GEC 2 – Readings in the Philippine History University of Antique – Libertad Campus

Module 2 College of Business and Management

KADESH EXODUS T. BERDEBLANCO, MAEd Libertad, Antique
Course Facilitator

Sources of Historical Data

Four Basic Categories of Historical Sources Materials

• Documents – are written or printed materials that have been produced in one form or another
sometime in the past.
• Numerical Records – include any type of numerical data in printed or handwritten form.
• Oral statements – include any form of statement made orally by someone.
• Relics – are any objects whose physical

Distinction of Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources

Historians encounter a large variety of sources during the course of their studies. Sources can be labelled
primary, secondary, or tertiary, depending on their distance from the information they share.

Primary Sources

Primary Sources give first hand, original, and unfiltered information. Examples are eyewitness
accounts, personal journals, interviews, surveys, experiments, historical documents, and artifacts. These
sources have a close, direct connection to their subjects.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Primary Sources

• Directly address your topic and often provide information that is unavailable elsewhere.
• Some primary sources such as eyewitness accounts, may be too close to be subject, lacking a critical
distance.
• Interviews, surveys, and experiments are time consuming to prepare, administer, and analyse.

Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are one step removed from the topic. You must remember that secondary information
is filtered through someone else’s perspective and may be biased.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Secondary Sources

• Provide a variety of expert perspective and insights.

• Peer review usually ensures the quality of sources such as scholarly articles.
• More efficient than planning, conducting, and analysing certain primary sources.
• Secondary Sources are not necessarily focused on your specific topic, you may have to dig to find
applicable information.
• Information may be colored by the writer’s own bias or faulty approach

Tertiary Sources

Tertiary sources provide third-hand information by reporting ideas and details from secondary sources.
They include the potential for an additional layer of bias.
GEC 2 – Readings in the Philippine History University of Antique – Libertad Campus
Module 2 College of Business and Management
KADESH EXODUS T. BERDEBLANCO, MAEd Libertad, Antique
Course Facilitator

Advantages and Disadvantages of Tertiary Sources

• Offer a quick, easy introduction to your topic
• They may point to high-quality primary and secondary sources.
• Because of their distance, tertiary sources may oversimplify otherwise distort a topic.
• By rehashing secondary sources, they may miss new insights into a topic.

Differences between Primary Sources and Secondary Sources

Primary Sources

• Created at the time of an event or very soon after

• Created by someone who saw or heard an event themselves
• Often one-of-a-kind, or rare
• Letters, diaries, photos and newspapers (can all be primary sources)

Secondary Sources

• Created after an event; sometime a long time after something happened.

• Often uses primary sources as examples
• Expresses an opinion or an argument about a past event
• History textbooks, historical movies and biographies (can all be secondary sources)

Types of Primary Sources

• Autobiographies and Memoirs

• Diaries, Personal Letters, and Correspondence
• Interviews, Surveys, and Fieldwork
• Photographs and Posters
• Works of arts and literature
• Speeches and Oral Histories

Types of Secondary Sources

• Bibliographies
• Biographical Works
• Periodicals (newspapers, magazine, and Journal)
• Literature Reviews and Review Articles (Film Review and Book reviews)

Types of Tertiary Sources

• General references such as directories, encyclopedias, almanacs, and atlases.

• Crowd Sources like Wikipedia, Youtube, message boards, and social media sites like twitter and
Facebook.
• Search sites

Repositories of Primary Sources

• Library
• Archive
• Museum
• Historical Society
GEC 2 – Readings in the Philippine History University of Antique – Libertad Campus
Module 2 College of Business and Management
KADESH EXODUS T. BERDEBLANCO, MAEd Libertad, Antique
Course Facilitator
• Special Collections

TASK 2: Historical Sources Collection and Analysis (95 pts)

Look for a Pair and collect at list 30 (Thirty) some old things related to
history, you can find in your respective home, and classify it if it is a
primary, secondary or tertiary source. Provide Pictures of your collected
old things, a short description. Present your output in the class once you
finished it.

External and internal criticism

Historical data has to be examined for its authenticity and truthfulness. This examination is done through
criticism; by asking and researching to determine truthfulness, bias, omissions, and consistency in data.
(“Historical Research Methods, “n.d)

External Criticism

External Criticism refers to the genuineness of the documents a researcher uses in a historical study.
(Fraenkel and Wallace, n.d)

Questions to establish the genuineness of a document or relic (Key, 1997)

• Does the language and writing style conform to the period in question and is typical of other work
done by the author?
• Is there evidence that author exhibits ignorance of things or events that man of his training and time
should have known?
• Did he/she report about things, events, or places that could not have known during the period?
• Has the original manuscript been altered either intentionally or unintentionally by copying?
• Is the document an original draft or a copy? If it is a copy, was it reproduced in the exact words of
the original?
• If manuscript is undated or the author unknown, are there any clues internally as to its origin?

Gilbert J. Garraghan (1946) provides the following questions:

• When was the source, written or unwritten, produced (date)?

• Where was it produced (localization)?
• By whom was it produced (authorship)?
• From what pre-existing material was it produced (analysis)?
• In what original form was it produced (integrity)?

Internal Criticism
GEC 2 – Readings in the Philippine History University of Antique – Libertad Campus
Module 2 College of Business and Management
KADESH EXODUS T. BERDEBLANCO, MAEd Libertad, Antique
Course Facilitator
Internal Criticism refers to the accuracy of the contents of a documents. Whereas external criticism has
to do with the authenticity of a document, internal criticism has to do with what the documents says.
(Fraenkel and Wallace, n.d.)

Questions to check the content of a source of information (Key, 1997)

• What was meant by the author by each word and statement?

• How much credibility can the author’s statement be given?
• What is the evidential value of its contents (credibility)? (Gilbert J. Garraghan, 1946)

General Principles for Determining Reliability (Olden-Jorgensen, 1998 and Thuren, 1997)

• Human sources may be relics such as a fingerprint; or narrative such as statement or a letter. Relics
are more credible sources than narratives.
• Any given source may be forged or corrupted. Strong indications of the originality of the source
increase its reliability.
• The closer a source is to the event which it purports to describe, the more one can trust it to give an
accurate historical description of what actually happened.
• An eyewitness is more reliable than testimony at second hand, which is more reliable than hearsay at
further remove, and so on.
• If a number of independent sources contain same message, the credibility of the message is strongly
increased.
• The tendency of a source is its motivation for providing some kind of bias. Tendencies should be
minimized or supplemented with opposite motivations.
• If it can be demonstrated that the witness or source has no direct interest in creating bias then the
credibility of the message is increased.