I know we already discussed this in class, but I’m still just blown away by the article “Digitization: Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should.” I can’t imagine being in the subject of the video’s position, having consented to a very niche audience seeing the material and then having it digitized for people across the world to see. This article definitely resonated with me in thinking about my own work. My current main focus is on Reconstruction, but I’m also deeply interested in queer history, including the 20th century, so this is the only area I research in which my subjects are sometimes still alive, or still have living loved ones. It also happens to be one of the most sensitive subjects in a person’s life, and issues of privacy in particular surrounding queerness are huge. The concept of “outing”, I feel, shouldn’t stop once one enters the context of academia, and I don’t think outing just means revealing another person as gay–I feel, in my opinion, that it means revealing the “specifics” of what that means to that person to others without their consent. Even though it feels like digitizing content on historically (and currently) marginalized groups should automatically be a good thing, as it raises visibility and therefore, in theory, awareness, it’s far more important to respect the actual human beings involved, even if their wishes are to be left out of the archives.
I think one of the first times I ever considered the issue of privacy in historical research was in undergrad, when I was researching a group of female Irish nationalists from the Irish War of Independence. After the War ended and southern Ireland became the Republic of Ireland, many of these women applied for pensions from the government on the basis of their service during the war. This meant that these applications were essentially pages upon pages of women frankly recalling their actions during the War, such as hiding men and weapons in their homes, obfuscating the British police, and actively participating in events like Bloody Sunday, where multiple revolutionary groups occupied government buildings for multiple days, keeping British soldiers out by firing at them from the windows. There were women participating in every government building but one. Aside from how interesting all of that is, when I chose this research topic in 2021, the pension applications had just been made available, maybe a few years prior. This was because the last woman in the applications had passed on. Many of the women who participated were very young at the time, so many survivors of the War were still around until very recently. As such, the information in those pension applications could have led to them receiving retaliation all those years later, especially considering how incredibly charged the topic of Irish independence still is. That was one of those “OH!” moments, where it finally really clicked for me what the real-world consequences of unearthing primary sources can be for the people in those sources.
In conclusion, I really enjoyed the readings and discussing the ethics of digitizing materials! I’m going to take the title of the article “Digitization: Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should” as a motto if I’m ever in charge of any sort of project where I’m digitizing materials.