Natalie Zemon Davis has spent six decades on the trail of stories hidden in the archives. Her archival explorations have powered an influential scholarly career—Ms. Davis is an emerita professor of history at Princeton University now associated with the history department at the University of Toronto—and works like The Return of Martin Guerre, the tale of a 16th-century Frenchman who took over the identity of another man. Most recently she’s been on the hunt for evidence about the lives of four generations of a slave family in colonial Suriname.
Popes and potentates are well documented. Peasants and the powerless get lost in what Ms. Davis calls “gaps and silences in precise evidence.” Archives “are set up according to the categories that are important to the body that established them,” she says. “The first thing to know is how your archive is structured.”
In late October, Ms. Davis delivered the keynote talk at a conference sponsored by the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at University College London. The gathering, provocatively called “Failure in the Archives,” invited scholars and archivists to explore blind spots and blank spaces they encounter in their work, and to talk about how they might help each other do their jobs better.
Humanities scholars rarely talk about their failures. Publications and promotion depend on making discoveries in the archives, not losing one’s way in them. But as researchers try to recover lives and experiences absent from the official record, they work within archival systems that weren’t set up to help them find what they’re in search of. And digital-era scholars with a world of information at their fingertips don’t always have the patience or the know-how to pick through the idiosyncratic records of the past.
Many of those records date back decades or centuries, and reflect the practices of archivists long since retired or dead. Archives aren’t politically neutral; the priorities of whatever group or entity set them up determine their structure and what’s most visible to users. Many archives first took shape as tools of empire-building, says Will Tosh, a postdoctoral research fellow with Globe Education at Shakespeare’s Globe, who led a panel at the conference. He’s referring to a central theme of the conversations there: who controls records in the first place. (Consider, for instance, the National Archives of India, established in Calcutta in the late 19th century as the Imperial Record Department.) In the 20th century, colonial archives were often returned to the U.K. when former British colonies won their independence, “thus removing from nascent states access to their own political history,” Mr. Tosh says.
Arnold Hunt appreciates the challenges both researchers and archivists face in working with legacy archival structures. Now a curator of manuscripts at the British Library, he spent 10 years as an academic, “a regular reader on the other side of the Reading Room desk,” he says.
Mr. Hunt gave a talk at the conference on “How to Hide Things in Archives"—not deliberately but through “the accidental concealment of documents.” In 1891, for instance, what was then called the British Museum Library divided its growing manuscript collections into two parts, Western and Oriental, category definitions that have become vexing as well as outdated. Manuscripts in Hebrew were classified as “Oriental,” Greek manuscripts as “Western.” “A Hebrew text copied in Antwerp or Amsterdam is therefore an Oriental manuscript, whereas a Greek text copied in Cairo or Alexandria is a Western manuscript,” Mr. Hunt writes in his conference paper. “And that of course has a profound but invisible influence on our understanding of the collections.”
Scholars who plunge into an archive have to confront the possibility that the enterprise will be a waste of time. For his dissertation, Mr. Tosh wrote a study of late-16th-century male friendship in England, based on the social circle of Anthony Bacon, Francis’s less-studied older brother. The project required him to dive into Anthony’s papers, not knowing what he would find there. Mr. Tosh worried that he would “end up with lots of useless transcriptions,” he says. For some scholars, encountering material that they can’t make fit the shape of their project means failure. “But I found that the shape of my work was almost wholly determined by what I found,” Mr. Tosh says. That kind of risk-taking gets harder. “Post-Ph.D. there may be a risk in sinking into uncharted archival discovery because deadlines are looming and promotion is hovering.”
Scholars could be better about sharing what they discover, Mr. Tosh says. That became another theme of the conversations at the conference: “When you find this exciting stuff in the archives and you can’t use it, for God’s sake, please tell the archivist.”
‘Emotional Undercurrent’
The inspiration for “Failure in the Archives” came not from a veteran of archival research but from the ranks of scholars just beginning their careers.
Brooke Palmieri, a graduate student at the center, organized the event after listening to the “emotional undercurrent” of researchers talking about their encounters with archives and special collections.
“I kept picking up on frustration, or bewilderment, or little moments of laughing off a common theme,” Ms. Palmieri says via email. “What happens when you don’t find what you’re looking for? And how do you assess the bits and pieces that you do find, that resist simple explanation? There is a tradeoff between what we want from the archive and what we are given.”
In Ms. Davis’s talk, “Coping With ‘Failure’ in the Archives,” she gave examples from her own career. In colonial Suriname, the record keepers “were white men, a corps of notaries and government secretaries, all of them plantation owners, and more modest plantation scribes.” Less obvious is how “slaves had some impact on the documents in which they figured"—in how they phrased requests for manumission, for instance, with notaries writing down their words for the record. Evidence requires context.
Online databases have changed researchers’ habits over the past decade, and raised new challenges for archival work. While new search tools have been “a tremendous boon” to scholars, says Mr. Hunt, a keyword search doesn’t give you much context for whatever you turn up. Mr. Hunt’s graduate adviser, Patrick Collinson, a historian of Reformation England, read catalogs through from beginning to end. “Nobody would do that nowadays,” Mr. Hunt says. With online searching, “what you lose is a sense of the structure as a whole” and a sense of what could be hidden within that structure. “In some cases, we’re still relying on 19th- or even 18th-century records that haven’t been brought up to modern standards.” If catalog records don’t describe items in detail, or aren’t digitized yet, they won’t be able to feed useful information to search engines.
Fascinating material awaits the researcher who learns to work around cataloging quirks and explore such database-defying categories as “Miscellaneous letters and papers.” Mr. Hunt points to the British Library’s Trumbull Papers, a significant 17th-century archive, as an example. Its miscellanies include letters by John Donne and John Locke that don’t yet have individual listings in the library’s catalog. “There is a more detailed listing in the printed catalogs produced by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, but this is the sort of information that young or inexperienced researchers won’t necessarily know,” Mr. Hunt says.
Jessica Green, the digital curator at London’s Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, took part in the conference to get a better sense of what frustrates researchers when they come to work in archives like hers. They hear “No” a lot from archivists: No, you can’t use a pen in here; no, you can’t work with the original document. Archivists need to explain those rules better, Ms. Green says. It’s important to remember that catalog records are created by human beings with individual biases and approaches—information scholars need to know to understand what they’re working with.
Explorers of archives should also understand that many collections don’t have adequate staff to catalog and digitize materials and provide research support. And if a researcher finds something amiss, he or she should report it rather than suffer or rage in silence. “Let us know if something’s out of place or miscataloged,” Ms. Green says. “Both sides are expert in the materials in different ways.”
