Digital Historiography and the Archives

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Going Meta on Metadata

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I once joked to an archivist that all I really do as a historian is add meta-metadata to the archival database.

What I meant was that if we understand metadata—the information that accompanies artifacts—as not merely descriptive, but also already on its way to interpretation, then what is historical scholarship but a further extension of this elaboration of the evidentiary record? The joke was intended as humorous (at least for the geeky among us) because typically historical work gets separated from, and often privileged over, archival labor. The archive is there, historians mistakenly believe, solely to be mined by them alone for scholarly production. Archivists, of course, know better. The archive serves many other purposes than just fodder for historical inquiry. And as archives move into the digital domain, whether through digitization of artifacts or with born-digital materials, the archive’s many uses expand even more. Might it be more accurate, then, my joke implied, to reverse the hierarchy of archive and historical research as we move into the digital realm? Perhaps the digital archive becomes the final product—something that now absorbs historical research and publishes into it—rather than just a storehouse for information hidden in the stacks; and perhaps in this new context, historical findings become nothing but a new field added to the interactive, accessible, crowdsourced, hyperlinked records management system!

Michael-Kramer on Journal of Digital Humanities

Digital Historiography and the Archives

Going Meta on Metadata