Microfilm, TEI headers and bibliographic metadata
One of the biggest and most urgent issues facing historical scholarship in the next several decades involves the transition to digital archival work, and with it the question of how the materiality of archival sources can be preserved, respected, and communicated in that translation. The importance of archival sources as material objects has become a vital branch of study in the last few decades, as historians and literary critics have begun asking detailed questions about the signification of paper, binding, type, etc., to the meaning of texts. This has occurred partially in response to the mania for textuality that was associated with the critical theory boom of the 1980’s and 1990’s, but it has also coincided with the advent of increasing digitization of the archives. On of the one hand, as anybody who has ever struggled with microfilm can tell you, digitized archives – even very simple ones that just display high quality digital images — can be a major step forward for scholars asking materially oriented questions. Most of the time on microfilm, binds are left unreproduced, paper and watermarks etc. are washed out in the harsh whites of the microfilm, and any sense of the materiality of the original document is lost in the always present awareness of the materiality of the film through which you are viewing it. Some digital archives, such as the EEBO database and a database I’ve been using a ton this semester, the Virginia Company Archives, are simply digitized images of microfilm, and … Continue reading