The fetish of archives

Archives are primary sources of information for biographers, historians and social scientists. Yet the question about archives is how much information we overlook or transform: fiction and facts often interplay. We pinned a related question about the moral lesson present or not in archives. Do annal...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Quality & quantity 2014, Vol.48 (1), p.425-437
Main Author: Hogenraad, Robert L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Archives
Archives & records
Autobiographical Materials
Autobiographies
Conflict
Content analysis
Cuba
Cuban Missile Crisis
Emotions
Ethics
Fetishes
Historians
Historiography
History
Imagination
Information Sources
Information technology
Methodology of the Social Sciences
Risk
Scripts
Social Sciences
Social scientists
Source materials
Studies
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Items that cite this one
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Summary:Archives are primary sources of information for biographers, historians and social scientists. Yet the question about archives is how much information we overlook or transform: fiction and facts often interplay. We pinned a related question about the moral lesson present or not in archives. Do annals, chronicles, or histories settle or merely end accounts? Coupling authority and moral lesson in texts provides a way of linking archives of different degrees of accuracy: annals, chronicles, and histories. We identified the same series of events covered on three supports, as tapes, as memoir, and as film. The events in question concern the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. We ran a computer-aided content analysis of these textual data and used words into assessing, first, the risk of conflict in the data, then the mood present in the data. Pure archives, such as tapes, do not succeed in reenacting nonverbal events. It is as if only fiction or imagination, in chronicles or stories, could do justice to a 3D reality and allow it to become history by naturalizing that reality.
ISSN:0033-5177
1573-7845
DOI:10.1007/s11135-012-9778-0