Archives Wars and Digital Duels: My History with Digitization

Comanche raids. Royal proclamations. Ransomed captives. Processions of gifts to appease native tribes. Amnesties for prisoners granted in honor of infantas’ births. Suits over the herding of wild cattle and the branding of slaves. Treatments for small pox and, of course, chiggers.

These are the characters, the dramas and heated histories that inhabit my encounters with digitization. They are the residents—friends and enemies—of the Spanish province of Texas in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and their stories spring to life in the pages of the Bexar Archives, a collection of over 250,000 manuscript pages that resides at UT Austin’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.

Courtesy of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.

I began working as an intern on the Bexar Archives Online digitization project just a few short months after moving to Texas, when I was just beginning to formulate a vague impression of life in this new state and Austin was still an exotic land of BBQ and vegan taco trucks, burnt orange football swarms and guerilla knit graffiti.

Despite my complete lack of Spanish language skills (thank goodness for the Center’s decades of work on translations!), assisting with the Bexar Archives project soon confirmed for me that Texas history is a chronicle of clashing and conflating cultures, pride and passion and vengeance. Above all, it’s a tale of archives wars.

Fire away, Angelina! (But don't singe the records!)

There was the infamous episode in 1841, of course, when Sam Houston declared Austin to be "the most unfortunate site on earth for a seat of government" and attempted to abscond with the Republic’s archives in hopes of reinstating his namesake city as the rightful capital. Just try it, Sammy! Didn’t take long for archival hero Angelina Eberly to fire her cannon and alert the Austinites to the attempted raid.

Over a century before that cannon fire, however, there were residents of the same land—Spanish, Mexican, Native American, French—making records and battling for their own territorial rights, their own namesake cities. Fighting their own archives wars.

Digitization has shown me these layers of what I am learning to love, what I moved here to understand—records.

Courtesy of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.

In honor of that, I have selected a document from the Bexar Archives as the background for this blog: “Inventory of records for 1778-1779 received and filed in the Archives of Béxar,” by Governor Domingo Cabello, December 20, 1779.

Through this course, I look forward to confronting the “digioverload” that dominates our lives today and exploring the questions and conflicts that inspired me to pursue this degree:

What special value is contained in the actual object versus a representation of the object? Could we develop a digital format capable of capturing the profound authenticity unique to the physical artifact itself, freeing precious archival space and making a new, uniquely rich experience of that object available to more people than ever before? How might we use digitization technology to expand access to physical materials—not only to replicate but to enhance the magic and the power of the original object? As born-digital becomes the norm, how will our definitions of provenance and authenticity evolve? How might the appeal and accessibility of digital formats serve to increase awareness and appreciation of archives? Can we ensure that the benefits of digitization outweigh the conundrums of metadata standards, data security, emulation, and migration? How might digitization function as a tool for both preservation and reinvention, stability and creativity?

Sound like it’s about time for another archives war: let the digioverload begin!