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Archival objects in motion: historians’ appropriation of sources in nineteenth-century Austria and Switzerland

Archival objects in motion: historians’ appropriation of sources in nineteenth-century Austria... This contribution examines the social, material, and epistemic practices of historians and their counterparts engaged in the textual and visual reproduction of historical sources in nineteenth-century Austria and Switzerland. The Schweizerische Urkundenregister (1863–1877), a Swiss register of medieval charters, and the Monumenta graphica medii aevi (1859–1883), an Austrian collection of photographic facsimiles of medieval sources, were both intended to make historical sources accessible outside the archives in the framework of national history. The article analyzes institutional collaborations and the social interactions among the actors involved and follows the trajectories of the mobilized archival objects. These projects for national source publications appear as a negotiated social practice, in which archival objects were dislocated conceptually as well as materially in order to be stabilized and reified again in new infrastructures of research. The conflicts surrounding the projects reveal disputes about authority over the archival records, their significance, and the techniques required to represent them properly, and show how the emergence of scholarly source publications accompanied a conscious erasure of older contexts of meaning. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Archival Science Springer Journals

Archival objects in motion: historians’ appropriation of sources in nineteenth-century Austria and Switzerland

Saxer, Daniela
Archival Science , Volume 10 (3) – Oct 7, 2010
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17 pages

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References (57)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
Subject
Cultural and Media Studies; Library Science; Organization; Information Storage and Retrieval; Anthropology; Cultural Heritage; Computer Appl. in Arts and Humanities
ISSN
1389-0166
eISSN
1573-7519
DOI
10.1007/s10502-010-9126-x
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This contribution examines the social, material, and epistemic practices of historians and their counterparts engaged in the textual and visual reproduction of historical sources in nineteenth-century Austria and Switzerland. The Schweizerische Urkundenregister (1863–1877), a Swiss register of medieval charters, and the Monumenta graphica medii aevi (1859–1883), an Austrian collection of photographic facsimiles of medieval sources, were both intended to make historical sources accessible outside the archives in the framework of national history. The article analyzes institutional collaborations and the social interactions among the actors involved and follows the trajectories of the mobilized archival objects. These projects for national source publications appear as a negotiated social practice, in which archival objects were dislocated conceptually as well as materially in order to be stabilized and reified again in new infrastructures of research. The conflicts surrounding the projects reveal disputes about authority over the archival records, their significance, and the techniques required to represent them properly, and show how the emergence of scholarly source publications accompanied a conscious erasure of older contexts of meaning.

Journal

Archival Science – Springer Journals

Published: Oct 7, 2010

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