I am a historian by training, and this is a historian’s project. My training was in late medieval history, where the sources survive in fragments, are often written in old scripts and handwriting that take real effort to learn to read, and sit in archives arranged for someone else’s purposes. What that leaves you with is less a set of rules than habits and particular types of expertise: go to the documents, ask who made them and for what, notice what is not there, and do not claim more than the record will carry. That is not a recipe for dry antiquarianism. History is the work of building accounts and narratives out of records: making sense of what happened, why it matters, and how the pieces fit together. But the account is always answerable to the records, and bounded by what they can bear. I have also spent much of my working life in records and information management, in government and elsewhere. That taught me the other side of the same thing: how records are made, kept, lost and found, and how much depends on the care that is taken.
There is no view from nowhere here, and I do not pretend otherwise. I came to this through something that happened next door. When I first wrote to the bodies responsible, I assumed they knew more than I did and that the water had somehow slipped their attention. What is on this site is what I went and found afterwards, one particular at a time. I did not start from a thesis; whatever pattern there is came out of the documents. I do not know the whole record, but I know a lot of it, I know where the gaps are, and I know how to look, how to read what I find, and how to set it in context. That is what I can contribute.
In practice in the work here, claims are tied to documents: a report, a bylaw, a set of minutes, a record released under freedom of information. Where I can, I host my own copy and link to it, so a reader can see the page I am reading. Over time that is also becoming an archive of documentary sources in its own right, gathered in one place, which may be useful to others well beyond anything I write about them. I write about what things did, not about why people did them, and I do not assert motive. Facts matter more than narrative neatness, so where the record is thin or contradicts itself, I say so rather than smooth it over.
Once a post is published, I do not revise it, apart from very minor fixes such as a typo. Any substantive update is either clearly marked as an update, or, more likely, becomes the subject of a new post. Where something here is wrong, it is corrected, and the correction is logged on the corrections page with the date and what changed. The same page carries the other kind of change: records that arrive later and complicate or contradict what a post says. In that case the post stands as written, and the log says what has since come to light and where to read it. The short reference briefs on the basics page are the exception: they are there to be current, so they are updated in place and carry the date they were last checked.
This is a blog, not an academic paper, and some choices are made for the medium. Sources sit in the text as links rather than in footnotes or a bibliography. When I cite a web page I often link to an archived copy, so that a reader sees the page as it stood on the day I wrote, rather than whatever it says now. I do not stop each time to explain the capture, its date or what has changed since. Choices like that are deliberate, and where they matter I account for them elsewhere on the site rather than in the flow of a post.