sourceswritten

Sourceswritten is a term used in information science and humanities to denote the corpus of written sources that inform research tasks. It encompasses books, manuscripts, articles, letters, reports, and other textual documents, whether in print or digital form. The category excludes non-textual media such as audio, video, and artifacts unless those artifacts include a written component.

The term is often used to contrast with sourcesspoken (oral testimony and recordings) and sourcesvisual (maps, images, and other non-text media). It can also function within metadata schemas to indicate the medium of a source, aiding search, preservation, and provenance tracking.

In practice, categorizing sourceswritten supports bibliographic work, citation practices, and digital preservation. Researchers may annotate, transcribe, or translate sourceswritten; digitization projects typically prioritize written materials for long-term accessibility.

Limitations include biases inherent in written records, unequal access to textual material across cultures and periods, and the risk of overemphasizing written over other forms of knowledge. Critics argue that overreliance on sourceswritten can marginalize oral histories and non-textual data.

See also: primary source, secondary source, provenance, metadata, digital preservation.