Compare methods

	Archival Content Analysis	Historical Hermeneutics
Field	Historiography	Historiography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1952	1819
Originator	Adapted from Berelson and Lasswell content analysis; Furet's quantitative history	Friedrich Schleiermacher; Wilhelm Dilthey; Hans-Georg Gadamer
Type	mixed qualitative-quantitative method	qualitative interpretive method
Seminal source	Furet, F. (1971). Le quantitatif en histoire. In J. Le Goff & P. Nora (Eds.), Faire de l'histoire (Vol. 1, pp. 42-61). Gallimard. ISBN: 9782070287666	Howell, M., & Prevenier, W. (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Cornell University Press. ISBN: 9780801485602
Aliases	Documentary Content Analysis, Archival Coding, Quantitative-Qualitative Content Analysis, Source Coding	Hermeneutics, Textual Interpretation, Hermeneutic Method, Verstehen
Related	4	4
Summary	Archival content analysis adapts the social-scientific technique of content analysis to the systematic study of historical documents held in archives. Where the impressionistic reading of sources risks privileging the vivid or the convenient, content analysis imposes an explicit, replicable procedure: a defined corpus, a coding scheme of categories, the consistent application of those categories to every document, and the analysis of the resulting frequencies and co-occurrences. Pioneered for mass communication by Bernard Berelson and Harold Lasswell, the approach was absorbed into the quantitative history championed by Francois Furet and others, who treated runs of administrative records as data to be counted and tabulated. Applied to archives, however, the method must reckon with a complication absent from designed surveys: the archive was not created to answer the historian's questions. Its categories, survivals, and silences reflect the purposes and power of the institution that produced it, so disciplined coding must be paired with critical reflection on the archive's own logic.	Historical hermeneutics is the theory and practice of interpreting historical texts in order to recover their meaning. Growing from the older art of scriptural and legal exegesis, it was generalized by Friedrich Schleiermacher into a universal method of understanding, deepened by Wilhelm Dilthey into the foundation of the human sciences, and given its modern philosophical form by Hans-Georg Gadamer. The method confronts a basic problem: a text from the past was written in a language, genre, and worldview not our own, for an audience whose assumptions we do not share. To understand it, the interpreter must reconstruct what its words meant to its author and first readers, moving in a circle between the meaning of the parts and the sense of the whole. Gadamer added a reflexive turn, insisting that interpreters cannot escape their own historical position but must bring it into a fusion of horizons with the text. Hermeneutics thus supplies the interpretive depth that source criticism, concerned with authenticity and reliability, leaves open.