Photo: Library of Congress.
I have often thought about what we’ve lost in the digital age, when we can no longer scrutinize the thought process of a novelist from seeing her many revisions. Nor can we learn much about the significant people in her life, given that so many of her emails and texts will have been erased.
What will biographers do? How will today’s archivists deal with the challenge?
Michael Waters writes at the Atlantic (via MSN), “It was long the case that archives were full of physical ephemera. Think of Oscar Wilde’s love letters to Lord Alfred Douglas; … Sylvia Plath’s shopping list; Malcolm X’s lost poem; and other scraps of paper buried in boxes. Today, text messages and disappearing voice notes have replaced letters between close friends, Instagram Stories vanish by default, and encrypted platforms such as Signal, where social movements flourish, let users automatically erase messages. Many people write to-do lists in notes apps and then delete them, line by line, when each task is complete.
“The problem for [historians]: On the one hand, celebrities, artists, executives, and social-movement leaders are generating more personal records than ever, meaning a lucky researcher might have access to a public figure’s entire hard drive but struggle to interpret its contents. On the other hand, historians might lose access to the kind of intimate material that reveals the most. …
“The work of history starts with a negotiation. A public figure or their descendant — or, say, an activist group or a college club — works with an institution, such as a university library, to decide which of the figure’s papers, correspondence, photos, and other materials to donate. Archivists then organize these records for researchers, who, over subsequent years, physically flip through them. These tidbits are deeply valuable. They reveal crucial details about our most famous figures and important historical events. …
“Over the past two decades, the volume of these donations has increased dramatically. When Donald Mennerich, a digital archivist at NYU, first started working in the field, 15 years ago, writers or activists or public figures would hand over boxes of letters, notes, photos, meeting minutes, and maybe a floppy disk or a ‘small computer that had a gigabyte hard drive,’ he told me. Now, Mennerich said, ‘everyone has a terabyte of data on their laptop and a 4-terabyte hard drive’ … plus an email inbox with 10,000 messages or more. …
“Now many libraries possess emails that they don’t have the bandwidth to make accessible to researchers. … Even when an email archive is made public … it’s easy to get lost in the chaos. Jacquelyn Ardam, a writer and a literary scholar, was one of the first people to visit Susan Sontag’s archive, which she told me was filled with digital clutter: Sephora marketing emails, files with unlabeled collections of words (rubbery, ineluctable), and lots and lots of lists — of movies she’d liked, drinks she’d enjoyed. …
“Among that mess of information, however, Ardam found emails confirming Sontag’s relationship with the photographer Annie Leibovitz, which Sontag had denied. All Ardam had to do to locate them was ‘search her computer for the word Annie,’ she said. …
“In the past, even a writer of Sontag’s stature would typically have a small-enough correspondence collection that they could plausibly review the letters they were planning to donate to an archive—and perhaps wouldn’t have included missives from a secret lover. But the scope of our digital lives can make it much harder to account for everything (imagine giving up your whole social-media history to a researcher) and much easier for a historian to locate the tantalizing parts with a single search.
“Of course, that’s if historians are lucky enough to access records at all. Many people delete their old texts to save storage space. … Mennerich said he’s been locked out of the email accounts of several deceased public figures because they never shared their passwords. …
“Archivists might be able to sidestep some of these problems by rethinking how they present collections of digital records. Today, after archivists do their initial review of a collection, visitors can typically get a complete box of someone’s letters with no questions asked. With emails, conducting that whole initial review up front would be so much more time intensive that blanket access might no longer be realistic. …
“The archivists I spoke with told me they’re all bracing themselves for the moment when, inevitably, a public figure donates their smartphone. It is in some ways the most personal kind of donation someone can make, offering access to text and WhatsApp histories, photos, Tinder messages, saved recipes, TikTok likes. Such a donation seems both likely to reveal more than a person’s emails ever could and even harder to sort through and interpret.”
More at the Atlantic, here.
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