On Digital History

“History, as a discipline, comes out of the archive... enter the smartphone, and cheap digital photography. Instead of reading papers during an archival visit, historians can snap pictures of the documents and then look at them later. Ian Milligan, a historian at the University of Waterloo, noticed the trend among his colleagues and surveyed 250 historians, about half of them tenured or tenure-track, and half in other positions, about their work in the archives. The results quantified the new normal. While a subset of researchers (about 23 percent) took few (fewer than 200) photos, the plurality (about 40 percent) took more than 2,000 photographs for their ‘last substantive project’... the literal job of doing history has changed. It works through screens now; that much is for sure. Now we’ll have to look to the historians to document what that means.”

Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Way We Write History Has Changed” - theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/smartphone-archives-history-photography/605284/. Interesting summary of the ways in which archival work has become more accessible to a wider variety of scholars. The author’s brief description of such work sums up the experience quite well: “You put your things in a special locker, keeping only laptop, phone, pencil. You’re inspected for purity on the way into the sanctum and instructed in a series of obscure rights and responsibilities that attend to touching this very special paper.” I’ve added such work to my research process over the past few years, and in part, caught this odd little strain of archive fever, to recall Derrida’s comment.