Archives - The Basics: Using Archives

An archival document should not be considered neutral evidence. Different document types come with their own inherent biases, informed primarily by considerations of audience and purpose.

It is important to remember that, whilst we might use a document for its archival value when contributing to a historical debate, the creators of that document did not necessarily have in mind future researchers as an audience and future research use as a purpose.

Taking a look at a few common document types will allow us to explore this concept further:

Diaries are an obvious case in point. Most people who keep a diary do so for personal use only. The audience goes no further than the creator, and the purpose can be very personal to an individual. Someone might use a diary as a memory aid, as a practical record of things they have done; whilst others might use a diary to record thoughts and feelings for self-therapy. For these reasons, diaries can be heavily biased towards the recording of events and opinions of significance to the writer. Whilst this makes diaries less useful for a factual analysis, it makes them highly useful as a source of qualitative analysis. It can also make using them to study the big events of the day frustrating in the instance that individual writers have not thought it significant enough to themselves to record such events, although this in itself can say something interesting about the writer.

Letters are another example where the audience is not intended to be wide reaching. The same writer might craft letters in a different way depending on who the intended recipient is. If writing to a personal acquaintance for the purposes of keeping in touch, the author of a letter might include more expansive thoughts and opinions, family news etc. If writing to a professional contact, the author of a letter might be succinct and to the point, providing necessary information on a given topic only. The content of a letter is therefore biased by the intended recipient and the reason for writing.

Propagandist pamphlets and posters are a very overt example of inherent bias. The original purpose behind the creation of such material is to persuade an audience of the validity of a particular viewpoint. Devices such as language selection, colour and imagery are employed specifically to make an argument more appealing to a given audience. Analysis of such devices, in the light of thinking about the intended audience, can help reveal the wider context around a particular debate.

Minutes and reports might be considered to be more fact based, and less subject to inherent bias. However, these documents also have an intended audience and purpose. Minutes represent the official documentation of an organisation's decision-making process for stakeholders, whilst reports are usually a summary of evidence intended to inform decisions regarding a course of action. Lengthy discussions highlighting alternative opinions might be held during a meeting, however, the official minutes will usually only record the agreed result. Minutes, therefore, represent an agreed version of events and not a complete factual account. Similarly, official reports are usually the distillation of a research process, crafted to present preferred options once non-preferred options have been disregarded. The content of both document types can thus be considered to be biased by the desire of an organisation to present a particular view of its own decision-making process.

Therefore, before we even start to look at the informational content of an archival document, we must acknowledge that there are inherent biases at play which could affect our interpretation of a source.

When trying to assess the potential influence of the personal subjectivities of a document's author, it can be helpful to think about pertinent elements of that author's background.

Some key questions to ask include:

• What are the political beliefs of the individual?
• Is the individual a member of any partisan groups which might colour their view on this particular topic?
• Does the individual bring an 'expert' opinion to discussions of the area, or merely a casual layman's view?
• Does the individual have a personal connection to the subject matter, or to persons involved in the area?

Taking these questions in turn, let us explore them in further depth.

Political beliefs: An individual's political opinions are likely to have an influence on how they view a given issue, which will in turn influence how they might write about it. For example, in a debate about the issue of low pay in a given sector of the economy, someone who considers themselves to hold traditional Labour values might be more likely to blame the problem on the ineffectiveness of trade unions and lack of government intervention, whilst someone who considers themselves to hold traditional Conservative values might be more likely to blame market forces.

Group membership or affiliations: Similarly to the above point, if an individual is a member of a group that is known to campaign on particular issues, it is likely the individual will take a stance in line with the objectives of that group when discussing related issues. For example, in a debate about providing financial aid to the government of a particular country, an individual who is a member of a group which campaigns to expose government corruption in said country might oppose the move on these grounds, without necessarily declaring an affiliation to the group in question. Determining such connections can help us to understand the wider context of a debate by allowing us to uncover additional considerations.

Expert vs layman: An expert opinion might be considered to have more weight or validity when assessing contributions to an argument. For example, the opinion of a working further education teacher might be considered to have more knowledge behind it when discussing questions around further education, than say that of a primary school teacher with no connections to further education. Qualifications for having an expert opinion on a given subject might include: first hand experience of a subject; an academic background in a subject; a significant period of time working in areas related to that subject, etc.

Personal connection: Even if we might consider an author to be an expert in the subject under discussion, we must not forget that their view can still be biased and should not be considered 'fact' without question. For instance, an expert might have been carefully selected and paid to create the document in question by a political group, with its own agenda, in order to add validity to a particular argument. Putting aside the question of expert knowledge, any author with a strong personal connection to a given subject will likely be more prone to having a strong a opinion on that subject. For instance, in a debate about the causes of homelessness, an individual who has worked with homeless people with mental health problems might put more emphasis on poor mental health care provision as a factor, whilst someone who has worked with people who have lost their homes as a result of being made unemployed might put more emphasis on inadequate unemployment protection as a factor. Whilst this might be a very simplistic view of a complex issue, it serves to illustrate the potential influence of personal involvement in opinion formation.

The assessment of personal subjectivity is a complex though worthwhile analysis to undertake. It allows us to fully understand the factors involved in an individual's contribution to a particular debate. This in turn gives us a much more complete understanding of the wider context of that debate.

As researchers we strive to achieve an objective review of evidence in order to contribute to the development of academic debate in a given field. However, without thinking, it can be easy to let our own views influence our interpretation of the source material.

This is true right from the outset of a research project. Having undertaken a literature review of a given area, we might start to form opinions based on the debates within that literature. Whilst this can be good in helping us develop questions to test with our research investigations, we must be careful not to unconsciously select archival material based on what most supports our developing argument. Instead, we must try to select a range of sources which present as representative a range of perspectives on the issues as possible, allowing us to test our argument without bias.

When it comes to the sources themselves, we must also be careful not to judge to closely by modern values and ethical considerations. Thinking about the issue of mental health, we would now consider the word 'lunatic' to be a derogatory way of referring to someone with severe mental health problems. If we were to use asylum records as part of a study of historical attitudes to mental health we would often come across the word 'lunatic', we would also commonly find the term 'mental defective'. Using modern values, we might interpret the use of such language as derogatory, negative and unfeeling based on our own feelings of unease. We might unconsciously be predisposed to think that individuals working at asylums were not respectful of persons with mental health problems. However, understanding the context of asylum records further allows us to see that such language was widely employed as a way of categorising non-physical health problems. It is important, therefore, to look past modern understandings and to make assessments based on the evidence of contemporary attitudes and behaviours.

Whilst it is not always obvious when our own subjectivity affects our analysis and interpretation of sources, taking time to think about this (and to expose it where we cannot avoid it) will help us to develop more academically robust arguments.

Archives are not neutral documents. They were created at specific points in time, for a particular reason, by individuals with their own agendas.

This means that archival documents will always represent a biased and subjective perspective on a wider issue, rather than a factual presentation of information that we can read at face value.

We might ask then, whether such documents are not too biased to be considered an accurate representation of the perspectives they purport to provide. But to ask this would be to miss the opportunity that archival research provides us. What we should be asking ourselves is: given a greater understanding of the biases and subjectivities inherent in a document, what more nuanced understanding of the perspective provided by the source material can we determine? In exposing the biases and subjectivities inherent in a document, the perspective we uncover might be even more useful to our research analysis.

Whilst it can be easy make a piece of evidence fit a particular argument by ignoring aspects of context, it is important that we explore the evidence as fully as possible before assessing what perspectives might be represented. Thinking critically about audience, purpose and author allows us to analytically assess the perspective that a given document can bring to an academic debate.

Pulling this together requires us to pick up and follow cues in the source material, undertake background research to gain a bigger picture, and synthesize our findings and thoughts. This course of action allows us to make mini-conclusions as we go along. However, we must be prepared to alter these conclusions if, upon exploration of additional material, we find something that sheds new light on our initial understanding.

As a final point of consideration, the analysis discussed on this page focuses on close analysis of individual archival documents. It is important to note that one document might help to bring several perspectives to an argument when we consider the influence of intended versus actual audience, and purpose versus reception. It is for this reason that, once we have analysed individual documents for their own context, we must then seek to understand them in their wider context alongside other pieces of evidence.