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Writing 340: Arts and Humanities: Types of Evidence

The Humanities: Literature, art, film, music, philosophy

Textual evidence such as passages of text or lines of a poem.

Details from an image, a film, or a work of art. Scholarly books and articles that interpret evidence.

Results of field research such as interviews, observations, or surveys. Scholarly articles that report findings from experiments.

Passages of a musical composition. Statistics from government agencies.

Critical essays that analyze original works.

Humanities/Social Sciences: History

Primary sources: photographs, letters, maps, chronicles, government documents.

Scholarly interpretations of primary sources: books and articles

Social Sciences: Sociology, political science, psychology, anthropology

Results of field research such as interviews, observations, or surveys.

Data from original experiments.

Statistics (gathered by governmental and other agencies).

Scholarly interpretations of data, statistics experiments and field research results (books and articles).

Physical Sciences: physics, chemistry, biology

Data from original experiments

Interpretations of data harvested in experiments presented in papers, articles, books.