Digitized archives, content providers, and slow scholarship: why archival researchers should care about digital provenance

Recent research has stressed the importance of recognizing the political nature of the digitization of primary sources, but how much do we really know about the choices, labour, and lacunae embedded within and across our preferred databases? Following Tom Nesmith’s redefinition of provenance as encompassing a much fuller view of records’ histories and contexts, this article argues that articulating the digital provenance of our sources can unlock and contextualize data ethics and informed use, for both ourselves and our students. It begins by defining digital provenance and its relationship to digital literacy, before undertaking a close reading of the UK digitized archive sector with two brief case studies, centring on the growth of commercial content providers. It explores the consequences of this shift in primary source provision and associated barriers to developing a full understanding of the technical histories and contingent present underlying our digital archival landscape. The second part takes a reflective view on the difficulty of doing this slow, careful work in a sector under intense pressure. The article concludes with recommendations for future study and a proposal that we seek inspiration from the critical turn to the archives seen in the 1990s and 2000s to naturalize questions of digital provenance, both to better understand our sources and as a way of learning about the wider materialities and contingencies of digitized data in today’s world.