Evaluation of Historical Document Quality: An Interdisciplinary Method (Published)
Historical sources are more and more used in studies relating on extreme events, natural hazards, or environmental sciences. When dealing with these kinds of documents, it is very important to certify the reliability of the historical sources and the data they contain. The consequences of errors of interpretation, unidentified inconsistencies, misleading information on the historical sources and data can be very important for the population, the environmental or town planning, engineering, the economy, industries, insurance companies, etc. This paper aims to present and discuss an innovative method to assess the quality of historical documents: The Historical Document Quality Method (HDQM). This study has required an interdisciplinary work between historians, engineers and mathematicians. The HDQM works in three steps: 1) historical critical analysis, 2) decision tree and evaluation of four criteria, 3) assigning a final score using expert systems. It is a user-friendly, easy-learning, operational and functional method. The results obtained are very consistent as the models developed to assign a final score to historical documents have all a coefficient of determination close to 1.
Keywords: Expert System, Reliability, document quality, extreme events, historical document, methodology