Ethics in digitalization

 In 2019 a swedish government enquiry for the future of archive politics where launched. In it, digitalization was proposed as a important way forward for the Swedish archives since it both cut public spending and increase the access of public records. During the past twenty years or so, society have been singing praise to digitalization but one question still remains with cultural heritage: should everything be made accessible for a wider public?

In 2011 Paul Dalgleish published his paper "The thorniest area" which conceptualized an important question: what happens to privacy of those creating the record once they are published online? Drawing on the idea that psychical archives comes with certain informal limitations, such that a person have to visit an archive and take photocopies of the material the digitalization provides a challenge. This challenge is due to that when material becomes digitalized they become avaible for every person to read, even though for instance the original material was written for a limited circle. Whilst Dalgleish mostly makes us of the example of private letters there exist a wide amount of material that today already is digitalized, even though the creation of the records can be highly questionable. I could draw up several examples of them, but I will be satisified with two. 

On a public webpage a leading swedish archive institution have published police rapports on suspected homosexual activity at a public toilet. In it, the suspects are mentioned by name and occupation, thus making it possible for their relatives today to relate to them. Thereby, the people in the material are described as homosexuals, even though they were mearly a part of an ongoing investigation. Given the large social stigma at the time, when homosexuals were persecuted throughout Sweden, it becomes possible to question the ethics of pointing finger. 

Another example is a prison index, where every inmate is both identified with name, occupation, birth year, what they have sentenced for and a photograph. Whilst the digitalization of this material comes with several possible benefits - such as making the material accessible for family historians - they fail to provide context. Just beacause a person served time in prison, they did not actually have to be guilty of the charges pressed for them. Even today mistakes are regularly made within the justice system, and during the early 20th century such mistakes were probably even more common both due to the lack of investigating technique, and the social standards at the time. 

Printscreen transgender archives 


I am not anti-digitalization, on the contrary I believe that it is something that brings society closer to history. I also follows on Fredrik Skotts notion that archives need to highlight even the darker sides of society, since we otherwise would provide a history-writing washed clean of the backsides of society. This has posed me, both as scholar, archivist and lastly fellow human, with the question of how the dilemma between the need to create an inclusive history and the integrity of those within the records. Anonymizatio would for instance not work in this case, since part of makes the material so interesting is the possibility to actually follow certain individuals. Instead I have come to a proponent of what I, in lack of a better word, calls for critical ethical contextualization. 

This approach means that the records but can and should be digitialized, but that the records need to be combined with a critiqual discussion of how they were created. This can be done through both providing the social context - such as the purge of homosexuals or the lack of justice in the justice system - as well as an appraisal of the records themselves: what do they actually tell us? Is the recorded really what happened? This is not a fully satisfactory solution to the ethical dilemmas posed in this text, but it might be a way forward. And after all, to quote Arnold Schwarzeneger, small succeses over time will build up to great victories.  

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