In Defense of the Search Bar

Hannah Frydman, "In Defense of the Search Bar," The American Historical Review, Forthcoming.

This article responds to the challenge posed to historians by what has been called the “infinite archive”—the ever-expanding and seemingly inexhaustible terrain of mass digitization projects by archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage sites—by arguing against charges that the search bar and full-text search lead to decontextualized history. Using the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s digital library, Gallica, and my research in its (web)pages and on site in Parisian archives as a case study, I show how the anarchy of mass digitization and its search bar can, in fact, lead us toward greater contextualization and depth and allow us to think outside of long-established classifications (not to mention hierarchical spaces and forms of authority) that have stymied new ways of thinking at least as much as they have enabled them. In doing so, I propose that queer history, which requires what Tirza True Latimer describes as “developing a period eye and cultivating a period mentality,” provides a portable method for how we could best use our newfound power, enabled by the search bar, to deconstruct and reconstruct the archive and its categories (in both its digital and physical instantiations), to see and write the past with fresh eyes.

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