Comparer des méthodes

	Diplomatics	Archival Content Analysis
Domaine	Historiography	Historiography
Famille	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Année d'origine	1681	1952
Auteur d'origine	Jean Mabillon (De re diplomatica)	Adapted from Berelson and Lasswell content analysis; Furet's quantitative history
Type	qualitative formal-analytic method	mixed qualitative-quantitative method
Source fondatrice	Guyotjeannin, O., Pycke, J., & Tock, B.-M. (1993). Diplomatique medievale (L'Atelier du medieviste, 2). Brepols. ISBN: 9782503503127	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
Alias	Diplomatic, Diplomatique, Urkundenlehre, Charter Criticism	Documentary Content Analysis, Archival Coding, Quantitative-Qualitative Content Analysis, Source Coding
Apparentées	4	4
Résumé	Diplomatics is the science that studies the form, structure, and genesis of documents, above all the solemn legal instruments of the Middle Ages such as charters, diplomas, and acts. Founded as a discipline by the Benedictine scholar Jean Mabillon, whose De re diplomatica (1681) answered Jesuit doubts about the authenticity of Merovingian charters, it provides a rigorous procedure for deciding whether a document is genuine and for dating and localizing it. The method rests on the observation that documents produced by a given chancery follow highly regular conventions: a fixed sequence of parts, recurring verbal formulae, standard modes of validation by seal and subscription. By dissecting a document into its constituent elements and comparing each against attested norms, the diplomatist detects forgeries, interpolations, and anachronisms, and pins a document to a place and time. Diplomatics is thus the most formalized branch of external source criticism.	Archival content analysis adapts the social-scientific technique of content analysis to the systematic study of historical documents held in archives.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.