How PLOT works · Sourcing protocol · Written accounts
We read what people wrote, and say exactly what it can tell us.
For a place's past, PLOT looks for what naturalists, settlers, surveyors and newspapers wrote about its land, shore, plants and animals. It asks the same six questions of every place, searches in a declared order, stops by a written rule, and keeps every passage as the writer's own words with where they were published. A passage is context and a reason to look again, never a measurement.
In 30 seconds
Four promises about how we look
Questions first
Six questions for every place: how it looked, what lived there, how many, how far the swamps and shores reached, what people changed, and what happened.
The writer's words, kept
Every passage is stored as the writer wrote it, with the page it came from. What it asserts and what it may mean today are separate, and a person checks both.
Silence is not absence
No passage can show that something was missing. Where PLOT hasn't looked, or looked and found nothing, the timeline says which.