In late October, Ms. Davis delivered the keynote talk at a conference sponsored by the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at University College London. The gathering, provocatively called "Failure in the Archives," invited scholars and archivists to explore blind spots and blank spaces they encounter in their work, and to talk about how they might help each other do their jobs better.

Humanities scholars rarely talk about their failures. Publications and promotion depend on making discoveries in the archives, not losing one’s way in them. But as researchers try to recover lives and experiences absent from the official record, they work within archival systems that weren’t set up to help them find what they’re in search of. And digital-era scholars with a world of information at their fingertips don’t always have the patience or the know-how to pick through the idiosyncratic records of the past.