Mind the Gap. On archival politics and historical theory in the digital age

Modern archival scholarship and practice are strikingly absent from contemporary historical theory. Given the archive's enduring importance for history and its long-thematized political aspects, this absence is especially notable when theorists address the 'politics of the digital' and its effects on our understanding and experience of history. This paper argues that such neglect has two important consequences. First, it sustains misconceptions of the '(digital) archive' as a monolithic and inherently conservative phenomenon. Second, it drives the thesis of a flattened temporality and depoliticized historicity attributed to the 'digital (archive)'. Counterbalancing such views, this paper surveys how the politics of digital archives is addressed in neighboring disciplines and adjacent fields. On the one hand, it outlines the geopolitical, economic, and environmental forces shaping their physical and virtual infrastructure. On the other hand, it points to various co-existing, conservative and transformative, political agendas embedded in archival paradigms, i.e. in the practices through which we establish, maintain, and interact with digital archives. The paper concludes by emphasizing that engagement with politically reflexive archival scholarship reveals a dynamic, heterogeneous, and internally contested field. Such engagement, it suggests, could allow historians to enrich their thinking about the politics of history in the digital age.