I want to use this post to briefly touch on an issue, which has been popping up with increasing regularity, and focuses on the accessibility, or lack thereof, of many historical sources. I began my first post by outlining the reasons behind selecting Napier as a case study for this research. In doing so, I mentioned the earthquake of 1931 as something of a side note to illustrate the presence of more salient events in the region's history which may have obscured the significance of other narratives. I had thought that this would be the first and only time I would reference that event, believing it to have, perhaps somewhat naively, virtually nothing to do with the task at hand. As it turns out, however, it has proven more influential than expected. In acknowledging this fact, I turn toward the accessibility of sources and the presence of the digital for evidence of the impact this seemingly disparate event has had on the current research. Physical ImpactFor the most part, the connection between the earthquake which occurred on 3 February 1931, and the effort to trace the sample of 1890s women who form the cast of this suffrage narrative rests on the destructive power of the former. On more than one occasion, in recent weeks, I have come across potentially fruitful sources (church records, particularly, but also various school rolls and staff lists) accompanied by the caveat of partiality enforced by 1931. When searches for such sources return links to 'the Lost Archives' it is difficult not to contemplate the impact. The combination of the earthquake and fires which followed as a result destroyed a number of sources in various archival repositories. As such, the records for particular institutions, Napier Girls' High School, for example, or St Paul's Presbyterian Church, are incomplete. John Garnham and Gwenda Cowlrick acknowledged this issue in their centenary history of NGHS, noting that omissions attributable to the effects of the earthquake were inevitable but they could 'do little but acknowledge the problem.' Earthquake Damage on Tennyson Street, 1931. Credit: 'Tennyson Street, Napier', 3 February 1931, MTG Hawke's Bay, available: collection.mtghawkesbay.com/objects/84432 Acknowledgement of the problem is necessary. Its presence does, however, open avenues for discussion which I'll delve into ever so briefly here. Occurring, as it did, in 1931 the earthquake and its aftermath destroyed thousands of physical records containing, in many cases, information which cannot be easily obtained from any other single sources. This fact serves to highlight something which deserves further attention, from a digital history perspective: the perceived fragility of the physical source. Digital surrogates serve a vital preservation purpose, provided they keep pace with the changing technologies. Such absence as that created by the events of 1931 is, then, far more avoidable. This perception has been a driving force for much archival digitisation in recent decades. Such endeavours are regularly accompanied by the declaration that in producing digital facsimiles of these physical sources, they become instantly more accessible. Digital AccessibilityDigital scholars exhibit, perhaps understandably, a tendency to conflate notions of digital and accessible. Making something available online, or in some other digital form, does not, however, automatically accomplish this second objective. This issue has been noted by several scholars, particularly those seeking to examine the dynamic skill set required to navigate the ever-changing world of academic scholarship. With more and more resources being made available online, in some cases exclusively so, digital literacy is becoming increasingly important even, perhaps particularly, for those who do not acknowledge the technologically dependent nature of their fields. While physical sources may be fragile, and the argument is there to be made that they are no more fragile than some of their digital counterparts, the manner in which they can be accessed has changed very little. The 'participation gap', as some scholars have termed it, which is enforced by the digital needs to be considered. In digitising sources, and producing digital histories, we need to remain aware of the fact that we are limiting the scope of our audience to those capable of utilising them. Having come up against the barrier of physical fragility on more than one occasion, however, I am inclined to lean toward the pros of the digital over the cons. Sources and Further Reading
John Garnham and Gwenda Cowlrick, Ad Lucem: Napier Girls' High School 1884-1984, (Napier: NGHS, 1984). George Veletsianos and Royce Kimmons, 'Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship', IRRODL, Vol.13, no.4, October 2012, pp.167-189, doi: https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.vl3i4.1313.
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