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A thread on the #SHEAR2020 plenary session yesterday:
Documentary editors find, transcribe, annotate, and publish sources for other scholars. Very loosely speaking, documentary history is a project centered around a topic or a person. The Papers of Andrew Jackson, led by Daniel Feller, is one of many such projects.
It’s my experience that there is an undercurrent of resentment held by documentary editors towards historians. We in the documentary editing field sometimes gripe that we are not taken seriously—that we don’t get the recognition we deserve.
Are we recognized in the academy as experts in the field for our contribution and scholarship or are we seen as simply the purveyors of historical sources? (What this tendency for insecurity does to our professions is a thread for another day.)
Documentary editors work to understand and present the facts. For instance, accurate and reliable transcriptions are our bread and butter. And we should rightly be proud of our work. (Many of us are!)
After figuring out a particularly tricky textual issue, it’s a well-earned victory. We are a detail-oriented sub-field. We exert so much effort in the facts that when we see mistakes in others’ works we sometimes pounce. (I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve done this myself)
But it’s actually more than getting the facts right. We, as documentary editors, sometimes feel that we have earned the right to be one of the few gatekeepers of the “archive.” We are the curators, custodians, and caretakers of the historical record (or so we sometimes think).
But historians have been spending years dismantling or decentering the archive. Their work has been instrumental in offering a more complex, nuanced, and complete history of the past. They write books based upon their insight in reading against the archival grain.
Historians (and archivists) are becoming more and more aware of what some groups have known their whole life: archives, like so many societal systems, are constructed by those in power to document and perpetuate certain “realities” that are incomplete and often inaccurate.
Documentary editors who focus on the papers of white men need to be aware of those conversations. (And again, many are!)
We *are* experts on (one of) the archive(s). We not only know the contents of that archive, but we understand how and often why it was created. We know of its limitations and who is missing. We should be using our scholarship to complicate the creation of the dominant archive.
I’m convinced there is value in continued attention paid to the archive established generations ago, but we cannot and should not take it at face value, nor should we ignore (and certain not belittle!) the scholars drawing upon "non-traditional" sources.
(BIG DISCLAIMER): There are fantastic documentary editing projects out there that center and highlight the voices of indigenous people, enslaved people, African Americans, women, and other historically marginalized people.
For just a few examples, scroll through the ADE website: http://www.documentaryediting.org/wordpress/?page_id=363
