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Perspectives on working with archived textual and visual material in social research: editors’ introduction

Working with archived textual and visual material is a growing phenomenon in social science research. Long-standing archives exist, holding historical material and objects as well as continuing to establish collections of recent material, and newer archives have also been established with the express purpose of providing textual and visual data for reuse by social researchers. In all cases, the archive is a container for the collection, organisation, representation and production of meaning and scholars in the field of archive studies have debated the politics of the archive in terms of its constitution and interpretation (e.g. Cox, 2000). Our focus in this Special Issue is not the whole field of archive studies. Rather, this Special Issue is concerned with the emergent methodological issues for social scientists working with various forms of archived textual and visual data from a variety of perspectives. These issues include those confronting archivists making available material for use or reuse by social researchers; those confronting social researchers who have collected data as part of original research projects that will be archived for reuse by other social researchers and those confronting social researchers who are undertaking secondary analysis or reuse of archived data as both researchers and teachers. These categories of archivist, archiver, and user are not always distinct, of course; archivists may be users as well, for example, and users may be archivers too. That is readily apparent in the contributions to this Special Issue. The reality of archives today is a long way from the traditional image with which they have been associated of the inaccessible and dusty repository of parochial documents (Steedman, 2001). This is the case for several reasons. Much has happened to make the contents of archives more accessible. In part this can be attributed to the application of advances in technology such as digitisation, which makes it possible for users to gain remote access to archives, as well as greatly assisting the searchability of the materials they contain. The value of accessibility is also more readily appreciated as an aspect of the opening up of knowledge to an ever-wider body of users whose purposes and interests have expanded in line with the expansion in their numbers. Bishop’s article on the use of archived materials in teaching provides a good example of how the range of users of archived material is expanding. As a result of the growth in the army of archive users, archives are busy places frequented by people searching for knowledge, by people seeking to make their materials available and of course by those people whose role is to facilitate these processes. It is not only technology that has transformed archives, it is also the demand for access to the materials that archives contain and the growth of materials that people are seeking to archive. One element underlying the impulse to archive is the sense of loss relating to materials no longer available, which for one International Journal of Social Research Methodology Vol. 15, No. 4, July 2012, 259–262