I totally forgot to hit "Reply" to this. Apologies! > Are you an historian? I published some work in undergrad but stopped afterward (much to the chagrin of m

I totally forgot to hit "Reply" to this. Apologies! > Are you an historian? I published some work in undergrad but stopped afterward (much to the chagrin of my professors.) I still keep up with historian circles, folks who either are academic historians or participate in the general community. > I know people will often use a digital scan, a reliable transcription, etc., and not necessarily the original - but then isn't that based on the assumption that it's a reliable representation of the original? Veracity of a source is a very, very complicated topic in historical research. Sometimes documents are authoritative. For example, the American Declaration of Independence is a well-preserved document that has been commented on millions of times at this point and has many, many copies. We can be very sure that the Declaration of Independence exists and says what it says. This isn't the case for a lot of historical documents. Until use of the printing press became widespread in a culture, distributing copies of documents was laborious. Usually a scribe would have to read the original and copy it. Writing media from this time (paper, parchment, tablets, etc) were also usually expensive. Each document was usually considered an individual work of art and so even if a scribe was copying a document, we had no idea whether the scribe editorialized the work, forgot to copy some of the work, or otherwise modified its original intent. That means that while we may find a document with a title in our modern era, we don't know if that document was the authoritative original or even if the contemporary readers actually consumed the version of the document we have in our possession or a different edition. Then there's the question of veracity of the claims of the document itself. A lot of surveys and statistics from historical writings are false. There are usually numerous cultural and political reasons for this (maybe the culture didn't count women as people, maybe the culture only counted landholders, maybe the author didn't see a certain tribe in the area as people to be counted, etc.) and so even when we're reasonably confident of when a document was authored and by whom it's hard to be certain of the veracity of its claims.