Historiography

This is the discipline of studying history. It doesn’t refer to the actual study of history, but rather to the practice, process, and tools that we use to study history.

Wikipedia makes an interesting point:

The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic by using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches.

So, the history of something is its…well, history. The historiography of something, is the history of how we studied that history.

Why I Looked It Up

I have an idea for some “timeline software,” which would be a way to model and visually present timelines. I asked on the History Stack Exchange about how histories are studied:

Maybe another way of asking: how do historical researchers organize their notes? If you’re researching and documenting the history of…well, anything, are there systems designed to keep track of “the timeline”?

One of the answers to that question introduced me to the concept of historiography.