The Problem of Anonymity in Archives: A Literature Review

The Problem of Anonymity in Archives: A Literature Review

Blog Article

Archivists processing documents rely on factors such as authorship and provenance to contextualize their materials and render them searchable.But in my read more past experience as an archives user, I repeatedly came across instances of anonymity: letters and diaries by unnamed authors or to unknown recipients, photographs of unknown subjects.In some cases this anonymity is a loss of information that was once there, but in other case it enabled the material to come into existence product in the first place: such as in the case of satirical political poetry, for which a writer might face legal censure.

In this literature review, the issue of anonymity in the archives is explored, both in a pragmatic sense (recommended strategies for managing it), and a philosophical sense (according anonymous documents the same status as documents with known authors).