Historical documents are original documents that contain important historical information about a person, place, or event and can thus serve as primary sources as important ingredients of the historical methodology.
Significant historical documents can be deeds, laws, accounts of battles (often given by the victors or persons sharing their viewpoint), or the exploits of the powerful. Though these documents are of historical interest, they do not detail the daily lives of ordinary people, or the way society functioned. Anthropologists, historians and archeologists generally are more interested in documents that describe the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, indicating what they ate, their interaction with other members of their households and social groups, and their states of mind. It is this information that allows them to try to understand and describe the way society was functioning at any particular time in history. Greek ostraka provide good examples of historical documents from "among the common people".
Many documents that are produced today, such as personal letters, pictures, contracts, newspapers, and medical records, would be considered valuable historical documents in the future. However most of these will be lost in the future since they are either printed on ordinary paper which has a limited lifespan, or even stored in digital formats, then lost track over time.
Some companies and government entities are attempting to increase the number of documents that will survive the passage of time, by taking into account the preservation issues, and either printing documents in a manner that would increase the likelihood of them surviving indefinitely, or placing selected documents in time capsules or other special storage environments.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
A partir d'analyse de sources historiques et d'exercices d'écriture, ce cours propose de comprendre comment les choix technologiques, politiques et économiques du passé ont forgé la «question écologiq
Ce cours s'inscrit dans une offre de cours interdisciplinaires et collaboratifs ouverts aux étudiant·e·s de l'UNIL et de l'EPFL.
Il s'oriente principalement vers la connaissance de l'histoire de Lausa
Exploration du concept d'architecture merveilleuse au travers d'un travail de recherche sur une série d'exemples historiques. Transposition des acquis de la recherche dans une base de projet qui se p
Archival science, or archival studies, is the study and theory of building and curating archives, which are collections of documents, recordings and data storage devices. To build and curate an archive, one must acquire and evaluate recorded materials, and be able to access them later. To this end, archival science seeks to improve methods for appraising, storing, preserving, and cataloging recorded materials. An archival record preserves data that is not intended to change.
History (derived ) is the systematic study and documentation of the human past. The period of events before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of these events. Historians seek knowledge of the past using historical sources such as written documents, oral accounts, art and material artifacts, and ecological markers.
An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of that person or organization. Professional archivists and historians generally understand archives to be records that have been naturally and necessarily generated as a product of regular legal, commercial, administrative, or social activities.
Explores Marc Antoine Laugier's impact on Greco Gothic architecture, emphasizing the rejection of excessive ornamentation and the quest for universal principles.
This dissertation aims to demonstrate the development, meaning and significance of cultural infrastructure in the cities of Skopje, Belgrade and Sarajevo (1945-1991). In the historic context, culture became the fundamental critical tool with which to yield ...
If automatic document processing techniques have achieved a certain maturity for present time documents, the transformation of hand-written documents into well-represented, structured and connected data which can satisfactorily be used for historical study ...
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group2023
, , ,
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Napoleonic administration introduced a new standardised description system to give an objective account of the form and functions of the city of Venice. The cadastre, deployed on a European scale, was offering for ...