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Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology is now a mature machine learning tool, becoming integrated in the digitisation processes of libraries and archives, speeding up the transcription of primary sources and facilitating full text searching and analysis of historic texts at scale. However, research into how HTR is changing our information environment is scant. This paper presents a systematic literature review regarding how researchers are using one particular HTR platform, Transkribus, to indicate the domains where HTR is applied, the approach taken, and how the technology is understood. 381 papers from 2015 to 2020 were gathered from Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science, then grouped and coded into categories using quantitative and qualitative approaches. Published research that mentions Transkribus is international and rapidly growing. Transkribus features primarily in archival and library science publications, while a long tail of broad and eclectic disciplines, including history, computer science, citizen science, law and education, demonstrate the wider applicability of the tool. The most common paper categories were humanities applications (67%), technological (25%), users (5%) and tutorials (3%). This paper presents the first overarching review of HTR as featured in published research, while also elucidating how HTR is affecting the information environment.

Mass digitisation and the exponential growth of born-digital archives over the past two decades have resulted in an enormous volume of archives and archival data being available digitally. This has produced a valuable but under-utilised source of large-scale digital data ripe for interrogation by scholars and practitioners in the Digital Humanities. However, current digitisation approaches fall short of the requirements of digital humanists for structured, integrated, interoperable, and interrogable data. Linked Data provides a viable means of producing such data, creating machine-readable archival data suited to analysis using digital humanities research methods. While a growing body of archival scholarship and praxis has explored Linked Data, its potential to open up digitised and born-digital archives to the Digital Humanities is under-examined. This article approaches Archival Linked Data from the perspective of the Digital Humanities, extrapolating from both archival and digital humanities Linked Data scholarship to identify the benefits to digital humanists of the production and provision of access to Archival Linked Data. It will consider some of the current barriers preventing digital humanists from being able to experience the benefits of Archival Linked Data evidenced, and to fully utilise archives which have been made available digitally. The article argues for increased collaboration between the two disciplines, challenges individuals and institutions to engage with Linked Data, and suggests the incorporation of AI and low-barrier tools such as Wikidata into the Linked Data production workflow in order to scale up the production of Archival Linked Data as a means of increasing access to and utilisation of digitised and born-digital archives.

This article examines the structures, practices, and processes of collection, cataloging, and curation to expose where current cultural authority is placed, valued, and organized within archival workflows. The long arc of collecting is not just rooted in colonial paradigms; it relies on and continually remakes those structures of injustice through the seemingly benign practices and processes of the profession. Our emphasis is on one mode of decolonizing processes that insist on a different temporal framework: the slow archives. Slowing down creates a necessary space for emphasizing how knowledge is produced, circulated, and exchanged through a series of relationships. Slowing down is about focusing differently, listening carefully, and acting ethically. It opens the possibility of seeing the intricate web of relationships formed and forged through attention to collaborative curation processes that do not default to normative structures of attribution, access, or scale.

This essay argues that archival paradigms over the past 150 years have gone through four phases: from juridical legacy to cultural memory to societal engagement to community archiving. The archivist has been transformed, accordingly, from passive curator to active appraiser to societal mediator to community facilitator. The focus of archival thinking has moved from evidence to memory to identity and community, as the broader intellectual currents have changed from pre-modern to modern to postmodern to contemporary. Community archiving and digital realities offer possibilities for healing these disruptive and sometimes conflicting discourses within our profession.

Access to data is seen as a key priority today. Yet, the vast majority of digital cultural data preserved in archives is inaccessible due to privacy, copyright or technical issues. Emails and other born-digital collections are often uncatalogued, unfindable and unusable. In the case of documents that originated in paper format before being digitised, copyright can be a major obstacle to access. To solve the problem of access to digital archives, cross-disciplinary collaborations are absolutely essential. The big challenges of our time—from global warming to social inequalities—cannot be solved within a single discipline. The same applies to the challenge of “dark” archives closed to users. We cannot expect archivists or digital humanists to find a magical solution that will instantly make digital records more accessible. Instead, we need to set up collaborations across disciplines that seldom talk to each other. Based on 21 interviews with 26 archivists, librarians and other professionals in cultural institutions, we identify key obstacles to making digitised and born-digital collections more accessible to users. We outline current levels of access to a wide range of collections in various cultural organisations, including no access at all and limited access (for example, when users are required to travel on-site to consult documents). We suggest possible solutions to the problems of access—including the ethical use of Artificial Intelligence to unlock “dark” archives inaccessible to users. Finally, we propose the creation of a global user community who would participate in decisions on access to digital collections.

Over the past two decades, many digital humanities projects have presented themselves as various forms of digital archives, and the term ‘archive’ has been used frequently by many digital humanists, leading to an expanded but also eroded concept of the archive. This phenomenon, described as the linguistic turn of the archive, has sparked intense debates in both the digital humanities and archival science research communities. The conceptual divergence between the concept of the archive in archival science and in digital humanities can lead to misunderstandings and academic exchange gaps on both sides. To bridge this divide, we conducted research by selecting all 58 cases related to archives from the International Digital Humanities Awards (2012–2023). This study draws on the socio-contextual analysis and discourse–historical analysis framework to code and analyze the characteristics of the linguistic turn. By extracting four layers ‘concept-tool-cognition-scenario’ from existing research, we innovatively proposed a framework suitable for analyzing archival terminologies within the contexts of different projects. Through analysis, we identified the following four turning features: (a) an expansion of the traditional archival terminology, i.e., many digital resources are referred to as ‘digital archive’; (b) the application of archival theories, principles, and tools for resource preservation; (c) the embedding of archival cognition in the processes of digital humanities projects; and (d) the integration of archives into broader and more socially oriented digital scenarios. This paper suggests that archivists and digital humanities researchers need to increase the dialogue between the two disciplines to better facilitate an archival paradigm shift and ensure the sustainability of digital humanities research.

Trauma as a concept, a signifier and a frame has become increasingly visible in archival theory and praxis in recent years. A shift that is perhaps unsurprising given that society at large appears to have embraced trauma as a major interpretative category for our age. The recent spotlight on trauma can also be linked to accompanying movements in our discourse as we have begun to unpack and theorise the affective dimensions of records work and have moved towards more person-centred approaches. While the recent introduction of trauma-informed approaches to our field is a welcome development in many ways, this article seeks to critically engage with the Western concept of trauma to expose its intellectual lineages and the social and moral economies that have shaped its emergence in different spheres; and highlight how archival studies discourse on trauma is shaped in relation to different branches of Western trauma discourse. This article argues that as archivists and records workers adopt the language of trauma from adjacent arenas as an explanatory and transformative frame, it is vital that we do so in possession of an understanding of trauma’s conceptual legacies and in conversation with broader affective, liberatory and reparative framings. The article is written in the spirit of becoming truly ‘trauma-informed’.

An engagement with affect theory is a significant way in which dimensions of social justice for the archival field can be elucidated, fleshed out, and ultimately confronted. Affect theory provides tools for undertaking substantive analyses of power and its abuses in order to better perform, more critically understand, and challenge and reconceptualize archival functions and concerns in support of social justice principles and goals. In this paper, I provide an introduction for the archival field to affect theory, arguing that the contributions of Ann Cvetkovich, Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant can critically expose, complicate and further work toward social justice in three areas of archival concern. First, drawing on Cvetkovich’s work, I argue that affective value should be surfaced and explicitly applied as an appraisal criterion. Second, extending Ahmed’s work on pain and witnessing to the archival realm and building on arguments that archivists are witnesses (Punzalan in Community archives: the shaping of memory, Facet, London, 187–219, 2009 ; Caswell in Archiving the unspeakable: Silence, memory and the photographic record in Cambodia. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2014a ), I argue that archivists are deeply implicated in webs of affective relations. Such relations require the archival field to expand its ethical orientation to address considerations of emotional justice. Finally, I build out of Berlant’s work to call out, define and analyze a different kind of archival relation, an affective investment in and attachment to damaging neoliberalist ideologies that shape the conditions of contemporary archival work.