Papers Past
Digitised New Zealand and Pacific newspapers, magazines/journals, letters/diaries, parliamentary papers and books.
Open Papers Past →MODULE 3 · FINDING EVIDENCE · 45–70 MINUTES
Finding evidence: move upstream
Strong research rarely begins with the perfect source. It begins with a question, then uses broad tools to discover the vocabulary, institutions, people, dates and citations that lead toward stronger evidence.
Question→Vocabulary→Exploratory search→Repository / scholarship→Citations→Original evidence
Search is navigation
A search result is not automatically evidence. Neither is a snippet, AI answer or overview page. These can be excellent navigation tools if they help you reach inspectable evidence.
The senior habit is to ask: Where can I move upstream from here?
Need one guided run before you work independently?
Use the 1893 Women’s Suffrage Guided Source Hunt. It walks through a real Aotearoa chain from orientation material to the petition, contemporary newspapers and later interpretation, then asks you to match claims to the sources capable of carrying them.
Complete it if the practical challenge below feels too open. Skip it if you can already demonstrate the same process on your own topic.
Aotearoa research gateways
DigitalNZ
A discovery service linking digital material from many New Zealand organisations. Treat the original contributing institution as part of the provenance chain.
Open DigitalNZ →Archives New Zealand
Government records and research guidance. Useful when your question involves state institutions, policy, administration or official records.
Open Archives NZ →National Library / Turnbull
Published and unpublished collections, manuscripts, images, audio, books, journals and collection catalogues.
Open National Library →Stats NZ
Official statistical data and methodological information. Always inspect definitions, collection methods and time periods before making comparisons.
Open Stats NZ →Waitangi Tribunal
Reports and inquiry documents that can include findings, evidence, submissions and historical material. Distinguish Tribunal findings from the many types of evidence contained within an inquiry record.
Open Tribunal reports →Search strategy: widen, then narrow
- Write the question in ordinary language.
- Extract search concepts: people, place, event, institution, date range, policy, Māori/Pacific names, older terminology.
- Generate variants: historical spellings, official names, abbreviations, Māori and English terms where appropriate.
- Search broadly once. Use the first pass to discover vocabulary and likely institutions, not to collect random quotations.
- Move to a repository or scholarly source.
- Chase citations. When a scholar makes a load-bearing claim, inspect what they cite.
- Record provenance as you go. Do not wait until the end to reconstruct where everything came from.
Practical challenge: find three layers
Choose a topic relevant to a senior Social Sciences course. Examples might involve protest, migration, housing, environmental change, government policy, iwi history, economic change or social movements.
- Find one orientation source that teaches you useful vocabulary or dates.
- Use it to find one secondary scholarly or institutional interpretation.
- Use that to locate at least one primary source or dataset.
For each step, write what changed in your understanding and what new search term or citation allowed you to move upstream.
AI can help here — with a boundary
Useful requests include:
- “What search terms might historians use for this issue?”
- “What institutions in Aotearoa might hold records about this?”
- “Give me competing interpretations I should investigate, but do not present them as verified until I check sources.”
- “Turn my broad question into narrower research questions.”
Then verify any named source, scholar, quotation, statistic or document before treating it as real.
Year 13 extension: citation genealogy
Take one repeated claim from three secondary sources. Follow each citation backwards. Do all three lead to genuinely independent evidence, or do they eventually converge on one earlier source? Draw the citation genealogy.
Extension question: when does repeated citation create confidence, and when does it merely create an illusion of consensus?
Mastery check
You are ready to continue when you can show one real path from broad orientation to a stronger upstream source and explain why each step improved — or complicated — the evidence available to you.