Sometimes, what you discover, or don't discover, in archives has less to do with digitization or description, and more to do with historical and internalized racism, classism, sexism, and ignorance of marginalized genders and sexualities. Archival silences are the voices missing from the collections. These gaps in the historical record preserved by archives are real, and are not accidental.
Archivists have made decisions over time about who and what is deemed important enough to be preserved, and these decisions have influenced the historical record. Archival neutrality is the tone in archival description that erases or avoids inequity.
For a long time many archivists believed we were just including facts, and avoided language that made us feel like we were interpreting, or editorializing.
Be cautious of possible description this way in finding aids and online archives. Adapted from the work of Dorothy Berry. Like any source, primary sources are created by people with opinions and experiences which influence their points of view.
Two people discussing the same place and time might have very different points of view. For example: a University President and a student attending the same event might have very different experiences of the event and create different records of the event.
These records may both be useful to your research, and evaluating primary sources for bias is important and using more than one primary source can be helpful to see the bigger picture.
Archives do not preserve history in its entirety. Here is a simple example of how using a different set of rules can affect how we see or judge the world. Imagine that during a football match one player suddenly picks up the ball runs past the other team deep into their half and scores a goal. However, if we judge this action using the rules of American football the player will have scored a perfectly legal touch down.
This example does not seem very convincing because we are aware of both sets of rules and can switch between them depending upon what game we wish to play. The problem with a discourse, however, is that we are often not aware that our society even has a set of rules because we follow them so naturally and unconsciously and because of this we do not have the freedom to switch from one set of rules to another.
This presents a problem when trying to write. An author will write about the world as he or she sees it. However, the view that any author has of the world is not how the world really is. Instead it is the world seen through the filter of their discourse, through their set of rules. As such the story they write will not be able to represent the world fully and when the writer comes across part of the world that does not fit with his or her ideology they will be forced to leave a gap, silence or contradiction in their text.
At this point their story will break down or stutter. Publication Type. More Filters. This study warns that Scottish education is in danger of losing a valuable and venerable element of the school curriculum: the Classics. In order to demonstrate what Scottish education stands to … Expand. Highly Influenced.
View 10 excerpts, cites background. Critical literacy investigates how forms of knowledge, and the power they bring, are created in language and taken up by those who use texts. It asks how language might be put to different, more … Expand.
Highly Influential. View 5 excerpts, references background and methods. View 2 excerpts, references background. A curriculum for excellence: a question of values. A Curriculum for Excellence outlines a curriculum for young people in Scotland from age 3 to In the report, endorsed wholly by Scottish ministers, much is made of the underpinning values of the … Expand. View 1 excerpt, references background.
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