being oppressed if
there’s upheaval, strike or war.
• In interviews, questions should be ask according to the
overall plan about the kind of information to be sought.
Interviewers must be flexible also
C. The Impact of Communication
and Information Technology on
the Production of Sources
• The mechanism of communication and the speed at which
information circulated are both elements of this
technological history of sources.
This history can be divided into three periods.

• First the information was transmitted by people who walked or

ran with the news the medium of transmission was messenger
himself but this can limit the range and speed of transmission
• Second phase - information is transmitted using animals
Other technical developments further improved this mode of
transmission
Phoenicians – developed an alphabet
Persian kings – created the courier system of transport.
Three categories of information during this period

• “Litterae clausae “of various kinds economic or business, diplomatic , military which
had to be written in code.

• “litterae patentes” this is general correspondence and was taken over by the news
paper

• The foreruners in the production of this genre were the venetians who regularly
penned commentaries to accompany the business correspondence they sent all over
Europe ; they were followed by the German trade cities like Nuremberg and
Wittenberg which produced what a regular periodicity appeared first in distinction
was made between simple news sheets (which has no explicit editorial content ) and
“new papers of opinion “
Third phase- defined by mechanical media
• 1830 train increased in speed

• 1844 invention of telegraph

• By 1896 it required only seven minutes to transmit a message from one

place on the globe to another. The recent innovation such as telephone,
fax, radio, television and satellite brought changes in the way information
was gathered and delivered.
• The power of modern day communications, with their
steady stream of fashion changes and technical
innovations, depends, however, not just on the speed at
which message travel but also on the quality of the carrier
and of the distribution system. It also depends on the
readiness of the audience to accept innovation
The materials qualities of the message itself affect its
influence as well.
• Mass media and technology makes it possible o change the character of
news reporting and its relationship to scholarship.
• In sixteenth century mass media's potential was recognized and with
that development the political control came.
• Since then the government starts to limit the press and required them
to obtain official license and impose onerous taxes that limit their ability
to collect, publish, and circulate news in Western Europe.
•
• Today most of their newspapers in west depends on their financial
support on government, private interest groups, or private firms.
• An early high point (or low point) of the press was reach by hitters
propaganda
• In other hand there are some presses that is relatively free, they
function independently in political application and in direct control.
Ex: the London times, France’s le monde, New York Times, and the
fastest growing network of the recent years the CNN.
• CNN is considered part of this traditional of press
""freedom"" although the growth of this media is driven by
commercial motives. They also said that they help prevent
the ""freedom of press”.
• Every news report is in some sense selective and
therefore “biased”. Journalist are always affecting by the
news, making one story” important “and another
“unimportant” making “news” on one hand and “not-
news” on the other. Journalist is responsible for varying
sources, for making sure that the bits of information used
is accurate
• To employ the sources usefully, the historian must consider not just the content
of the text, but its author and issuer , the publisher and its institutional
location , the audience , and the immediate (political, social, economic ) context
of its original publication. The historian must remember that the emission of a
report itself can affect the events being reported, that there is no clear
separation between the event is about the event, not part of it , but sometimes
this relationship is distorted
• A message delivered electronically can be literally distorted, just as can a line of
print or a story passed by mouth from generation to generation
• The linguistic or cultural code is important because this can affect how the
reading can understand a message
D. Storing and Delivering
Information
Archive (ar.chive)

• a place in which public records or historical materials

(such as documents) are preserved

• the material preserved – often used in plural (Merriam-

Webster Dictionary)
The term has two meanings,

• In the most general sense, an archive is the collection of

documents held by a natural or a legal person (a
government agency)

• In a more technical sense, the term “archive” means the

place or the institution itself that holds and manages the
collection.
In principle,
• Diplomatic sources and social documents are kept in archives
• Narrative sources in libraries
An archive is considered “living archive” if it’s still growing and
acquiring new material which is the owner or the institution is still
active.
“Old” or “Historical” no value for on-going operations because the firm
or the operation no longer exists, the documents have lost their official
or juridical status.
• In recent years, some new independent archives have
been created, usually attached to research institutes
focused on a particular problem, a group of people, or a
place.
• Until recently it was generally accepted that public
archives should hold only public documents, that they
should not, in fact, acquire the holdings of private families
and private institutions, no matter how important
historically.
Sources of other kinds, most of them unwritten, are typically held in
other depositories.

• Museum are usually repositories for archaeological finds,

artworks, and similar objects

• Libraries have been established for special collections

• Archives in Europe and North America today follow
generally standard practices in organizing their holdings.
• For the historical archive, the most important principle of
organization is place of origin, or provenance.
Technical reasons why archive does not last

• First Few events were actually recorded. Events considered too

banal, too obvious, were not recorded by contemporaries and were
noted only in conversations.
• Fax has no improvement, for the quality of the print of most fax
machines assures the ephemerality of the messages so transmitted.
• Often occurred that the official who produced or originally collected
a given document did not think it worth saving.
• Archives are frequently destroyed in catastrophe, fire and war.
• Archives are frequently destroyed in catastrophe, fire and war.
• Many institutions and individuals simply do not seek aggressively enough
to preserve their records. Private firms are notorious in this regard.
• The quality of the material on which the record is kept.
• The ink used today which is based on aniline, becomes virtually
unreadable after about thirty years
• Archives can fail scholars because there is too much to collect, and
archivists become overwhelmed by the task of deciding what to save and
what to discard.
• The huge influx of material into small archives with
overworked staffs has meant that files cannot be
catalogued and prepared for use quickly enough and
become , in effect, inaccessible.
Solutions to this matter
 
 

• Technical means
Compact disks
Microfilm – durable substitute for paper

• Editing process
Sampling
Selective triage

• Create storage centers for documents that have lost their official use but cannot
yet be properly archived. (Record Centers)
But sources not only disappear’ they also appear or come into existence.
The boundaries of knowledge and expertise shift constantly,
-because new material is found or discovered,
-because material once closed to scrutiny becomes available.
-sometimes create sources when they conduct interviews w/ people who
lived though the events being studied.
Although these published collections have long served and will long
continue to serve scholars, its clear that we will never ba able to edit and
publish all” the known historical sources.
 Chapter Two
Technical Analysis of Source
 How sources can be use as an
evidence 101:
• It must be comprehensive
Know the wordings, writing styles, handwriting and
vocabulary
• Know the place and the date
Know when it was composed, and in what social settings
• Is it authenticated?
Know the purpose
Writing History of the
Philippines
Ancient Philippines
• Ancient peoples of the Philippines did not have any
writing system, and so they relied on oral tradition in
recording folklore and folk history.
Ancient Philippine scripts
systems of writing that developed and flourished in the
Philippine islands in about 300 BC.
related to other Southeast Asian systems of writing that
developed from South Indian Brahmi scripts used in Asoka
Inscriptions and Pallava Grantha, (a type of writing used in
the writing of palm leaf books called grantha during the
ascendancy of the Pallava dynasty about the 5th century.)
 baybayin had 3 alphabet characters
representing vowels (A, E/I, and
O/U), while there were 14 characters
representing syllables that begin with
the consonants (B, C/K, D/R, G, H, L,
Pre-colonial to early colonial
M, N, NG, P, S, T, W, and Y).
writing systems derived from the Indian-influenced
cultures of Indonesia and Malaysia came to the
islands, leading to the emergence of native writing
systems called baybayin, primarily used by certain
inhabitants of Luzon and the Visayas.
Spanish period: Abecedario

Beginning in the 17th Century, colonized

Filipinos followed the Spanish alphabet
and its developments. Eventually, the
number of letters in the alphabet used In
the islands, called the abecedario,
reached 32 letters:

Doctrina Christiana
• Latin alphabet was used
American to the Commonwealth
eras: Abakada
The end of Spanish rule and the arrival of
the American style public education in the
Philippines introduced Filipinos to the
English language and to its 26-letter
alphabet. Despite this,
the abecedario remained in use by
Philippine languages, as many words still
used Spanish letters.
• 1937- government ordered for the adoption of a national
language based on Tagalog, and for the preparation of a
dictionary and a grammar book for the national language.
• 1939- Lope K. Santos developed Ang Balarila ng Wikang
Pambansa (The Grammar of the National Language). (32
letter abecedario into 20 letters. )
• 1970's- Revised abakada. Abakada remained the national
language’s alphabet from 1940 to 1976.
• 1973-  1973 Constitution issued a new definition of the
national language, renaming it as Filipino 
• 1976- 1976 Filipino Orthography Reform approved by the
Institute of the National Language. Under Department of
Education, Culture and Sports (DECS) memorandum
order 194, 11 letters made a comeback in the revised
Filipino alphabet – C, CH, F, J, LL, Ñ, Q, RR, V, X, and Z 
• With the 11 letters included, the1976 alphabet became
similar to the old abecedariowith its 31 letters:
1987: Present Filipino alphabet
• In the DECS Order, the new alphabet retained the 20
letters of the abakada; retained the letters C, F, J, Ñ , Q, V,
X, Z on account that these letters are commonly used in
many regional languages; and removed the letters CH, LL,
and RR.