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	Archival Content Analysis	Source Criticism
Ämnesområde	Historiography	Historiography
Familj	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Ursprungsår	1952	1889
Upphovsperson	Adapted from Berelson and Lasswell content analysis; Furet's quantitative history	Leopold von Ranke; Bernheim and Langlois-Seignobos codification
Typ	mixed qualitative-quantitative method	qualitative critical method
Ursprungskälla	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
Alias	Documentary Content Analysis, Archival Coding, Quantitative-Qualitative Content Analysis, Source Coding	Quellenkritik, Historical Criticism, External and Internal Criticism, Heuristic and Critical Method
Närliggande	4	4
Sammanfattning	Archival content analysis adapts the social-scientific technique of content analysis to the systematic study of historical documents held in archives.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.	Source criticism (Quellenkritik) is the foundational procedure of the historical discipline, by which a scholar interrogates a source before treating any of its statements as evidence. Codified in the nineteenth century by Ernst Bernheim and by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, and rooted in Ranke's insistence on examining documents at first hand, the method divides into two complementary operations. External (or lower) criticism establishes whether a source is what it purports to be: its authenticity, the integrity of its text, its author, place, and date. Internal (or higher) criticism then asks what the source means and how far its assertions can be trusted, weighing the author's competence, sincerity, proximity to events, and interests. Only after both passes does the historian compare independent sources and synthesize a defensible account. The discipline of the method lies precisely in its refusal to take any testimony at face value.