Digital archives and recombinant historical geographies

With David Beckingham and Jake Hodder, University of Nottingham.

Part of the Cultural and Historical Seminar Series.

Abstract

This paper considers the mass digitisation of archives. If historical research traditionally entailed buildings, catalogues and physical documents, increasingly our labour has moved online. Digitisation promises to empower the researcher to make new connections across a limitless world of electronic information. We argue that these acts of recombination represent more than simply a technical shift, but are transforming the nature of historical knowledge itself, in ways rarely accounted for in geography methods texts. The shift from archive catalogue to individual search term is presented as benign and convenient. But in this paper, we call attention to the otherwise hidden, determinative role proprietary platforms and algorithms increasingly play in shaping our research.