In her guest lecture, Estelle Bunout offers a critique of interfaces for digitised archives. Interface critique is an essential part of digital source criticism and an unavoidable step when using digitised archive material online. Yet it is often neglected. Using the example of Polish Cold War archives, she presents an assessment of the accessibility of archived materials and their metadata. Polish Cold War archives are challenging to work with because they are transnational by definition. They are scattered around the world in different institutions, and they contain different kinds of material such as documents, pictures and audio and video footage. The lecture offers practical guidelines and resources to make the best scholarly use of these primary sources.
About the Author
Estelle Bunout holds a PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Lorraine in France. In her thesis, she studied expertise on Eastern Europe in Germany and Poland (1918-1972), its emergence after 1918, its formalisation as a science of the enemy in the late 1930s and during the Second World War, and its revision after 1945, accompanying the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt. From 2017 to 2020, she worked on the impresso project “Media monitoring of the past. Mining 200 years of historical newspapers” at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg.
Suggested Literature for Lecture
Owens, Trevor, and Thomas Padilla.
‘Digital Source and Digital Archives: Historical Evidence in the Digital Age’. International
Journal of Digital Humanities, 2020, 1–17.
Putnam, Lara. ‘The Transnational and the
Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast’. The American
Historical Review 121, no. 2 (March 2016): 377–402.
Copyright
All references are displayed in the video.