Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series: Transformation in the Archives

On January 11th, 2024, as part of the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Series, The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities, at Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University, Alisea McLeod (University of Chicago), Cynthia McLeod (UCSB), and Bethany Nowviskie (James Madison University) explored how archives have functioned thus far and how they can be newly envisioned in the digital era.
Paper archives have long been foundational sources of data for humanities scholars-be these materials organized as logs and records or correspondences and various other writings, institutionally produced and preserved or recovered by other means. What are the risks and rewards of digital archives? What are our corresponding responsibilities-as archivists and scholars of archives in the digital era? What makes a digital data archive? What are their ethics in the new digital formats of accessibility and of preservation? Can we revolutionize the burdens that accompany past archives?