Dark archives or a dark age for reasoning over archives

Bibliographic Data

ID20398704
AuthorsMark Bell (0000-0003-0154-4651, National Archives), Jenny Bunn (0000-0002-1443-5449, National Archives, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume37
Issue3
Pages959-966
Publication date2022-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAI & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0951-5666 • E-ISSN: 1435-5655
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s00146-021-01365-z
OpenAlexW4206150696
LanguageEN
References cited19

This article considers that reasoning over archives is a joint enterprise between archivists and researchers and that both groups are increasingly using machine agents to assist them in it. It starts by considering the processing of archivists, researchers and machine agents separately. Using the different perspectives this brings to highlight different aspects of that processing, as a process of sense-making, as scholarly research activity, as practices that realise and achieve data for the drawing of further inference, it reasserts the argument that archives cannot be regarded as raw data to be reasoned over, but must be seen as the result of multiple representative and interpretive acts, of iterative realisation and activation as ‘data’ potentially involving many, many additional actors. It then goes on to consider how the involvement of machine agents fits into and potentially alters this picture by providing more detail about the basis on which they currently perform such acts

Data science · Human–computer interaction · Inference · Programming language · Raw data · Realisation · Archaeological Research and Protection · Computer Science · Digital and Traditional Archives Management · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Artificial Intelligence

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