Digitization and anonymization: what does a name mean?

About a month I was granted a scholarship from the Swedish national archives to conduct a four months study on ethics and digization. This project can in some terms be seen as a party-pooper project, since one of the key aims is to describe complexities within the digization of cultural heritage. For the past years, digitization have become a key element in the discussion on how to increase accesibility of the cultural heritage and the long term preservation of records. Whilst the latter have been subject to much debate, such as how we can handle formats become obsolete there have been little discussion on the ethics of digitization within Swedish academic circles. This even though in an international perspective, ethics have played a larger and larger part in big scale digitization projects. 

Drawing inspiration from Fredrik Skotts article "finns den på nätet" (is it avaible online) I view digitization as both a tool for increasing accesibility and a threat towards the individuals within the records. Therefore, digization projects can both be seen as a tool in achieving democracy but also as a threat towards human rights granting the right to privacy. The core of this debate is many times my view the question of dead people have rights, which has been discussed in public inquiries about access to offical documents since the late 1930's. 

From an archival theory perspective this is an issue that is hard to solve. The most obvious solution to the problem is anonymization, where we remove everything that makes it possible to identify the individual. This however comes into conflict with core values of information management, which often aims to make things and people findable in the archives as well as preserving the records integrity. When we anonymize we go into record a mark things as secret, thus creating new problems with using the source for historical research since it calls into question if other information have been tampered with. 

On the other hand, the new archival theory often highlights the need of what David Mindel calls equity. This term means that archives never should only contain a single voice of the majority, but instead also should contain information on marginalized groups. The problem with being in a marginalized group is however that it often comes with the risk of being repressed due to ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. In this perspective it would be wise to anonymize the record, to shield the persons within it. Or atleast so I thought, until I read two colleagues of mines (Malin Thor Thureby and Kristina Wagrells) article on archival vulnerability.  Drawing inspiration from Butler, Thor Thureby and Wagrell highlights that categorizing certain groups as vulnerable often renders them the position of being deprived agency. They thus go from individuals to a nameless collective that merely are described as victims. Furthermore, anonymization also deprives people of their right to tell their story and being remembered as just individuals with feelings and agency. 


So, how do we handle this tension? I do not have the answer to that, but I hope that my coming project which aims to go into dialogue with archivists can provide some insights. Until our scientific understanding if these ethical questions is answered, we perhaps should move with caution. 


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