DIGITAL ARCHIVAL LITERACY FOR (ALL) HISTORIANS

For centuries, understanding archives has been key to historians' work. Within the last decades, the increasing availability of sources in digital archives has fostered a growing need to understand how the logics of these influence historical research. Because, even if the digital representations of the individual sources might appear similar to those in analogue archives, using digital archives impacts the work of historians in new ways. In this article, I offer an outline for a digital archival literacy which supports a professional reflection on the everyday uses of digital archives. I propose seeing the shift from analogue to digital archives as a shift in medium, which establishes a new set of logics for the archival production, content, distribution and use. The framework draws upon notions of media literacy developed within the British Cultural Studies tradition.