Archival Theory and Digital Historiography: Selection, Search, and Metadata as Archival
Processes for Assessing Historical Contextualization

Archival Theory and Digital Historiography: Selection, Search, and Metadata as Archival
Processes for Assessing Historical Contextualization

Digital Humanities

This article focuses on the application of archival theory to create digital representations of history, and how this has created a new theory within digital humanities scholarship termed digital historiography—a theory which focuses on analyzing and studying how digital technologies and historical practice interact. The sudden, rapid development of digital humanities scholarship and its increasing emphasis on interdisciplinarity has left scholars without a criteria to properly assess the validity and importance of digital representations, leaving them without a means to determine what scholarly value should be assigned to the project. The author provides a solution to this problem by proposing three processes of archival theory as criteria: selection, search, and the application of metadata. To support this idea, the author examines several digital representations to illustrate how selection, search functionality, and metadata application impact, inform, and interpret the historical knowledge that a digital representation aims to impart. While the author believes technology has improved the ways in which history is conveyed to wider, non-specialized audiences, he explains the important role that more traditional approaches have on archival theory and historical practice and argues for their assimilation into digital humanities scholarship.

Sternfeld, Joshua

Society of American Archivists

2011

Wolf, Casey

Journal Article