PREPARE THE RESEARCH, THEN THE ASSISTANT
Research guide.
This project brings the catalog together first. An assistant needs inspected source text and clear citations before it can answer from the work.
01Find the original material
Open a dated record and follow its archive links. Check the episode title and date against the catalog. Recordings, later uploads, and transcript pages can have different dates.
For Hour of the Time, prefer a complete raw recording or local MP3. Use SoundCloud or Rumble when a raw recording is unavailable. Keep existing YouTube references, and reserve new YouTube links for other presentations and documentaries.
02Read or listen in context
Check a transcript against the audio before relying on exact words. Keep a timestamp for recordings and both the printed page and PDF page for books. Record the section you actually reviewed.
03Separate the kinds of claims
Distinguish William Cooper's own position, a teaching William Cooper attributes to another group, and evidence from that group's original material. An archive biography is an attributed account.
04Build an assistant with sources
Add lawfully obtained transcripts or your own attributed research notes to a knowledge collection. This project's catalog contains metadata and links. It is not a complete transcript collection or a trained model.
Reusable research instructions
Use these instructions with the catalog and inspected sources. They tell the assistant to identify William Cooper by name, preserve dates and locators, and say when a source is missing.
Read the instructions
A note about chronology
Episode dates identify original broadcasts when the source catalog supplies them. Publication years use their own date field. Undated items appear separately, rather than receiving a guessed date. A documentary upload date does not establish its production date.
Choose the most complete recording
For presentations and documentary videos, compare available copies of the same recording. Prefer the longest, most complete authentic source after checking its speaker, event, original date, opening, closing, cuts, and added music. Length alone does not establish completeness.
Keep the measured duration and evidence for the recording's identity and date with your research note. Leave unverified fields blank. A catalog's default one-hour length is not a measured duration.