The Scattered Source Apparatus
SOURCE APPARATUS
Every Source in Its Own Voice, With Its Provenance Shown — So the Reader Can Re-Weigh the Scale
The Once-silenced now have a voice, and their story spans multiple generations. This research tells their perspective, the people of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and their lived experiences.
On Method: How Sources Are Presented Here
This apparatus lists every source used in the series. Rather than dividing them into 'trusted' and 'untrusted' — a verdict that would smuggle in exactly the victor's-perspective bias the series exists to question — each source is shown along transparent, checkable dimensions, so the reader can weigh it independently:
• Kind — what type of source it is: primary archival record, period eyewitness account, antiquarian synthesis, modern scholarship, ethnographic record, or oral tradition.
• Proximity — how close in time and place the source is to the events it describes.
• Corroboration — whether it is independently confirmed by other sources or stands alone.
• Method note — where a source's own reasoning method (e.g. sound-resemblance philology) affects how much weight its specific claims can bear.
The reader is free to draw the conclusion. The purpose of showing provenance is not to hand down a verdict but to arm the reader to re-weigh a historical scale that, as the series argues throughout, was tilted at its origin by who kept the records.