Matters of substance: materiality and meaning in historical records and their digital images

Abstract

Historical records embody the contexts of their creation and use through time, but their materiality may be perceived as a neutral background to their content. Analogue records are increasingly available online as digital images, and these images may be perceived as surrogates with evidential value equivalent to the source document. This paper presents a set of prompts for developing awareness of materiality in analogue records, and considers how these prompts might be applied to digital images of analogue records. The paper concludes with suggestions for how archives might acknowledge and mitigate some of the limitations of these representations.