Digitising the modern archive

  • Katrina Dean
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.911679

Abstract

In 1979 French sociologist Jean-François Lyotard predicted ‘that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable’ into computer-readable packages of information ‘will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language’.1 Despite the efforts of archivists and (digital) scholars, most of the archival legacy of the modern period remains untranslated into computer-readable language and accessible only to those with traditional archival research skills or specialist reference services. Archivists remain the keepers of important stores of evidence and authentic information that are becoming dangerously irrelevant. The postmodern, digital archive only compounds the fundamental flaws of the modern archive, itself an incomplete project.

Author Biography

Katrina Dean

Dr Katrina Dean is University Archivist at the University of Melbourne. She was Curator of the History of Science at the British Library (2006–2010), a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol (2004–2005) and previously worked at the National Archives of Australia and the Australian Science Archives Project. She has published several articles in scholarly journals, and is co-editor of a new book on nineteenth-century inventor of photography William Henry Fox Talbot: William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (Yale University Press, 2013).

Published
2014-07-30
How to Cite
Dean K. (2014) “Digitising the modern archive”, Archives & Manuscripts, 42(2), pp. 171-174. doi: 10.1080/01576895.2014.911679.
Issue
Vol 42 No 2 (2014): Special Issue: Reinventing Archival Methods
Section
Reflection articles

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