De la poussière à la lumière bleue

Abstract

For a great many historians, Arlette Farge’s book The Allure of the Archives remains a seminal description of working with archives, at least in France. In the past few years however, a clear disparity has emerged between this book and the actual experience and practice of historical research because of the rise in digital technologies, which have prompted a dramatic change in historians’ relationship with archives. Based on the collective online book Le Goût de l’archive à l’ère numérique (“The allure of the archives in the digital age” – https://www.gout-numerique.net/) and on a study day held in 2018 at the French National Archives, this paper aims to investigate the changing relationship of historians with archives: their emotional engagement, their relations with archivists and their practices when consulting paper, digitised or born-digital archives. From dusty shelves to blue light, the entire profession of historian has changed, often in discreet, implicit ways, such as the recent practice of taking photos at archival centers, a consequence of the widespread ownership and use of digital cameras. Do archives still elicit the same emotions when they are merely one snapshot among many on a hard disk, or when they are turned into data and published online in a corpus? If the emotion attached to archives is no longer the same, does this change the way in which we interpret them? How should we reflect on our own practices so that we can see past the algorithms that drive the search engines and software we now use?

Keywords

• emotions
• methodology
• digital
• practices
• reflexivity