WELCOME TO: WORKING WITH PRIMARY SOURCES
INTRODUCTION
During your time at university you will need to engage with a wide range of ideas, approaches and perspectives from your subject area. This will involve looking at secondary, critical perspectives, but also engaging directly with the materials that inform these perspectives.
WHAT ARE PRIMARY SOURCES?
This useful video from Eastern Arizona College explains the differences between Primary and Secondary sources and why we might use both at University. This is also available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=170&v=pmno-Yfetd8&feature=emb_logo
HOWEVER ...
Sometimes sources are not defined as 'primary' or 'seondary' by their nature, but rather by how we use them.
For instance, a speech might be a secondary source if used as someone's discussion of an event that had happened, but you could do a linguistic analysis of that speech that would then mean that it was treated as a primary source. Or a newspaper article about historic flood events might be considered a secondary source for a historical environmental study of flooding (indicating dates of flood events, as hydrological records often only extend over a few decades), or it could be primary source for a project studying media discourses of flooding
In Geography, the terms 'primary' and 'secondary' are used in a slightly different way in relation to defining sources. Within geography, we distinguish between:
Primary data: data gathered specifically for the research project
Secondary data: data gathered by someone else, for a different purpose, that may be relevant to your project
To illustrate: the video above identified 'research data' (with a picture of a graph) as a primary source, and secondary sources as things that interpret, critique or analysed it. By these definitions, census data (for example) would be a primary source.
But with the definitions from Geography, census data would be a secondary data source as it has not been gathered specifically for your research project.
HOW TO USE THIS SITE
LOOK AT THE KINDS OF RESOURCES YOU'LL USE
Watch the videos from your subject areas on the 'Using Primary Sources in Your Subject Area' page to find out more about the kinds of primary sources you'll use on your programme. Then you can explore the pages for those source types to find out more.
FIND EXTRA INFORMATION AND RESOURCES FOR EACHÂ SOURCE TYPE
We will provide training on working with primary sources of different types, but you'll be able to go beyond this to continue your academic development with the sources here.
VIRTUAL VISIT
This site also contains our virtual visit to York Explore, to find out more about Primary Sources that relate to York.