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Provocations on the pleasures of archived paper

Digital formats are often popularly imagined to spell the ‘end’ of paper. In this essay I pose a series of questions about the importance of materiality for how researchers understand and work with archived paper documents. Drawing examples from research among literary papers and personal correspondence, I highlight the ways in which paper traditionally ‘disappears’ from the researcher’s view and ask whether the conditions of the digital turn may in fact provide for a return to ‘thinking through paper’.