Historicizing the Archive

This article introduces a collection of articles that discuss the nature of “the archive” in the research and writing of media history. The archive is defined as a concept that covers questions of interpretation, evidence and authenticity. Therefore, the archive provides a focus for a critique of acts of classifying, collecting and storing the “evidence” that is the basis for media history. In this analysis archival logics and practices become themselves artifacts of history.

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[2]  Sumathi Ramaswamy,et al.  Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India . By Matthew H. Edney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xxi, 458 pp. $35.00 (cloth). , 1998, The Journal of Asian Studies.

[3]  L. Gitelman,et al.  New Media, 1740-1915 , 2003 .

[4]  Wendy Hui Kyong Chun,et al.  New Media, Old Media : A History and Theory Reader , 2006 .

[5]  Adrian Cunningham,et al.  Political Pressure and the Archival Record , 2007 .

[6]  A. Burton.  Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India , 2003 .

[7]  Carolyn Steedman,et al.  Dust: The Archive and Cultural History , 2001 .

[8]  T. Osborne.  The ordinariness of the archive , 1999 .

[9]  C. Robertson,et al.  Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History , 2006 .

[10]  Convergence Media History , 2009 .

[11]  G. Spivak.  The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives , 1985 .

[12]  B. Cohn.  Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India , 2020, The New Imperial Histories Reader.

[13]  William G. Rosenberg,et al.  Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar , 2005 .

[14]  Matthew Henry Edney.  Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 , 1997 .

[15]  I. Velody.  The archive and the human sciences: notes towards a theory of the archive , 1998 .