Course Syllabus

Welcome to FRENCH 435/ TXTDS 403: Archives, Data, and Databases

Critical Archives in Theory and Practice

Digitization projects have profoundly changed the landscape of historical research and have raised critical questions about how to account for the mediated ways we access the past. In this class, we will explore some possible answers to these questions, considering what opportunities digitization affords and what possibilities it forecloses. To do this we will begin by looking at the forms of mediation (and their basis in power structures) that were already present in physical archives before then turning to an examination of how digitization inflects the way archives mediate the traces we use to write history. While we will think about many different kinds of archives, we will take digitized newspaper archives as our primary case study, using them to engage in a hands-on way in the work of querying, collecting, and organizing archival material, and, in final projects, in integrating these sources into critical historical writing for a variety of different audiences. Course taught in English and in person.

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