Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Archivists processing documents rely on factors such as authorship and provenance to contextualize their materials and render them searchable. But in my past experience as an archives user, I repeatedly came across instances of anonymity: letters and diaries by unnamed authors or to unknown recipients, photographs of unknown subjects. In some cases this anonymity is a loss of information that was once there, but in other case it enabled the material to come into existence in the first place: such as in the case of satirical political poetry, for which a writer might face legal censure. In this literature review, the issue of anonymity in the archives is explored, both in a pragmatic sense (recommended strategies for managing it), and a philosophical sense (according anonymous documents the same status as documents with known authors).
Source: Bilgi Dünyası
DOI: 10.15612/bd.2013.119
Author: Emily Ross
Institution: Simmons University
Language: English
Subfield: Conservation
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1786243780