Digital archives - solving the issue of de-abstracting history?

 For the past years I have taught alot of history, ranging from large oversights to supervising thesis work. In the first part of teaching I early on realised that my background as an archivist would work to be a benefit, but it's first during the latest year I have actually developed a method for including primary sources fluently in my teaching. The perhaps hardest part of teaching large global history courses is that partly what to view as most important, and in many cases the course curriculums states both the need to learn about important actors, but also social structures. Since these courses also cover the development in vast geographic areas, it is also hard to actually give the students a way to make their work concrete. And in is here that digital archives many times have come to my rescue. 

Starting with the obvious form of source critique, digital archives should never be the historians sole source of information if we have to do with transcribed material. Humans will always error when copying, and furthermore digital archives often contains editions of archival material. It is only through actually working with primary sources in their structured containers we truly can grasp their context and make sure that my interpretation does not includes rests of the archivists. However, teaching actually works quite differently. The aim of incoorparting sources of history in teaching is not teach the students how to actually conduct historical work, but rather both how historians in theory work and how the material from the course literature can be understood through remanents of the past. 

In my teaching on antiquity I had the pleasure of teaching the social structures of germanic tribes during the first century after our own time. I could have spent ten minutes talking about how the age of marriage unlike in the roman world was quite high and how family relationships played a large part. In part I did just that for the first five minutes of my lecture, but I also in-corporated the works of roman writer Tacticus, whose works is quite accesible online and in detail told the story of how the german tribes organized their society. What I did then was quite simple:

I took Tacticus text on family relations from the web, pulled it through chatGPT and edited the language until it was satisfactory in Swedish. Then I presented the except on a powerpoint with questions on how Tacticus viewed the germanic tribes, which were largely the same description as utilized in the course literature. From there I asked my students to discuss some aspects of the source with questions derrived from the literature. 

Tacticus Germania in it's original form.
Hardly something you'd put in the hand of
undergraduate students. 

What I hoped to achieve with this excerise was two-foldth. Firstly, it enabled given the students a clear real life example of how the germanic tribes arranged their society. Secondly, I was both open about Tacticus being a roman (and therefore writing from a roman perspective) as well as how I had processed the source into being readable in Swedish, thereby enabling a form of source and text critique. This is a excerise I have utilized quite frequently but I am often suprised by the result, where students often feel that their understanding goes from the abstract to the concrete. 

Drawing inspiration from a conference I visited some months ago, the history profession is undergoing a transformation. This transformation can be seen as historians leaving the archives (to put it to the extreme) and instead focusing on questions of how history is utilized in society. To some extent, this explained by the archival sector as the result of historians being afraid of archives. They are hard to handle, and the records they contain often hard to read. By working this way my aim is to de-dramatize the fear of the archive, and instead show it's possibilities, thereby keeping my own trades traditions alive. Hopefully, this and the digital turn might enable a re-discovery of the archive, similar to that of von Rankes writing in the mid of the 19th century which created history as a academic discipline. 

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