Archives: An Introduction (original) (raw)

Scholarship across the humanities is being radically and rapidly transformed through digital access to archival sources. Through the development of online scholarly editions, digital archives such as the Walt Whitman Archive and online repositories such as HathiTrust Digital Library, among many others, a wealth of archival data—textual and graphic, quantitative and qualitative—have become electronically available. With this new digital wealth of materials for humanities scholarship has come new ways of looking at the archival record, new ways of interpreting historical information, and new standards for accounting its value and authority as knowledge. The fact that archival records are finding new life in digital environments does not, however, necessarily mean that they are accessible , let alone meaningful, to students, scholars, and citizens searching for evidence about the past and telling new stories about it. Single-search boxes of Internet browsers, online catalogs, and search engines offer a narrow window on to a vast landscape of digital data, organizing and retrieving results with the efficiency of machine reading and automation. They do so at the expense of kinds of attention and content expertise by which librarians and scholars have processed our cultural inheritance for hundreds of years at a human scale, using skills of eye and hand. Digital images of manuscripts , graphic material, and newspapers can make crucial information about provenance and format harder to find than when such artifacts are encountered in person, in traditional settings of archival research, in repositories, libraries, and other sites that collect, organize , and preserve cultural heritage materials for future use. This introduction to a summer 2017 special issue of American Literary History [Vol 29, Num 2] offers an overview of current scholarly approaches to archives in American literature.