Semester 2 Week 2: Archives in Context and as Context
An archive traditionally describes a location where public records or historical materials are stored and preserved by archivists. However, throughout time the word has been adopted by various groups, most notably by digital humanists, to mean a variety of things. Kame Theimer, in her article “Archives in Context and as Context” critically examines this phenomena so as to explain the significance of articulating and sharing the original vision of archives.
Immediately, Theimer sets out to outline the fundamental principles separating traditional archives from collections created by digital humanists. She highlights the “selection” activity emphasized by scholars in their definition of the term to be a major differentiating factor from the definition coined by archivists. I found myself better appreciating Theimer’s claim when I thought of this concept in more familiar terms of content creation by influencers. For instance, I personally would not consider the work of a daily vlogger to be that of an archive despite their role in essentially collecting “historical” content via camera footage and uploading it to a platform like YouTube for perpetual availability and accessibility.
Next, Theimer explains the manner with which materials are selected and managed by archivists. She addresses the principle of provenance which brought to mind the question of modern internet archivists who often deal with anonymously created digital objects. How then, are they able to authenticate items and prevent the intermingling of records of different sources? She then goes on to discuss the remaining two principles of original order and collective control.
It was in her discussion of the third principle where I funnily enough could understand a digital humanist’s justification for calling their work an archive due to their role in preserving the context of records, and examining them in order to produce additional value. For example, the Viral Text and the Open Door Archive projects are excellent examples of the way humanists’ add value to historical material that would perhaps be meaningless outside their original context. However, as Theimer would have explained, since the research material informing these projects are often “located in different physical repositories or collections, purposefully selected and arranged in order to support a scholarly goal”, they would not fit in perfectly to the formal definition of an archive.
In sum, Theimer supports the belief that neither definition of the term is right or wrong. She believes instead that by broadening the definition of archives that there is potential loss of appreciation for the unique role that archives play. I would argue that the very same digital humanists of whom she would prefer they call their work “digital collections” rather than “archives” are assisting her efforts in appreciating archives as they are traditionally known. This I believe is evidenced by their significant usage of these spaces in exploring different literary and historical ideas for various projects.
Nonetheless, I think that she did an excellent job in explaining how archivists go about performing their archival work which allowed me to appreciate my very own local archives which I unfortunately significantly underutilize. Hopefully, I will remember Theimer’s writings and the immense amount of work undertaken in preserving historical documents whenever I find myself discrediting the necessity of libraries and archives in this day and age.