History is the recorded accounts or past events that one can investigate, interpret, and argue. Favoritisms and biases are often made about the data, even though they may not be intentional. Most biases are developed from perspectives on life and of the world.
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For any given event in history, there is much information and raw data available. Sifting through this multitude of information can be a very difficult task. Seeing past biases and trying to gather credible information is one of the most difficult tasks of historiography. A primary document is usually more credible than a secondary one; a secondary more so than a tertiary. Aside from different perceptions, there is the concept of what information is deemed important. Everyone has a different interpretation of importance, and due to the nature of historical documents, it would be impossible to describe every last detail. Historical documents are only written from the author's point of view, and thus only contain information the author actually knows. With historical documents, we are stranded behind the shroud of biases, and limited and unimportant information, as well as an incomplete picture formed by limited knowledge. Historical documents can never give us a complete understanding of history and culture.
To interpret a document is to select the information that is important and necessary. Between many documents, this task can be very difficult, because similar information is not always congruent; chronologies can become augmented over time. This provides the reader with the difficult task of finding out what really happened in history. How does the reader deem information credible or not? This selective process created a new interpretation and a new historical document, once again perpetuating the cycle of historiography.
In order to create a historical document that is as accurate and credible as possible, an author would need to write every piece of information down, and even then, it would be impossible to achieve perfection.
