25 Building the Full Field Guide
25.1 What the Current Modules Establish
The evidence map connects an intellectual question to the practical work of finding material. Literature as Evidence carries that logic into discovery, reading, comparison, and synthesis. Together, they show that one page pattern can support distinct tasks while keeping method separate from volatile products, giving AI bounded roles, and leaving a record another researcher can inspect.
The two modules share one architecture at different lengths. The evidence map runs seven stages and stops before analysis. The literature review runs six stages and includes reading, because synthesis is its product. Grouped by function, they align as follows.
| Function | Evidence map | Literature review |
|---|---|---|
| Frame | Frame the question | Define the review |
| Decompose | Decompose into concepts | Map concepts and vocabulary |
| Discover | Map source families; search iteratively | Discover through multiple routes |
| Evaluate | Evaluate evidence | Evaluate sources and claims |
| Read | Outside this module | Read, annotate, and compare |
| Close | Test coverage; produce the map | Synthesize, audit, and stop |
The evidence map devotes two stages to discovery where the review devotes one, because a collection project separates who could have recorded evidence from how to search for it. The review adds a reading stage because it must interpret what it finds.
The modules also reveal what remains outside the draft. They do not collect an interview, preserve a website, prepare a full archival corpus, or write the final empirical analysis. The synthesis chapter extends the literature workflow into open, living, and quantitative reviews. The bridge chapter on event databases introduces document extraction, dynamic coding, validation, and explicit causal updating. Historical Sources as Evidence adds the finer chain from archival witness to transcription, source-bound observation, historical claim, and downstream audit. Each still requires fuller treatment across source types and analytical traditions.
25.2 The Full Field Guide
The next module treats collection as evidence. It addresses documents, interviews, observations, images, audio, video, and web material. It connects capture to consent, metadata, storage, naming, backup, preservation, and chain of custody. A composite oral-history case will show where evidence co-produced with participants requires different decisions from retrieved documentary evidence.
A preparation module will extend the event-database and historical-sources chapters across OCR, translation, coding, memoing, temporal ordering, entity resolution, and other conversions of unstructured records into structured fields. The original project devoted substantial attention to this border between qualitative material and databases. We will reconstruct that contribution around transformations whose lineage remains visible.
An analysis module will resist a false division between qualitative and quantitative work. Researchers move between close reading, comparison, counting, visualization, and model-based inference. The relevant distinction concerns the claim and evidence, not the brand of software.
A communication module will cover manuscripts, presentations, public data, visual explanation, repositories, and long-term access. Sharing is not the final act after research. Decisions made during collection determine what can later be verified, reused, or protected.
25.3 A Hebrew Edition
English remains the canonical language during the pilot. A Hebrew edition should follow after the content model and navigation stabilize. Translation will require more than sentence substitution. Search terms, institutional examples, interfaces, and right-to-left design must be adapted. Stable page identifiers will keep the two editions connected without forcing them to change at the same pace.
25.4 An Invitation
This draft is an argument and a test. It argues that researchers need a visible structure between question, corpus, analysis, and claim. It tests whether two different modules can carry novices and experienced scholars through the same page pattern at different depths.
The next step is both editorial and empirical. We will test the current modules with readers, carry the municipal oral-history example through every stage, and build the Collection as Evidence module from the strongest legacy material.
The old project began with abundance. The revived project begins with limits, artifacts, and reviewable decisions. This is progress.