A worked project, start to finish
About this example
- The Riversdale Flats Drainage Scheme is entirely INVENTED. It is used so the whole process can be shown end to end without making claims about a real place, a real council, or real families.
- Your topic will be different. What transfers is the sequence, the decisions, and what gets written down at each stage.
- The same invented case is used in AS91435 and AS91437, so you can see one body of research answering three different questions — which is what your school will ask of you.
Week one — preliminary reading and the proposal
- What was done: read two secondary accounts of post-war land development, and searched the district's newspaper archive for the scheme's name.
- What was found: the scheme is mentioned in both accounts, briefly, and both describe it as uncontroversial. The newspaper archive shows six weeks of letters in 1955. The two do not fit together, and that mismatch is the research opportunity.
- The proposal, in outline:
- The topic: the scheme, 1954–1961, and its memorial, erected 1994.
- Why it is important, against the five significance criteria: it changed land use for a district; it displaced a settlement; its effects on the water table are still discussed; and it is commemorated, which is evidence of continuing significance.
- Why it is significant to New Zealanders: it occurred within New Zealand, which is the first of the three permitted relationships.
Week one, end — the focusing questions
- First drafts, written before the reading, and kept:
- What was the Riversdale Flats Drainage Scheme? — abandoned: a description, not a question.
- What was its impact? — abandoned: makes every source relevant, so nothing is selectable.
- The questions after the reading:
- Q1: Whose objections to the scheme were recorded between 1954 and 1961, and on what grounds were they set aside?
- Q2: Why was the memorial stone erected in 1994, and what does its wording emphasise?
- Why this pair: Q1 needs primary sources, Q2 needs secondary ones, and they divide the topic between the event and its commemoration.
Weeks two to four — gathering, with the log running
- What the log recorded, three lines a session:
- Looked for: submissions from objectors, county correspondence 1954–58. Found: nothing. Could not find: any written submission — either none were made or none were filed, and I cannot yet tell which.
- Looked for: the memorial's wording. Found: the 1994 booklet, and a photograph of the stone. Could not find: minutes of the committee that commissioned it.
- Looked for: names of objectors. Found: three families named in the 1994 booklet; the 1955 newspaper says only "several residents". Could not find: any contemporary source naming them.
- That third entry is the most valuable line in the whole log, and it took ten seconds to write. It records a contradiction between a contemporary source and a later one, in the direction nobody expects — the later source is more specific — and it will drive both an annotation and the evaluation.
Weeks four to five — annotating and organising
- Annotations written as each source was read, using the four-element form: what it is, what it gives me against which question, how it compares with another source, and what is wrong with it.
- Organised by question, not by source type:
- Under Q1: minute book, 1955 newspaper reports, the two secondary accounts, the thesis.
- Under Q2: the 1994 booklet, photographs of the stone, the 2019 article, the website page.
- Under both, with a note explaining the double placement: the 1994 booklet, which is a secondary source for the events and a primary source for the commemoration.
Week six — the evaluation
- Built entirely from the log. Nothing in it was reconstructed at the end.
- The strength and the weakness turned out to be the same feature — the minute book is complete and records decisions but not discussion.
- The finding was restated at the strength the evidence supports — the recorded ground for dismissal was cost — rather than abandoned.
- The null search became a finding with an unresolved question attached, which is stronger than resolving it without evidence.
Worked Example
Worked example
Note: the Riversdale Flats Drainage Scheme is an INVENTED case.
The single most productive moment in the whole project was a three-line log entry in week three. Here is what was done with it.
Answer:
Step 1 — notice that the contradiction runs the wrong way.
Normally the contemporary source is more specific and the later one more general. Here the reverse holds: a source written thirty-nine years afterwards names three families, and the source written at the time does not.
That is unexpected, and unexpected is where the analysis is.
Step 2 — generate the explanations, without choosing between them yet.
- The newspaper knew the names and chose not to print them — because they were not thought newsworthy, or because the paper carried the council's advertising and was disinclined to individualise opposition.
- The newspaper did not know them, because objectors spoke informally rather than at the meeting.
- The 1994 booklet's names are wrong or reconstructed, assembled from family memory forty years on.
- The 1994 booklet drew on a source that has not survived — the committee's own research.
Step 3 — turn it into an annotation on each source.
On the 1955 newspaper: names the councillors who spoke in favour but describes objectors as "several residents". Cross-reference: the 1994 booklet names three families. The contemporary source is the less specific, which suggests the omission was editorial rather than a lack of information — the paper knew who was in the room. This weakens the source for the first half of Q1 (whose objections) while leaving it strong for the second half (on what grounds).
On the 1994 booklet: names three families. Reliability: written thirty-nine years after the events, by a committee with a commemorative purpose, so the naming may be reconstructed. Uncorroborated by any contemporary source I have found. Useful as evidence of who was remembered as objecting, which is not the same as who objected.
Step 4 — note that Step 3 produced a distinction worth having.
Who objected and who was remembered as objecting are different questions. The sources cannot answer the first and can answer the second, and saying so is more useful than choosing one source over the other.
Step 5 — carry it into the evaluation.
My evidence cannot establish who objected. It can establish who the council and the paper recorded, and who the 1994 committee remembered. These diverge, and the divergence is itself a finding: the objectors were individualised in commemoration and anonymised in the contemporary record, which suggests that whose opposition counted as worth naming changed between 1955 and 1994.
Step 6 — see what that one log entry produced.
- Two critical annotations, both cross-referenced, both with reliability assessed by mechanism.
- A refinement of the focusing question, which is the line of inquiry changed clause.
- A weakness with its effect on a finding stated, which is the Excellence validity clause.
- A finding that neither source states, which is what research is for.