Triangulating Oral, Documentary and Physical Evidence
Launch library · evergreen read
Three broad kinds of evidence tend to recur across most serious research projects: what people say in their own words, what documents formally record, and what physical objects or places can independently confirm, and each of the three has its own distinct failure modes worth understanding on its own terms.
Triangulation means actively seeking all three where they genuinely exist, rather than settling for whichever kind happens to be easiest to obtain within a given deadline, since a claim resting on all three independently is considerably harder to challenge later than one resting on any single type of evidence alone.
Where only one kind of evidence is actually available, the honest response is not to abandon the claim outright but to state its basis plainly on the page, letting the reader understand exactly how much genuine weight the surrounding argument is able to bear on its own merits and nothing more.