Historical Interpretation and Digital Objects: Considerations based on Concrete Examples
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51349/veg.2022.1.03Keywords:
Digital History, Digital Objects, ArchiveAbstract
One of the fundamental problems for historical research that employs digital objects is how these latter should be interpreted. In addition to issues relating to the preservation of digital objects, already covered by archival science in the main, there are also questions around the analysis of digital collections without curation, or that are semi-structured, partial, etc. Departing from a well-known definition of digital objects that proposes to think about their physical, logical and conceptual layers (K Thibodeu), this article discusses the implications of said definition for the historical analysis of digital objects on the basis of concrete cases, using collections of digital objects of differing volume and purpose: chat logs and huge collections such as Geocities.com.
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