Close Reading, Distant Reading: Should Archival Appraisal Adjust? | The Signal: Digital Preservation

Digital humanists and digital historians are employing research methods that most of us did not anticipate when we were learning to be archivists.  Do new types of research mean archivists should re-examine the way we learned to do appraisal?

The new types of researchers are experimenting with methods beyond the scholarly tradition of “close reading.”  When paper archives were the only game in town, close reading was all a researcher could do – it’s what we generally mean by “reading.”  Researchers studied individual records, extracting meaning and context from the information contained in each document.  Now, however, digital humanists are using born-digital or digitized collections to explore the benefits of computational analysis techniques, or “distant reading.” They are using computer programs to analyze patterns and find meaning in entire corpora of records without a human ever reading any individual record at all.

http://1.usa.gov/1yz5GUl

Source: http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/10/close-reading-distant-reading-should-archival-appraisal-adjust/?loclr=twdig
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