The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historians and archivists approach the documentary past differently, as they consider, respectively, the ‘archive’ (singular) and ‘archives’ (plural). The former focuses on issues of power, memory, and identity centred upon the initial inscription of a document (or series of documents). The latter concentrates on the subsequent history of documents over time, including the many interventions by archivists (and others) that transform (and change) that original archive into archives. Despite making good common cause in lobbying over public policy, and initially sharing values based on objective, scientific history, the two professions have drifted apart in recent decades. This essay explores the reasons for this divergence by analyzing the history of the two professions and highlighting resulting misconceptions that blind both to deeper nuances of the multiple contexts surrounding records that may enhance their understanding and use. It concludes that archives are not unproblematic storehouses of records awaiting the historian, but active sites of agency and power. Until recently, it has been in the interests of both professions to deny (or at least not interrogate) the subjectivity of archives. Both professions could benefit significantly, therefore, from a renewed partnership centred upon the history of the record to produce better history. Historiens et archivistes considèrent différemment les documents hérités du passé. Les premiers s’intéressent à l’archive (au singulier), les seconds aux archives (au pluriel). Dans le premier cas, l’attention tend à se concentrer sur les questions de pouvoir, de mémoire et d’identité au moment de la production initiale du document ou du groupe de documents. Dans le second cas, l’intérêt se focalise sur l’histoire du document à travers le temps, notamment les multiples interventions par lesquelles les archivistes (entre autres) ont transformé l’archive originale en archives. Bien qu’elles fassent volontiers cause commune face aux pouvoirs publics et qu’elles aient partagé à l’origine une même foi en l’histoire objective et scientifique, les deux disciplines se sont éloignées l’une de l’autre ces dernières décennies. Cet article examine les causes de cette divergence. Il soutient que des défauts de perspective liés à leur histoire respective empêchent l’une et l’autre discipline d’apprécier dans toutes leurs nuances les multiples contextes du document d’archive et d’utiliser ce dernier à son plein potentiel. Il conclut que les archives ne sont pas tant des dépôts documentaires neutres et transparents en attente de leur historien que des lieux de pouvoir et d’action. Jusqu’à récemment, les historiens comme les archivistes avaient intérêt à nier (ou, du moins, à ne pas mettre en cause) la subjectivité des archives. Les deux disciplines pourraient à nouveau collaborer avec profit à une histoire de l’archive qui servirait de base à une meilleure production historiographique.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it