Friday Seminar Series: Source Types

Dear Readers,

I have decided to begin a series of (your) Friday "seminars" on our operations in the Department of Anachronism. These seminars will be summaries of several of my CHRN/AUG 100 lecture materials, designed for a more general audience. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them. The first of these, below, is on the different sorts of sources we obtain from the Department of Augury.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople

Source Types and Source Criticism

Introduction

In the course of anachronistic analysis, we find ourselves lonely spelunkers in vast caverns of augury data. While it is easy for the bewildered student of anachronism to view their augury collaborators as brutal taskmasters who drown us constantly in floods of arcane information, the seasoned researcher learns to value and appreciate this deluge of source material. The bridge between being lost in the signal and learning to be a commander of your data is built through an accurate understanding of source types and through appropriate source criticism. No one can even make their first steps in anachronism without a clear understanding of these concepts.

Types of Sources

Augury in its current form provides us with records in three major categories of media:

• Audio
• Visual
• Written/Printed

Of course, some sources combine these; video records often contain audio, written records frequently have a visual component, etc. However, due to technological considerations of augury, we cannot always be sure that the audio or writing collected with a visual record, for example, was intended to accompany that record. When context clues are absent, it is best to treat the two source types as distinct sources.

Due to the wide variety of technologies used for record-keeping across past and future time streams, I keep these categories as vague as possible. Fundamentally for our purposes, there is little difference between an audio recording originally on a compact disc when compared with a cassette tape or eight-track, in those time streams where the latter survived.

For each source type, different approaches to source criticism need to be taken.

Fact and Fiction

This topic is real "meat" of this seminar. Augury collects information without regard to its meaning, use, or truth. While this generates a lot of so-called "noise," it also gives us valuable information about the cultural context for our most valuable sources. Many innovative anachronists have surfed on waves of receipts and tax registers to important conclusions--and often, doctoral theses--about their specific eras of interest. Do not disregard a source merely because you do not like it! Even text from discarded food packaging can be useful in our pursuits.

More to the point, even fictional sources are useful. Take, for example, Dante's Inferno, from the early fourteenth century of the University's native time stream. It is unlikely that anyone will ever mistake this for a factual source, though there is some debate as to how Dante himself viewed it. Given energetic and timeline constraints, we cannot merely pluck Dante from his native time and ask him these questions. Instead, we have to use his fictional source and context clues within to determine how the author intended his work be received. This is one element of source criticism.

Another element involves differentiating fact from fiction when there is an ambiguous case. Consider, for instance, the 20th century American time stream film The Ten Commandments. Equal parts religious visual record and audio record, we have never obtained a full copy of it. Did the American contemporaries truly believe that Charlton Heston was the savior of the Hebrews, and that his blessed rifle brought them to freedom? Essentially the question is, "Does this record represent history, or historical fiction, to its contemporaries?" Debate on this particular source, especially on the breaks in its audio, continues, and it is possible that we will not know the full answer until our Augurs have retrieved a full, unbroken copy of the film.

Now, of course, the previous example, if we knew the answer to our questions, would not tell us anything about Egyptians, but instead about 20th century American conceptions of the past. We can simply use Augury to determine that the ancient Egyptians lacked firearms technology, for example, or to establish historicity for the claims of miracles. Knowing how the contemporaries of a source viewed it, however, tells us what is valued by their culture. If The Ten Commandments is a rousing historical piece, then it tells us of the 20th century Americans' love of their right to bear arms and their love of religion. Even though there are mild variations within the 20th century American time stream, we can still say that across individual veins of that time stream, some reflection of these feelings were true.

If the source is fictional, it becomes a significantly more complicated matter. Is the source then comedic? Heroic? The anachronist must use his or her best judgment combined with strong, specific source evidence in order to determine the answers to these questions. That is something that cannot be taught in only a few words. The judgment necessary is something cultivated over the course of an anachronist's entire career, honed and sharpened only with experience and learning by example. Hopefully this brief introduction gives you an understanding of the tricky situations that we encounter in our studies of time in and out of context.