Source Analysis

What The Tool Does

Every text that uses sources transforms them: by selecting, excerpting, reordering, paraphrasing, combining, and sometimes silently altering. Source Analysis examines that transformation. Given a text and its known or suspected sources, the tool identifies what has been taken from each source, what has been omitted, how the borrowings have been arranged, and what editorial or interpretive work the compiler has performed — whether openly acknowledged or not.

The analysis is useful at several scales. On a single chapter, it reveals how a historian or editor has constructed their argument from underlying materials. On a whole work, it exposes the compilatory architecture that shapes the reader's view of the subject. On a genre — mediaeval chronicles, early modern histories, modern textbooks — it reveals the characteristic habits of the tradition and the distortions those habits introduce.

Where The Method Comes From

Source analysis as a scholarly discipline is the *Quellenforschung* or source-research of nineteenth-century German historiography, institutionalised by Leopold von Ranke and his successors in the seminar method at Berlin. Ranke's insistence on the critical evaluation of sources — what he meant by *wie es eigentlich gewesen* — required, as a preliminary, the systematic analysis of how earlier historians had used their sources, so that the modern historian could work back to the primary evidence rather than inheriting its distortions.

Biblical source criticism, developed in the same period, pushed the method further. Julius Wellhausen's *Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels* (1878) argued that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were composed by the interweaving of four distinct earlier sources (the JEDP hypothesis), and produced detailed analyses of how the final editor had combined and altered them. The same methods have since been applied to the Synoptic Gospels, the Qur'anic hadith tradition, medieval chronicles, and a wide range of compiled genres. The tool draws on this long tradition.

What It Can And Cannot Do

The tool analyses source-use in texts where the sources are known or can be reasonably reconstructed. It can identify direct borrowings, paraphrases, silent combinations, characteristic omissions, and deliberate alterations. It works across historiographical, philosophical, theological, legal, and literary compilations.

It cannot identify sources that are completely lost. If a compiler drew on a work no longer extant, the tool can sometimes infer its existence and shape from internal evidence, but the reconstruction is speculative and reported as such. The tool is also careful about the direction of dependency: when two surviving texts share material, deciding which borrowed from which, or whether both drew on a common third source, often requires evidence the tool alone does not possess.