Archival Theory and Digital Historiography: Selection, Search, and Metadata as Archival Processes for Assessing Historical Contextualization

Digital history, a field within the digital humanities, has challenged the disciplinary boundary that in recent decades has come to separate the work of historians and archivists. A new theory and methodology that draws from both disciplines can create a shared vocabulary for the production, use, and evaluation of digital historical representations, a broad term that encompasses an array of products such as archives, databases, geospatial visualizations, and mobile applications. This article argues that archival theory, when combined with historiography and technical or computational standards, contributes to a new theory called digital historiography. Digital historiography is defined as the interdisciplinary study of the interaction of digital technology with historical practice. Three archival processes—selection, search, and the application of metadata—form the theory's foundation for determining a digital historical representation's contextualization, which may aid in assessing its trustworthiness and effectiveness to communicate historical knowledge.