documentary research Quick reference
A Dictionary of Sociology (4 ed.)
... research Research that uses personal and official documents as a source material. Documents used by social scientists may include such things as newspapers, diaries, stamps, directories, handbills, maps, government statistical publications, photographs, paintings, CDs, tapes, and computer files. The most important consideration in using documents is their quality as evidence on social meanings and social relations. Unlike survey questionnaires or interview transcripts, documents have generally been compiled for purposes other than research, and their...
Group Discussions and the Documentary Method in Education Research Reference library
Wivian Weller
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods in Education
...Discussions and the Documentary Method in Education Research Introduction There is currently a wide variety of research methods and techniques as well as empirical data analysis perspectives when it comes to qualitative research in the social sciences and education, drawing from different analytical references, philosophical concepts, experiences, and practices. This is evidenced by the growing number of scientific associations and events, specialist journals, and handbooks on qualitative research methods around the world. Although this movement has...
documentary research
Landscape History: The Countryside Quick reference
H. S. A. Fox
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...place‐names, parish boundaries, deserted sites, surviving sites, field patterns, documentary sources, and perhaps excavation is presented blow by blow as a catalogue; and readers are more or less left to form their own impression of medieval moorland edge life. Lost here are the insights which often come from an examination of the interplay of the different types of evidence; writing of this kind, a catalogue of findings rather than a history, usually reflects poor research design in which the different types of evidence are considered in parallel, and...
Britain and America: A Common Heritage Quick reference
George Redmonds
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...that George McCracken successfully identified many difficult variations of the surnames he was researching. For example, spellings of the Lancashire surname Hayhurst included Hairst, Hearst, and Hurst. Recent DNA tests carried out on members of the Cowgill family in both countries have confirmed family links that genealogical work had failed to prove. Other books which have history as their focus rather than genealogy are based entirely on documentary sources from archives in Britain and America. Peter Wilson Coldham published Emigrants from England...
Domestic Buildings Quick reference
Malcolm Airs
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...who are bringing the tools of anthropological analysis to bear on the physical and documentary evidence. This is likely to prove a fruitful area in the future, although its protagonists will need to improve their methods of communication if they are to reach the wider audiences that studies such as Matthew Johnson , Housing Culture ( 1993 ), deserve. Urban housing is another area with potential for further research and publication. In addition to the general documentary sources already discussed, certain classes of records are peculiar to towns and...
Family History Quick reference
Anthony Camp
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...it seems, have remained stronger and many families are still rooted in the soil. C. A. Bernau had published the first directory of the names of families which people were researching in 1907 . Such †surnames have come to be called the ‘interests’ of family historians. Annually published directories, the National Genealogical Directory ( 1979–93 ) and the larger Genealogical Research Directory ( 1981–2007 ), between them contained many hundreds of thousands of names. Similar directories were published by many local societies and by the Federation of...
African‐Caribbean Genealogy Quick reference
Guy Grannum
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...did not end until 1 August 1838 . Researching Caribbean families is similar to researching families in Britain: the British took their social, legal, and ecclesiastical systems with them to the Caribbean. Britain does not hold the locally created records of her dependencies and former colonies. Most surviving records are to be found in the archives and registration offices in the relevant country. The types of record created by these colonies will be familiar to those who have undertaken genealogical research in Britain. Differences will be experienced...
The Antiquarian Tradition Quick reference
David Hey
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...impressive variety of books and articles during the last four decades of the 19th century. Atkinson had immense intellectual curiosity. Coming as a young parson from the south of England to one of the wildest parts of the country, he became interested not only in documentary and topographical research, and in natural history and archaeology, but in the lives of his parishioners: their homes, their speech , their customs, beliefs, and superstitions. His knowledge of Scandinavian and other languages convinced him that ‘to all practical intents and purposes, the...
Agricultural History Quick reference
David Hey
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...through the coalescing of independent farmsteads; others were deliberately planned. No agreement has been reached on the firm dating of planned villages, though it is accepted that they were created between the 9th and the 13th centuries. Archaeological, topographical, and documentary research has shown that communal farming in open‐field systems began not with the arrival of the Anglo‐Saxons, but with the later creation of villages. Emphasis is now placed on the Anglo‐Scandinavian period, for similar systems can be observed in many other parts of Europe from...
1700 to the Present Reference library
Ronald Clements
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible
...of historical truth, at the same time making the real history of the Bible a more prominent focus of research. In no small measure the understanding of biblical prophecy also demanded a comparable change. If the physical universe is an objective reality which is subject to certain observable laws, is not the course of events which occur within it subject to comparable laws? So the causes and consequences of historical events required to be researched and interpreted in a more scientific way. The matter was of importance to the popular understanding of...
Surnames Quick reference
David Hey
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...the rest are unconnected, then the name is likely to have a single‐family origin. It is possible, however, that other individuals are rare survivors of different ancestors with the same name. Reliable statistics are not yet available and DNA findings must be linked with documentary research. The genetic evidence can help to identify what scientists refer to as a ‘non‐paternity event’—illegitimacy or change of name—and, in cases of more than one origin of a surname, it can separate the various families. The main area of contention is where 20–50 per cent of a...
Industrial History Quick reference
David Hey
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...departments and the Workers’ Educational Association provided evening and weekend courses that combined fieldwork with the study of documentary evidence from local archives. Many of the amateurs who were attracted to industrial archaeology had an engineering background, so their emphasis was on the practical concerns of preservation and restoration. Yet some went on to combine their practical knowledge with historical research and to write major contributions to the subject, notably K. C. Barraclough , Steelmaking before Bessemer (2 vols, The Metals...
Local and Regional History: Modern Approaches Quick reference
David Hey
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...extramural departments or the WEA. In the 1950s Bernard Jennings in Nidderdale and Lionel Munby in Hertfordshire independently developed this method of research. Their classes, and others that have followed them, have published some first‐rate work. Group research has proved far more popular and productive with local history classes than with any other subject. See Joan Unwin , ‘ Local History Group Research Projects in Adult Continuing Education ’, Local Historian , 24/1 (1994) . Local history has also proved a popular choice for part‐time qualification...
Introduction to the Pentateuch Reference library
G. I. Davies
The Oxford Bible Commentary
...is really tradition-history—and, as we have seen, went on to deal with the sources themselves and their combination together by the editors of the Pentateuch. Gunkel's views about the origins of Genesis have been enormously influential and have shaped subsequent research just as much as the documentary source-theory. They are not however satisfactory in every respect, as we shall see. 9. Form-critical study of the Pentateuch was extended to the stories involving Moses by Hugo Gressmann in 1913 and to the Pentateuchal laws by Albrecht Alt in 1934 ( Alt 1966...
Women Local and Family Historians Quick reference
Joan Thirsk
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...they favour buildings on a domestic, rather than monumental, scale though Ella Sophia Armitage's Early Norman Castles of the British Isles ( 1912 ) deserves to head the list for another reason, displaying as it does women's determination to make a thorough search of the documentary records. Margaret Wood's The English Mediaeval House ( 1965 ) was the first study for over a century to serve the interests of the general reader in tracing the evolution of houses, while Sarah Pearson's Medieval Houses of Kent ( 1994 ) counts as the most recent, striving...
Towns Quick reference
David M. Palliser
The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (2 ed.)
...between Roman and medieval town life anywhere in Britain, the Romans’ legacy is not irrelevant. Their surveyors had a remarkable talent for spotting good sites, and nearly all their towns were reoccupied in the Middle Ages. Until the 1950s it was possible to argue, from the documentary evidence, that towns in the economic sense did not reappear until late Anglo‐Saxon or even Norman times. However, archaeology has made it clear since the 1960s that towns reappeared in England as early as the 7th century. The earliest were apparently trading centres on coasts...
Industrialization Reference library
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
...World War. The powerful image of a landscape despoiled by industrialization, intensified by the interwar depression, is epitomized by Richard Llewellyn 's How Green Was My Valley ( 1939 ). Similarly, the posthumously published compendium of the great lyric poet of British documentary cinema, Humphrey Jennings , Pandaemonium (compiled 1937–50 ; published 1985 ), speaks volumes for the received cultural impact of industrialization. From 1937 Jennings, who described his political beliefs as those of William Cobbett, collected items for Pandaemonium ...
Bitter Lives: Israel in and out of Egypt Reference library
Carol A. Redmount
Oxford History of the Biblical World
... or source criticism has pursued underlying sources, arranged these in historical order, and identified points where different sources were redacted, or edited together, to form larger units. This method of analysis produced the “Documentary Hypothesis” that, with variations, remains widely followed today. The Documentary Hypothesis posits for the Pentateuch four primary literary sources (J, E, P, and D), dated to different periods in the first half of the first millennium bce , which were woven together by a series of mid-first-millennium redactors....
The Bible in Judaism Reference library
Philip Alexander
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible
...essentially by an exilic mentality. The influence of higher criticism and of the new biblical research can be seen in the essays of the Zionist thinker Ahad ha-Am (Asher Ginzburg, 1856–1927), who called for the creation of a Jewish culture that was fully in keeping with the advances of modern scholarship and science. Abraham Kahana (1874–1946), was one of the first to work this programme out in terms of Bible commentary and to make the fruits of modern research accessible to Jewish readers. He inaugurated an extensive Hebrew-language commentary on the Bible...
