What's History Got to Do With It?: Reconsidering the Place of HistoricalKnowledge in Archival Work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses the changing place of historical knowledge in archival work, particularly in Canada since the mid-twentieth century. The author begins by noting that knowledge of the history of one's country or community was the centrepiece of the early professional identity of Canadian archivists between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, when most archivists saw themselves as historians. The article then discusses the circumstances which subsequently prompted serious questioning and sometimes rejection of historical knowledge as a key component of an archivist's expertise and professional identity. The role of historical knowledge has thus been contested and problematic for many archivists across the recent intellectual history of the Canadian archival profession. The author then points to recent archival, intellectual, and societal trends which suggest that the pendulum is swinging back, not in a simple return to the past, when archivists were largely indistinguishable from academic historians, but toward appreciation of the central place of historical knowledge in the distinctive body of knowledge, research, and daily work of the new archival profession which has emerged over the last quarter century. RESUME Cet article aborde l’evolution de la place du savoir historique dans la pratique archivistique, au Canada en particulier, depuis les annees 1950. L’auteur commence en notant que la connaissance de l’histoire de son propre pays ou de sa propre communaute etait au centre de l’identite professionnelle des archivistes canadiens entre la fin du 19e et le milieu du 20e siecles, alors que la plupart des archivistes se definissaient comme historiens. L’article commente ensuite les circonstances qui ont mene au questionnement et parfois au rejet du savoir historique comme composante-cle de l’expertise des archivistes et de leur identite professionnelle. Le role de la connaissance historique a donc ete conteste et pose probleme pour plusieurs archivistes au cours de l’histoire recente de la profession archivistique canadienne. Par une analyse des tendances recentes au niveau archivistique, intellectuel et societal, l’auteur suggere que le pendule effectue un retour vers l’arriere, non pas vers l’epoque ou les archivistes etaient indissociables des historiens, mais plutot vers une valorisation de la place centrale du savoir historique au sein de l’ensemble particulier des connaissances, des recherches et des tâches quotidiennes de la nouvelle profession archivistique qui a emerge durant le dernier quart de siecle.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.095 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".