Slides from Tuesday, Jan. 30
Slide from Wednesday, Jan. 31
Try adding the two articles into your Zotero account tonight using the Zotero Connector for Google Chrome.
A Colby Community Site
Slides from Tuesday, Jan. 30
Slide from Wednesday, Jan. 31
Try adding the two articles into your Zotero account tonight using the Zotero Connector for Google Chrome.
© 2026 Into the Archive
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“Although the future of the digital present remains perilous, these recent initiatives suggest some encouraging strategies for preserving the range of digital materials. A combination of technical and organizational approaches promises the greatest chance of success, but privatization poses grave dangers for the future of the past. Advocates of digital preservation need to mobilize state funding and state power (such as the assertion of eminent domain over copyright materials) but infuse it with the experimental and ad hoc spirit of the Internet Archive. And we need to recognize that, for many digital materials (especially the web), the imperfect computer-science paradigm probably has more to recommend it than the more careful and systematic approach of the librarians and archivists” (Rosenzweig 12).
I found this article to be kind of frustrating. Rosenzweig discussed valid issues, but something I think he neglected to mention was that the field of history is agonizingly slow at picking up new technology. Colby changes the technology in the classrooms once and it’s suddenly impossible for them to play a DVD. I love historians and all, but the professor we have who teaches about and researches technology only has a smartphone because………his company told him………….they weren’t going to service his…………flip phone………..anymore. I don’t know. I guess it’s just hard to watch the blame be put on everything else and not lament the fact that as a discipline, there seems to be a sort of snobbiness about knowing how to use new technologies, as if the point of being a historian is being able to hold one’s head high and resist the temptation of Instagram. It’s a shame that we haven’t built structures into the discipline that account for this. Digital humanities and STS as a field are steps in the right direction, but if we plan on training people for being historians in the future, it seems like we should train them the technologies as well.
Question: How and when should technology and history be taught together? Is there even a way to do that, given that we may not always be able to predict what technologies will be available in the future?
“The life expectancy of digital media be as little as ten years, but very few hardware platforms or software programs last that long. Indeed, Microsoft only supports its software for about five years.” 742, Rosenzweig
It is very interesting to think that as information becomes more publicly available it also becomes less strategically recorded. It is a double edged sword, as making information public is the goal of many archivists, but where is the line or too much information drawn? I think this has a lot to do with the shortening attention span of individuals as technology advances. People are so exposed to so much information daily that that information eventually loses significance because something will take its place in the spotlight in a matter of minutes. You can be scrolling through a twitter page and refresh the page and be overwhelmed by a gross amount of new information of persons, sports, news – it becomes hard to retain all that information. As mentioned in the text, audiences also expands through technology. Because we live in such a technological advanced society, I never really thought about later generations not being able to interpret our technology now. But it makes a lot of sense that we should try and universalize our recording processes.
Questions: Does too much information dilute the significance of individual sources? Does constant new information being produced alter the significance of older, primary sources, maybe not for scholars but for the average person?
Quote: “If national archives were part of the projects of state-building and nationalism, then why should states support post-national digital archives?” (Rosenzweig 752).
Comment: I’m not sure I agree with Rosenzweig’s arguments that post-national digital archives will no longer contribute to projects of state-building. Unless post-national digital archives plan on sourcing all of their archival materials from non-governmental organizations, the archives will still implicitly carry biases towards the countries who contributed archival documents. Furthermore, the creators of supposed “transnational” archives will still be mired in their national frame of reference and worldview. Transnationalism is certainly not a panacea for all the questions being debated by archivists and historians.
Question: Do (or did) any archivists work on the projects that Rosenzweig mentioned like the “Internet Archive” or “Google Groups?”
“How, for example, do we ensure the ‘authenticity’ of preserved digital information and ‘trust’ in the repository? Paper documents and records also face questions about authenticity, and forgeries are hardly unknown in traditional archives…Digital information–because it is so easily altered and copied, lacks physical marks of its origins and, indeed, even the clear notion of an ‘original’–cannot be authenticated as physical documents and objects can” (Rosenzweig 743).
Rosenzweig illuminates a problem that I had never thought about: how do we know that digital sources are what they say they are? This fits in with his point about how where historians once faced a lack of information, in the future they will face too much information. Historians and archivists will have to figure out a way to process digital sources in ways that are efficient yet take the time to deduce the necessary information such as, “is this what we think it is?”
This problem seems glaringly obvious, yet it has never been talking about in any of my history classes before. It seems to me like it would be wise for the historians in training today to start grappling with issues and developing best practices as we move further into the digital age.
What kinds of exercises could help historians in training–who are digital natives, having grown up with the Internet and other technology–to authenticate digital sources?
“Ignacio’s sudden deletion of Bert should capture our interest as historians since it dramatically illustrates the fragility of evidence in the digital era. If Ignacio had published his satire in a book or magazine, it would sit on thousands of library shelves rather than having a more fugitive existence as magnetic impulses on a web server.” pg. 736
Maybe it is due to my lack of technological knowledge, but I have been under the impression my entire life that once you post something on the internet, it never goes away. While I do understand that one is not able to delete entire publishings of books and magazines in one click, is it that easy to delete something from the internet? If one simply googles “Bert is evil,” they are given an abundance of photos, information pages, and even mock websites. While one may be able to delete a site with the click of the button, the internet’s footprints and proof are far more accessible than the circulation of books or magazines. There are many flaws that make the internet an imperfect source of information. However, can anyone think of a system that would be better?
“…The problems are much more than technical and involve difficult social, political, and organizational questions of authenticity, ownership, and responsibility” (Rosenzweig 748).
Rosenzweig ultimately makes the case that the national archives are in a considerable amount of danger. He argues that we have a large issue because nobody is putting enough focus into the preservation of archives now so that they well be accessible years down the road. This especially is a problem because of all of the technological advances that are occurring so rapidly and are quickly rendering old technology useless. He argues that we need to take action now but the problem is that nobody really wants to deal with the challenge and most people are depending on someone else to get it done. Soon enough, we will not have any ability to access a large amount of vital documents. He states that focusing on preservation now would solve these issues and somebody needs to take control of the process otherwise we will lose this history forever.
Question: Whose responsibility is it to make sure that all of these records are preserved? Should the historians be taking all of the blame for this occurrence?
“For example, the Internet has dramatically expanded and, hence blurred our audiences.” (Rosenzweig, 739).
The internet is the great equalizer. With the internet anybody can basically access information and then along with that anyone can basically publish information. This is a radical change from even thirty years ago when access to information was only available to the elite. With this change has to come the realization amongst the academic elite that their ideas and papers are being read by a wider audience. As a result, I think there should be more emphasis put on authors making their documents and their arguments into a form that is easier to understand.
By writing this I am not saying that authors should “dumb down their work.” Obviously, that’s an awful idea and wouldn’t accomplish much. However, I am saying that more emphasis needs to be placed on companion pieces to important pieces of scholarship. For example, I really think the interactive map we viewed in class that tells the history of that colleges civil rights struggle is a valuable tool that appeals to a broader audience.
Question- what are some ways to make complex pieces of information more digestible for all audiences?
“Most obviously, the universe of digitized text is anything but representative of the temporal and geographic contours of human life in the past.” (Putnam, 389)
Here, I am reminded of how Howard Zinn noted that archiving physical documents is more of (in practice, not theory) a privilege rather than a right. Only those with a lot of money, a lot of power, or a lot of luck–in the sense that their effects were somehow preserved–will have their stories preserved and publicized for the academic, and general, public. It seems that Putnam is drawing on very much the same school of thought here: If it takes a certain amount of privilege or luck to get your stuff into a worthy archive, then, surely, it must take even more privilege or luck to get your stuff out of a worthy archive and onto the computer. It is in this way that dichotomies between lived experiences en masse and documented experiences are not just recreated, but exacerbated as well. Putnam goes on to point out some exceptions to this rule, but she is unwavering in that, by and large, those whose narratives are reproduced at the expense of other accounts are generally the same Anglophone men who populated archives in years past. In this sense, digitization is not a solution to issues of archival representation, but it is a *potential* solution that if not used responsibly can just make the problem worse.
Question: Is the “transnational” scholarship about which Putnam talks implicated by this specific problem with digitization? How could we prevent transnationalism from recreating the same problems that we see in digitization?
“Preservation of the past is, in the end, often a matter of allocating adequate resources” (Rosenzweig 761).
This line seemed to undermine some of Rosenzweig’s argument, but I appreciate his grasp on reality. Digitalizing is not a priority, nor are setting government guidelines for agencies on how and what to save in an increasingly digital world.
I also think it might be a dangerous, overly simplistic answer to think that if we digitalize archives they are therefore accessible and free, all biases and wrongs undone with the existence of a webpage. It is a necessary step, and a first step, but let’s not think that the work toward equality is over once things are online.
I thought it was interesting that even at the bottom of the PDF I was reading of the Rosenzweig reading, from JSTOR, had a message printed at the bottom of the page: “American Historical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and expand access to American Historical Review.” A necessary start.
What can we do beyond digitalizing to ensure accessibility to archives? What needs to be implemented within these online resources to ensure this accessibility?
“If they succeed, historians will face a second, profound challenge – what would it be like to write history when faced by an almost complete historical record.”
If there’s one takeaway theme from this semester, it’d probably be that archiving is a lot more complicated than it appears. One might wonder why we archive physical documents at all in the era of digitization, but this is a good point. If everything is thought to be complete, no one will question the archive itself, giving an enormous amount of power in the hands of the producer of these documents. History is only how we interpret it, rendering any archive essentially incomplete.
Question: Are there any archives that are thought to be 100% complete?
Quotes: “long -evolved systems of trust and authenticity, ownership, and preservation,” “clear notion of an ‘original'” – Rosenzweig
Comment: One of the first points Rosenzweig brings up on the disadvantages of digitization is that mass access to digitization allows the broadcast of material that has not been properly authorized–material that has not gone through the established channels of scholarly review. While information always needs to be evaluated in consideration of its source, I found this part of Rosenzweig’s argument to be one-dimensional. It seemed in places to confuse authenticity with authority–a distinction which is an interesting question all on its own.
Question: Certainly analysis needs credibility–does that credibility necessarily need to come from an institution?