A Roundtable Discussion
Mirjam Brusius, Mirjam Hähnle, Mallika Leuzinger, Markus Mößlang, Ole Münch, Michael Schaich, Indra Sengupta, Pascale Siegrist, Clemens Villinger, Christina von Hodenberg
The archival repositories historians work with, and the methods they use to analyse their source base, have undergone significant changes in the past few decades. Increasing efforts are being made to reconstruct the history of groups which are historically under-documented in institutional archives, such as women, the poor and the aged, immigrants, or lower-caste and marginal community groups. Alternative sources and methods are being sought to supplement or challenge official records, not least in colonial, pre- and postcolonial settings, and regions where formal archives are sparse or difficult to access. At the same time, historians are being confronted with a range of new, often still untested digital history and artificial intelligence-led tools which promise the possibility of processing large corpora of sources. Our projects focus on the analysis or re-analysis of diverse sources, such as social science-generated data, quantitative databases, websites and social media, oral history interviews, visual sources such as photographs, locally produced tourist brochures, serial data, and material objects. We engage critically with questions of method, theory, digital history, and archival practice in this regard, and we look at power as an epistemic force undergirding the modern archive.
This discussion between GHIL historians on the institute’s cross-cutting research theme ‘Expanding the archive’ was recorded in January 2025. The questions were asked by Clemens Villinger and the answers collated by Christina von Hodenberg.
Continue reading Expanding the Archive: Fact and Fiction, Reading against the Grain, and Formats of Engagement
