Source Criticism Protocol¶
Method — instantiates Source Provenance Triangulation
Uses structured questions about authorship, purpose, audience, context, proximity, and transmission to evaluate a source before accepting its claims.
Before a single source is allowed to support a claim, it should have to answer for itself. Source Criticism Protocol is the method that puts one source through a fixed set of interrogating questions — who made it, when, for whom, why, how has it been transmitted, is it authentic — and ends in a verdict about how far its claims can be trusted. Its defining move is that it evaluates a source in isolation, gated by provenance: the questions build up an origin-and-authenticity record for that source, and the protocol issues an accept / accept-with-caveats / reject judgment before the source is ever compared against others. It is the single-source admissions gate, not a cross-source comparison — the source stands or falls on what it is and how it came to you.
Example¶
A historian working on a regional famine finds a single traveller's memoir describing granaries as full while villages starved — a vivid, quotable account. Before letting it into the narrative, she runs it through the protocol. Who wrote it? A colonial official writing two decades after the events. For whom, and why? A metropolitan readership, in a memoir defending the administration's record — a purpose that rewards downplaying the crisis. How has it reached us? Through a later edited and abridged edition; the manuscript is lost, so selection and editing sit between the reader and the original. Is it authentic? The edition's provenance checks out, but the abridgment is undocumented.
The verdict is not "discard" and not "quote as fact." It is: accept as evidence of the administration's self-presentation and of one official's vantage, with low confidence on the factual claim about granaries, pending a contemporaneous record. The protocol also plants a re-open condition — if the unabridged manuscript surfaces, the source must be re-assessed. That reasoned label, attached before the memoir touches the argument, is what keeps a persuasive but interested source from doing more work than it has earned.
How it works¶
- Run the fixed question set. Authorship, date, purpose, intended audience, transmission path, and authenticity — the same interrogation applied to every source so none is waved through on charm or convenience.
- Build the provenance answer. The answers assemble into an origin-and-authenticity record: what this source is, how it was produced, and what happened to it before it reached you.
- Issue a reasoned verdict. Convert the answers into an accept / caveat / reject judgment with the reasons attached, not a bare score.
- Set a re-open condition. Name the discovery that would change the verdict — a missing original, a contradicting record — so acceptance is provisional, not permanent.
Tuning parameters¶
- Question-set depth — a six-question screen or a full external-and-internal criticism. Deeper interrogation catches forgeries and hidden purpose but is slow and demands expertise.
- Acceptance bar — how strong the provenance answers must be before a claim is admitted. A high bar protects against interested sources but discards thin-but-genuine evidence.
- Verdict vocabulary — plain accept/caveat/reject, or a graded label (authentic-but-partial, derivative, unverifiable). Richer vocabulary carries more meaning but demands more judgment.
- Re-open sensitivity — how readily a new discovery reopens a settled verdict. Loose settings keep sources honest; tight ones avoid endless re-litigation of low-stakes material.
When it helps, and when it misleads¶
Its strength is that it stops a source's rhetoric from substituting for its credentials: the authenticity and purpose questions catch the forged, the self-serving, and the mistransmitted before they enter the record. It is the historian's classic discipline — Quellenkritik, the external-and-internal source criticism systematized in nineteenth-century historiography[1] — and it travels directly to intelligence vetting, archival work, and document-based journalism.
Its failure mode is that a source can pass every provenance question and still be wrong, and can fail them yet still contain truth — authenticity is not accuracy. Its classic misuse is provenance theater: filling in authorship and date fields without letting the answers actually change the verdict, so the ritual is performed but the claim sails through unweighted. It is also a single-source method by design, so it can certify a source as sound while missing that it is the only source, or one of many copies. The discipline that guards it is to require every provenance finding to move the confidence label, and to pass genuinely sound-but-lonely sources onward for the corroboration and comparison this method deliberately does not perform.
How it implements the components¶
provenance_record— the question set assembles the source's origin, authorship, transmission, and authenticity into an explicit record.confidence_label— the protocol ends in a reasoned accept / caveat / reject verdict with its grounds attached, not a naked score.source_update_trigger— each verdict carries a named re-open condition, so acceptance stays provisional and revisable when new evidence lands.
It examines one source in isolation, so it does not trace independence across a citation network or map inherited framing (corroboration_check, interpretive_layer_map — Citation Lineage Review, its nearest twin, which works on relationships between many sources); and it screens for proximity and standpoint only as gating questions — it does not build the systematic event_proximity and perspective_bias_profile artifacts or weigh accounts against each other (reliability_weighting_rule), which are Witness / Source Comparison.
Related¶
- Instantiates: Source Provenance Triangulation — supplies the single-source admissions gate and reasoned confidence verdict the rest of the triangulation builds on.
- Sibling mechanisms: Audit Trail Review · Citation Lineage Review · Witness / Source Comparison · Conflicting Source Table · Triangulation Matrix · Chain-of-Custody Record · Confidence Annotation Rubric
Editorial Notes¶
Form Classification¶
Form family: Assessment, Review & Assurance
Rationale: Source Criticism Protocol operates as a bounded evaluation of existing evidence or work that produces a finding or disposition because it uses structured questions about authorship, purpose, audience, context, proximity, and transmission to evaluate a source before accepting its claims.
Independent corroboration: The frozen evidence defines Source Criticism Protocol as 'Uses structured questions about authorship, purpose, audience, context, proximity, and transmission to evaluate a source before accepting its claims', so its operative form is Assessment, Review & Assurance.
Nearest alternative: Record, Log & Register — Source Criticism Protocol includes features of a persistent ledger, log, register, or case record that preserves history and traceability, but its defining operation is a bounded evaluation of existing evidence or work that produces a finding or disposition.
Review outcome: Independent reviewer agreement; medium confidence.
Origin Attribution¶
Primary origin: History & Historiography
Origin pattern: Single lineage
Present-day reach: Universal
Rationale: Questioning authorship, purpose, audience, context, proximity, and transmission is the canonical historical method of source criticism.
Related originating lineages:
- Communication & Media Studies — Journalistic verification evaluates source access, motive, and corroboration.
- Criminology & Forensic Studies — Chain and context of evidence affect admissibility and weight.
- Library & Information Science — Provenance and document history support source evaluation.
- Organizational & Management Science — Organizational design, management, and operational governance supplies a parallel or contributing lineage for the mechanism's defining operation: uses structured questions about authorship, purpose, audience, context, proximity, and transmission to evaluate a source before accepting its claims.
Review resolution: The blind reviewers agree that history_historiography is the primary origin and differ only on alternate origin disagreement, domain reach disagreement. I preserve every independently explained alternate from both records rather than imposing a numeric cap. I retain single_lineage because the combined evidence shows one traceable formative lineage. The broader reach of universal records portability separately from historical provenance; encyclopedia_synthesis=false preserves the affirmative synthesis judgment where either reviewer identified one.
Review outcome: Reconciled after independent review; high confidence.
References¶
[1] Langlois, C.-V., & Seignobos, C. Introduction aux études historiques. Librairie Hachette (1898). Systematizes historical method into external and internal criticism for evaluating documents and constructing historical knowledge. registry ↩