Documenting Your Work: A Beginner’s Guide to Research & Documentation
The words ‘research’ and ‘documentation’ frighten a surprising number of otherwise confident people. They shouldn’t. The whole idea is simple: research is learning about your craft, and documentation is explaining what you learned and what you did. If you love your craft enough to make something in it, you already have everything you need to begin. This guide demystifies the process and shows just how little effort it takes to document well.
The Four Questions
Before you write a word, a maker’s documentation really only needs to answer four honest questions. Keep these on a card by your workbench:
- Did I do enough research before I started my project?
- Is my documentation brief — or at least does it have a short, clear cover-page summary?
- Does it educate a reader who knows next to nothing about my subject?
- Do I acknowledge my departures from historical practice, to show I know what would have been correct?
If you can answer those four, you have documented your work. Everything below is just detail.
Levels of Effort
Documentation is not all-or-nothing. It runs along a ladder, and even the bottom rung is perfectly respectable.
Minimal, but perfectly acceptable
What works: a brief spoken explanation of your period source and your presentation choices — what you did, what you didn’t, and why (time, materials, budget). Even this modest level earns real respect, because it shows you know what you were doing. What doesn’t work: no explanation at all, or ‘everybody knows that…’ with no source.
Pretty easy
What works: photocopies from your source book(s) with the relevant passages highlighted, a citation, your name and the date, stapled together, with enough copies for anyone judging. What doesn’t work: pages from unidentified books, nothing highlighted, too few copies, no name (documentation with no name attached tends to get lost).
Some effort
What works: copies from your sources with the applicable parts highlighted and brief notes in the margin explaining how those parts support your choices. Complete sentences are not required — a phrase is fine. What doesn’t work: highlighting obscure passages that don’t actually support (or even contradict) your choices, or citing sources that show a thing existed but not that your version is period.
Citing Your Sources
A citation is just a signpost that lets a reader find what you found. Note the author, the title, and the page. Primary sources — the actual objects, images, and texts from the period — are the strongest evidence; good secondary scholarship that interprets them is the next best. Digitized collections such as the Met and the British Library’s digitized manuscripts make first-rate primary sources freely available.
Primary Sources vs. Secondary Sources
One distinction is worth learning early, because it does more than anything to strengthen documentation. A primary source is evidence from the period itself: a surviving garment in a museum, a painting or manuscript illustration, an archaeological find, a period cookbook or treatise. A secondary source is a modern author interpreting those primary sources — a book, an article, a well-researched website. Both are useful, but they answer different questions. A secondary source is a wonderful place to start and to find your bearings; a primary source is what ultimately proves that your choice is historically grounded. The strongest documentation cites a primary source and, where helpful, a secondary source that helps interpret it. When a primary source is out of reach, a reputable secondary source that itself cites primaries is the next best thing.
Why Bother?
You can lead a long, happy, productive life in this hobby without ever writing a sentence of documentation — many people do. But documentation is a gift. It teaches the next person, it preserves what you figured out, and it turns a beautiful object into a beautiful object plus a small piece of shared scholarship. Part of the duty of anyone who has learned something is to teach it, and documentation is simply teaching on paper. Start with the Four Questions, keep it brief, cite one good source, and you will already be doing it better than you feared.