Archival Engagement in Historical Geography
Summary
Archival engagement in historical geography encompasses the methods and practices by which geographers access, interrogate and interpret archival materials to reconstruct past landscapes, spatial practices and social relations. Traditionally conceived as a passive storehouse of documents, the archive is now recognised as an active arena of knowledge production. Scholars explore both the silences of incomplete or suppressed records and the challenges posed by the sheer volume of materials in large collections. Digital technologies have reshaped access to dispersed holdings, enabling new forms of fragmentary analysis and synthetic storytelling. At the same time, attention to the materiality and embodied experience of archives highlights how physical interaction, sensory encounter and affect shape research outcomes. Collaborative approaches—whether with community groups, archivists or other stakeholders—further underline the dynamic relationships that animate archival work and the ethical dimensions of selecting, interpreting and disseminating sensitive or contested histories. These developments resonate across global contexts, illuminating colonial legacies, environmental transformations and the stories of marginalised communities.
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Archival Engagement in Historical Geography publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in archival engagement in historical geography across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Archival recombination: A practice of digitally extracting and reassembling fragments of archival information from diverse collections to create new spatial-temporal narratives.
Co-curation: A collaborative research process in which scholars, archivists and community stakeholders jointly select, organise and interpret archival materials.
Embodied archives: An approach that emphasises the physical, sensory and affective dimensions of archive engagement, recognising how bodies shape and are shaped by archival spaces and materials.
References
- Digital archives and recombinant historical geographies. Progress in Human Geography (2022).
- On absence and abundance: biography as method in archival research. Area (2017).
- Co‐curation: Archival interventions and voluntary sector records. Area (2021).
- Body of Evidence: Time and Desire in Embodied Archives. Qualitative Inquiry (2022).
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