Typewriting Mass Observation Online

This article examines how the digital is politicizing medium within historical studies. Through a critical evaluation of Mass Observation Online (MOO: the online portal for the Mass Observation Archive), the paper traces how OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has established a new hierarchy in a key archive of British social memory, centred around the typewriter, whose products can be transformed into searchable digital text. It shows how a new economy of representation has been created based not on what Observers wrote, but what they wrote with. This has serious historiographical consequences for research drawn from MOO. Typewriting during the interwar period was connected to wider historical forces, including changes in white-collar work, gender roles and cultures of representation. Privileging typewritten material, therefore, is changing how we understand MO materials: from the constitution of the national panel, to the identity of Observers, the form and content of materials, and the nature of life-writing. This distortion is not limited to MOO, but this article will show how the digital has made medium a key site around which primary source materials, archival collections and digital interfaces are being structured. As historical collections are increasingly accessed through digital interfaces, it is argued that increased attention must be paid by historians and archivists to the historiographical dimensions of media and its impact on digital historical collections.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Digital media · Hierarchy · Historiography · Identity (music) · Key (lock) · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics) · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Digital and Traditional Archives Management · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Image Processing and 3D Reconstruction · Law

• Space, text and selfhood

  James Baker, David Geiringer•Contemporary British History•2018

  Incluir item

• The ghost in the machine

  Open Access•Kathryn Spicksley•International Journal of Research…•2026

  Incluir item

• Technical Literature and the Text-Searchable

  Jeffrey Manuel, J S Manuel•Technology s Stories•2021

  Incluir item

• Women and Work in Britain since 1840

  Gerry Holloway•Women and Work in Britain Since…•2007

  Incluir item

• Archives, memory, and interfaces with the past

  Open Access•Maynard Hedstrom, Margaret Hedstrom•Archival Science•2002

  Incluir item

• Confronting the Digital

  Tim Hitchcock•Cultural and Social History•2013

  Incluir item

• Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines

  Andre Millard, Lisa Gitelman•Journal of American History•2001

  Incluir item

• Understanding media

  Marshall Mcluhan, Marshal McLuhan•Understanding media•1994

  Incluir item

• The Transnational and the Text-Searchable

  Lara Putnam•The American Historical Review•2016

  Incluir item

• Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

  Friedrich Kittler, Dorothea Von Mücke et al.•October•1987

  Incluir item

• The White-Blouse Revolution

  Vincent Mosco, Gregory Anderson et al.•Labour / Le Travail•1990

  Incluir item

• The Materiality of Method

  Open Access•Liz Moor, Emma Uprichard•Sociological Research Online•2014

  Incluir item

• Writing to the Archive

  Open Access•Dorothy Sheridan•Sociology•1993

  Incluir item

• Arts of Transmission

  James Chandler, Chandler et al.•Critical Inquiry•2004

  Incluir item