Compare methods

	Archival Content Analysis	Serial History
Field	Historiography	Historiography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1952	1971
Originator	Adapted from Berelson and Lasswell content analysis; Furet's quantitative history	Francois Furet; Pierre Chaunu; Ernest Labrousse
Type	mixed qualitative-quantitative method	quantitative descriptive 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	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
Aliases	Documentary Content Analysis, Archival Coding, Quantitative-Qualitative Content Analysis, Source Coding	Histoire Serielle, Serial History, Quantitative Serial Analysis, History of Series
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Summary	Archival content analysis adapts the social-scientific technique of content analysis to the systematic study of historical documents held in archives.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.	Serial history, histoire serielle, is the historical method that takes as its object not the unique event but the series: a long, homogeneous sequence of comparable facts, such as grain prices, baptisms, burials, marriages, notarial acts, or wages, recorded at regular intervals. Theorized above all by Francois Furet and practiced by Pierre Chaunu, Ernest Labrousse, and others in the orbit of the Annales school, it grew from Fernand Braudel's call to attend to the slow rhythms of history and from the conviction that the proper data of history are repeated, measurable facts rather than singular happenings. By constructing such series and analyzing their movements, trends, cycles, and fluctuations, the serial historian reconstructs the economic and demographic structures and conjunctures within which events occur. The decisive methodological requirement is homogeneity: the units must be defined and measured consistently across the whole span, so that change in the numbers reflects change in reality rather than in the recording.