The taste of the archive in the digital age: article

Posted by mdever on June 28, 2019 in archival research, archive, archives, critical archival studies, digital, digital preservation, digitisation, digitization, imaging technologies, materiality, paper

Quite exciting to locate this article today via the Documentary Heritage News digest: Le goût de l’archive à l’ère numérique published  in La vie des idées.

Anyone familiar with Arlette Farge’s book will immediately recognise the reference and also the importance of seeking to extend her thinking into the digital era. By the time Farge’s wonderful book which was first published in French in 1989 appeared in English in 2015, the impact of the digital on archives and on archival research was already more than apparent.

This short article by Frédéric Clavert & Caroline Muller opens by asking:

“How can we preserve or renew the “taste of the archive” (in the words of Arlette Farge) in the age of computers, digital photos, digitization projects, social networks and search engines?”

They emphasise how:

“It is necessary to resume the work of Arlette Farge to explore the new materialities of digitized or natively digital archives, and the new intimacies created between historians and their archives”.

The article is published in French but for those not fluent the translation function of your browser should offer a reasonably accurate English reading version.

Photo by Marta Branco on Pexels.com