Digital Historiography and the Archives

Katharina Hering, Michael J. Kramer, Joshua Sternfeld and Kate Theimer

The following pieces by Joshua Sternfeld, Katharina Hering, Kate Theimer, and Michael Kramer are based on our session at the American Historical Association (AHA) meeting in 2014, “Digital Historiography and the Archives,” and the series of blog posts based on our presentations that we posted on Michael Kramer’s blog, Issues in Digital History, and cross-posted on AHA Today.¹ We are thrilled that JDH invited us to submit our blog posts for publication. We had conceptualized the session as an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion with short presentations by each panelist, followed by a rich and multifaceted discussion with the audience.

Expanding upon this format and our engaged in-person discussion, we had hoped that the series of linked blog posts would serve as a virtual, extended roundtable. Because it exists in the liminal, intermediary space between traditional conference session and formal publication, we imagined it as an experiment in new forms of “open source” scholarly communication. In sharing our work in provisional form, we hoped to encourage readers to continue this discussion on the blog. While we are publishing the discussion papers in JDH in a more traditional format, the original idea behind the roundtable remains unchanged, and the blog continues to offer a space for posting criticisms, comments, ideas, and reflections.

Introduction

The preservation, analysis, and representation of digital information in digital collections, archives, and other media poses complex, challenging, and often confusing issues for historical researchers, archivists, digital humanists, and librarians alike. Whether we even call these digital materials “archive” is at stake. We hoped to address some of these issues in the session and subsequent blog posts, while also discussing some of the elements of a framework or vocabulary that can support a critical appraisal of digital information. In his 2011 article in The American Archivist, panelist Joshua Sternfeld introduced such a framework called digital historiography, which he defined as the “critical, interdisciplinary study of the interaction of digital technology with historical practice.”  The AHA panel was originally organized, in part, as a response to that work.

All participants in the panel emphasized how archival theory and practice need to be an integral element of such a critical framework, along with evolving historiographical and professional practices. The digital medium has challenged historians to expand their knowledge about archives, and understand their function in generating scholarship and knowledge. But what might be the key theoretical and methodological questions surrounding the intersection of digital archives or digital collections and historical practice? What materials do archives collect and preserve, and why? Which materials are selected, and which are excluded? What are the driving forces and principles guiding the contextual information about collections provided by archives? Which political, social, economic, and cultural power relationships now structure the archives? How do we cope with the sudden, and at times unexplained, disappearance of collections in digital archives (portions of American Memory being a prominent example, as one audience member suggested)? How important is contextualization of collections in the digital environment? How can archival metadata be better situated in place and in time? These are questions that archivists and historians might come together to confront in critical and productive ways.

Fortunately, not only has the digital medium unleashed a heightened awareness of established archival principles and historical practice, it has also introduced new lines of theoretical inquiry. Historians and archivists are beginning to work with sources of varying scope, format, and provenance, thereby challenging both fields to reconsider the limits of historical inquiry, the contextualizing properties of metadata, the design of access systems, and the engagement of new audiences. In short, trends in digital scholarship and practices have contested our collective conception of “the archive” as well as the role of the twenty-first-century historian.

What became evident from the session was that historians must collaborate with information professionals, including archivists, to create critical contextual information for sources, reference resources, and repositories as well as new kinds of scholarly work that harnesses the power and registers the challenges of the digital archive, while serving a diverse community of users composed of researchers, educators, information professionals, students, artists, policymakers, and members of the public as a whole. The question is how? What areas of research should be explored and what methodologies, theories and practical models are already under development?

We hope that sharing materials from the roundtable on the blog and now in JDH, even in provisional form, will continue to provide a catalyst for sustained discussion.

Originally published by Katharina Hering, Michael J. Kramer, Joshua Sternfeld, and Kate Theimer on January 21, 2014.  Revised for Journal of Digital Humanities in August 2014.

About Michael J. Kramer

Michael J. Kramer is an editor in the Design, Publishing, and New Media Department at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and holds a visiting assistant professorship at Northwestern University, where he teaches history, American studies, digital humanities, and civic engagement. His book, The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture was published by Oxford University Press in 2013, and he has written about history, art, culture, and politics for numerous publications. He is the co-founder of theNorthwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory and is currently developing a multimedia project about the Berkeley Folk Music Festival (1958-1970) and the history of technology and culture in the US folk revival. Additionally, he is involved with the Chicago Dance History Project, a large-scale oral history and archival digital documentation of dance in the Chicago region, and he is the dramaturg for The Seldoms Contemporary Dance Company. He blogs about art, culture, and politics at Culture Rover.

About Joshua Sternfeld

Joshua Sternfeld has served since 2009 as a Senior Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access in Washington, D.C. Prior to his arrival at the Endowment, Josh was Assistant Director and Postdoctoral Scholar for the UCLA Center for Information as Evidence and Information Studies Department from 2007-2009. He holds a B.A. in History from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in History from UCLA (2007), specializing in modern European cultural history and jazz studies. Josh has presented, taught, and published on the theoretical and pedagogical attributes of digital historiography. His publications have appeared in The American Archivist and Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics.

About Kate Theimer

Kate Theimer is the author of the popular blog and Twitter account ArchivesNext and a frequent writer, speaker, and commentator on issues related to the future of archives. She is the editor of the series Innovative Practices in Archives and Special Collections, in which books on description, management, outreach, and reference and access were published in 2014. She is the author of Web 2.0 Tools and Strategies for Archives and Local History Collections and the editor of A Different Kind of Web: New Connections between Archives and Our Users. She has published articles in The American Archivist and the Journal of Digital Humanities. Kate served on the Council of the Society of American Archivists from 2010 to 2013. Before starting her career as an independent writer and editor, she worked in the policy division of the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. She holds an MSI with a specialization in archives and records management from the University of Michigan and an MA in art history from the University of Maryland.