Historical research methods have been turned upside down in less than two decades. How can we preserve or renew the “taste for the archive” (in Arlette Farge’s words) in the era of computers, digital photography, digitization projects, social networks and search engines?
For those who have been in the reading rooms of archive repositories before 2010, the experience of archives has fundamentally changed. While many people had long used computers, the introduction of cameras has led to radically new gestures, behaviors, and understanding of documents.
Reading rooms are emptying: not only is reading archives now done at home, once the camera is connected to the computer, but digitization projects – whether massive like Gallica or smaller like the digitization of ten-year civil status tables by the Archives of the Nord department – sometimes make it unnecessary to stay in research centers.
Deep changes
Consultation and reading are not the only things affected. The ease of searching for information provided by major search engines has changed the behavior of researchers when faced with the research tools of archive centers. The possibilities for academic communication represented by digital social networks have changed the ways in which researchers socialize. Finally, new types of archives are appearing: born digital, collected on the web by the historian or from companies or administrations by the archivist, their consultation and reading, their interpretation are new things.
“The” digital, understood in the sense of “digital culture” given to it by Milad Doueihi (What is digital?Hermann, 2016), profoundly changes the daily work of historians and their relationship to archival documents. This raises the question of the fundamental transformation of the intimate relationship of researchers to “their” archives, natively digital or digitized. This question is not new, neither in history, nor more generally in human and social sciences. Since the end of the 1950s, historians have questioned the use of what is not yet called information technology.
However, the massification and increasingly easy access to data, including historical data, the generalization of new practices such as online research, the increasingly frequent use of mobile terminals – that is to say, increasingly important portable and individual digitization, storage, communication and memory capacities and, ultimately, elements of artificial intelligence – are profoundly changing the practices of historians.
When the tool shapes the practice
These new gestures have not, until now, been the subject of particular methodological reflections, historians often considering that these transformations can be summed up as a new “tool”. However, the tool shapes the practice:
– taking photos in the reading rooms, filing them on the hard drive, reading them on the screen, returning them to the archive centre to photograph more items “just in case”;
– the use of digitalized and online archives, sometimes directly transcribed into a computer file without even a facsimile of the original, the use of automatically recognized text despite all the weaknesses of optical character recognition;
– the online consultation interface for digital archives, which never had an “analog” existence;
– the dialogue between the historian or a member of his research unit, on the one hand, and a programming interfacethat is, a software device for collecting data, often in bulk, on the other hand, by means of computer code;
– the use of different software to help with reading and, sometimes, reading for the historian, without ever interpreting for him.
What new gestures!
These new gestures, these new methods remain discreet in the sense that, despite the expansion since the mid-2000s of the “transdiscipline” of digital humanities, they remain implicit, little explained, little debated. However, it is fundamental that the new epistemology that is emerging before our eyes be discussed, debated and perhaps reoriented in certain cases. In this context, questioning our relationship to archives amounts to questioning the entire profession of historian, to questioning the archive itself, which remains the heart of our rapidly evolving practices.
Extending Arlette Farge’s reflection
How can we problematize this transition of historical practices to a digital world? We propose to revisit the work carried out in the 1980s by Arlette Farge. In 1989, she published an essay entitled The Taste of the Archive. To his great surprise, this book was a resounding success, in France and elsewhere. Its translation into English, The Allure of the Archivewas published by Yale University Press, with a foreword by Natalie Zemon Davis, former president of the American Historical Association.
This foreword compares the experience of many historians in archives centres in the 1980s and 1990s (and before) with that of today’s researchers, a comparison which, for the Canadian historian, is ultimately to the disadvantage of the latter, regretting
the loss of the relationship to the object, of the little notations that escape the camera, the signatures cut off during the framing, the paper that can no longer be touched and the bindings that can no longer be seen.
Taking up Arlette Farge’s work does not mean wanting to return to an old paradigm of the historian’s profession – that of taking notes on paper, of attentive and patient copying of archive documents – but rather questioning what constitutes the historian’s profession today and, more precisely, what risks constituting its unthoughts.
Among these unthought-of things, we can take the example of the software we choose to manage photographs taken in archives, to automatically recognize the text (transform a photograph of text into text, strictly speaking, recognized as such by the computer, thus allowing full-text searches, copy-paste, etc.), to “read” the archives. How to store the photographs taken, so as not to lose them on increasingly large hard drives? How to classify them, annotate them, add metadata to them (the digital equivalent of the cardboard index card)?
Research orientation and neutrality
Our ability to process our archives and find them when we need them depends on these choices. Optical character recognition is also one of the tools that needs to be considered. As the British historian who successfully digitized the archives of the London Criminal Court pointed out,Old Baileyeven the highest quality optical character recognition can steer an entire search.
Finally, for those who wish to perform a “remote” reading of their sources, the choice of analysis software often implies the acceptance of working hypotheses, or even a very complete methodological framework. If we take the example of the network visualization program Gephi, using it means accepting the framework of the sociology of social networks, or more precisely, of the actor-network theory. Software is never neutral.
If taking archival photographs transforms the relationship with sources, reworking them on your computer, sometimes using the collaborative possibilities of the network, adding metadata to them, allows historians to establish a new relationship with the archive – different, but no less intimate. Collecting millions of tweets to understand certain memorial issues, for example around the Centenary of the Great War, distances us, through the mass, from the source, but also brings us closer to it through work on what we now call “data”.
This work, long and tedious, represents in some cases the vast majority of research. As long as it is not done, the analyses cannot be. It is necessary to return to Arlette Farge’s work to question ourselves on the new materialities of digitized or natively digital archives, on the new intimacies created between historians and their archives.