One of Pandora's Archives｜The Fundamental Logic of the Archives World 2/2 (Let Love Generate Electricity Season 2)

In the first paragraph of "The Fundamental Logic of the Archival World", we discussed the archives that are intuitively understood by ordinary people , or can be said to be the archives seen from the perspective of historical research. In today's second paragraph, we change our position and talk about archives from the perspective of archivists. .

The content of this time is mainly<br class="smart">The task of the archivist: to understand and reconstruct the context The troubles of the archivist: the remaining documents and historical materials after the context disappears Examples: The Dutch East India Company archives have nothing to do with the East India Company archives Filer's Fun: There's a Reasoning Game Too

In the autumn of 1991,Yan Plush received a doctorate in historical geography from Leiden University. Despite his Ph.D., he was at a loss for his future, so he made a life-changing decision to attend the archives school set up at the General National Archives (later renamed the National Archives) in The Hague.

"Finding the wrong person and getting married did not have as much impact on my life as going to the archives school." Yan Plover said with a laugh.

The Archives School of the State General Archives is a professional school with a master's degree or above. The talents trained by this school are high-level archivists, which are different from ordinary archivists trained by the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Yan Lingshi was instructed to deal with the files of a large corporate family during his internship, and the content of the files was disjointed and chaotic, which made him suffer a lot.

Yan Plushi uses an example to illustrate the core work of the archives. It is said that this is the most concise and clear example he can think of, and he often uses this example when teaching beginners.

Suppose you are a student of Yan Plushi, together with other students, everyone makes an album of their campus life, which is full of photos. Some people write under the photos, others stick cards next to the photos to draw illustrations, but everyone's life album is very colorful and contains a lot of information about individuals and each other. You gave the album to Yan Plushi as a souvenir, but his brother actually said, "This takes up too much space!" returned all albums.

If, after many years, everyone is dead, and this big cookie box somehow goes into the campus archives, some unfortunate archivist opens the lid of the cookie box and sees a ton of photos, but because there's nothing but photos, he It is difficult to archive these photos.

"The job of an archivist," Yan Pingshi emphasized, "is to trace back to the original state of documents, which is called the original order in archival science. We need to find this original order before we know how to organize the documents at hand. Archivists cannot What sorts out the order and builds the archives is just a bunch of documents, like the photo of that cookie box.”

The difficulties Yan Plushi encountered during his internship at the Archives School were no better than the photos in the big biscuit box, a collection of personal letters interspersed with business documents. Finally, by judging the contents of the letters, he learned that the addressee of these letters was a certain manager, who "was divorced about 20 times", had a colorful love life, and received many love letters from women.

"Twenty divorces is an exaggeration," I said.

"That's what it means. There are really many love letters written by different women. I don't know if any of the women who wrote love letters married him and then divorced."

"Didn't you read the content? You should know."

"The purpose of the archivist's interpretation of the content is to establish the order of filing, not the content itself ." Yan Lingshi said sternly, "Which year and month did someone die, and who married or divorced? That's history. work at home."

The content and the context in which the content exists is the most fundamental difference between the historian and the archivist. If there is no archivist to judge the context and try to establish the archives according to the original order, historians cannot use the archives. Although archivists often come across documents that they do not know what to do with them, conscientious archivists at least make a basic description of the documents and build an inventory ( inventaris ) in some way.

Take, for example, the Allied East India Company dossier, which has been discussed before. The seventh of the eight sub-categories of this archive is called " documents not related to the East India Company archives ". It is conceivable that the archivists who made the inventory in 1811 found among the documents left by the East India Company documents that were not made by the East India Company.

"Just like the file of the business family, it should be a business document, but it turned out to be a lot of love letters, which were written by different people." Yan Lingshi said.

However, the documents classified as "irrelevant" by the archivists in the East India Company archives were, after all, more "relevant" than the business correspondence of a certain business family. For example, the description of the first data (below) under the seventh sub-category is:

14912 News of Dutch business dealings in Asia 1597-1601 in German Two pieces

Note: Most people might think that the East India Company was a trading company, and that news related to business activities in their archives should be regarded as related to the East India Company, right?

Perhaps intuitively so, but the archivist is judging the document from the point of view of the main body of the archive (in this case, the East India Company), so although the content of the document is not unrelated to the activities of the East India Company, it is classified under " not related to the East India Company".

Or we can look at the next piece of information (below), the description given by the archivist is:

14913 Letter from the Prefect of Rio de Janeiro to the King of Spain in 1730 concerning the arrival of three Dutch ships

Although the content of this document involved the Dutch ship, it was classified as "irrelevant" by the archivists because it was not a document produced or received by the East India Company itself.

Archivists can create an "irrelevant" category to contain disorganized and clueless documents, but this tool is not very convenient, because judging whether there is a relationship itself involves more detailed content reading, such as the two documents mentioned above. , the archivist must be able to read at least German and Portuguese to classify it as "irrelevant".

Sometimes, archivists are faced with hopeless documents that are enough to cause the earth to collapse, and even the inventory cannot be established, then these documents will be silently squatting somewhere in the archives. Because there is no inventory, historians not only can't even touch it, but they are more likely to be completely unaware of the existence of these documents.

"Where's the picture in the big cookie tin?" I asked.

"That's not too difficult. After all, there are so many faces and backgrounds, even if you can't recognize people, the backgrounds may be recognizable. It is still possible to describe the large number of photos and list them in the list. ......" Having said this, Yan Plover suddenly felt blessed: "Your strange notebook can also be used as an example!"

Yan Plushi refers to a Sudoku notebook I made for fun. Every day, I cut out the Sudoku of the day from the newspaper and paste it into the notebook. After the whole book is full, I will cover it and paste it up, and occasionally I will paste some short news to occupy the page space.

Yan Lingshi flipped through my Sudoku notes, "Look, people are really boring. They can make things with unknown uses. Suppose this thing is in the hands of the archivist, how should the archivist describe this object?"

First, the archivist will give a summary description of the notebook's appearance, such as the number of openings, the number of sheets, and the quality of the paper. In addition, he will also summarize the contents of the notebook, which may be described as " Sudoku games and news cut from the "People's Daily", Time to include at least December 2020. ”

"How do you know? Don't make a random list!"

"Because there is news here. Although the name and date of the newspaper are gone, I can tell at a glance that it is a newspaper. As long as I can find the source of the news for this corner of the text, I can deduce that these Sudoku games may also be from the same Newspapers. Whether it’s the same source or not, we’ll find out as soon as we check.”

"Naja," I said, "Elementary, my dear Watson!"

The archivist's archival world is just that. Historians like to talk about context, and always put historical materials in context to understand . The part we usually don’t see is the context provided to historians by archivists . If the archivist makes a mistake, it will at least cause trouble for the historian, and may even mislead the research, and history is full of examples of such misclassification being corrected.

This is where the fundamental logic of the archive world comes in. Next time we will talk about the tasks of the National Archives in the contemporary era , using the example of the intense public criticism that the National Archives of the Netherlands faced three years ago.