Provenance
The record of where something came from. In DH, the chain of custody of a source; in computing, which model produced which output.
Last updated
In humanities practice, provenance tracks the chain of custody of a manuscript, edition, or archive. In a computational context, provenance tracks which model, which version, and which parameters produced each output. Both senses apply here, and they reinforce each other.
Why it matters for your research. A digital passage without source-document provenance is uncited; a digital passage without engine provenance cannot be reproduced or criticised. When you publish a claim backed by an analysis, the provenance chain is the audit trail that makes the claim defensible.
In Archēglyph. Provenance is load-bearing. Every extracted block shows the engine that produced it; every versioned snapshot is immutable. See Transparency is a feature and What a good provenance badge looks like.
-
Your footnote
¹ An English daily, 14 August 1896, p. 5, col. 2.
quotes
-
The passage
“The late setting-in of the monsoon has occasioned grave anxiety …”
found at
-
Its place on the page
Page 5, part 4 — outlined on the page image, one click away.
cut from
-
The scan you uploaded
Kept unaltered, with a digital fingerprint that shows it has not changed since.
Where a machine writes, it signs its name
- What read the page is named on every transcription.
- What romanised or translated it is named on every line.
- What titled a theme is named on the theme.
None of it replaces the source. All of it sits beside it.
Not to be confused with. “Citation” names the source; provenance names the process that produced the digital object from the source. Both matter.