Evidence evaluation

What is your success rate as a researcher? Does every effort advance your goals or bring you closer to resolving a specific research problem? Do you invest hours that generate no relevant information at all? Do record sets and databases never seem to yield the needed answers to your key questions about events and identities, associations, and relations? Or have you amassed great quantities of data that remind you of the Shakespearean line about “much sound and fury, signifying nothing”? ...

29 December 2014 EE's discussions of many materials—from artifacts to databases, from records to digital images, and even traditions—encourage us to consider the provenance of the material we use. Simply put, the term means "chain of custody" or "history of ownership." Judging the validity of information provided by a source requires us to ...