Beyond Factories and Laboratories: Reflecting the Relationships Between Archivists and Historians

1 Introduction

In her influential article published in 2016, Alexandra Walsham, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, coined the metaphor that ‘Archives are the factories and laboratories of the historian’ (Walsham 2016, p. 9). This evocative statement suggests that archives play an active and even determining role in the work of historians, providing both the raw materials and controlled spaces where historical research and understanding are produced. However, Walsham’s conceptualisation of archives and their relationship to historiography raises significant questions that merit critical examination. The metaphor of ‘factory and laboratory’ used by Walsham also diminishes the significance of archivists in the field of historical research. Instead of being mere servants to historians, archivists should engage in equal collaboration and actively contribute to the generation of knowledge alongside historians.

Walsham’s metaphor builds on long-running debates regarding the nature and functions of archives, as well as disputes around the objectivity of historians and the biases of the sources upon which they rely. Traditionally viewed as neutral storehouses of facts, archives have increasingly been recognised as subjective entities that shape as much as they facilitate historical knowledge (Cook 2011). Likewise, prevailing positivist ideals of history as an objective ‘science’ have given way to the acceptance of historians’ inevitable subjectivities and the constructed nature of all histories (Carr 1961; Iggers 2005). As a result, the very definitions and limitations of what constitutes an archive, as well as historians’ roles and methodologies, have become subjects of ongoing scholarly discussion.

This article aims to critically assess Walsham’s metaphor by situating it within these contextual debates. It will explore alternative understandings of archives and their complex interactions with historians to evaluate her conceptualisation. The following sections will define key terms, consider prevailing and expanding functions of archives, and analyse historians’ perspectives and sources. Walsham’s factory and laboratory metaphor will then be engaged with in depth. Finally, the conclusion will re-examine her statement in light of this scrutiny and suggest areas for further research on the dynamic relationships between archives and historiography (or archivists and historians). By adopting a hermeneutic and critical approach, this article aims to advance methodological debates regarding how we understand and write histories based on archival records. It hopes to clarify the productive yet inherently problematic nature of archives for historians while broadening our conceptualisation of what archives encompass. Ultimately, it seeks to move past simplistic views of archives and historiography (as well as archivists and historians) towards more nuanced perspectives.

2 Understanding Archives

Any discussion of archives and their relationship to historiography necessitates clarifying what constitutes an archive. Traditionally, archives have been narrowly defined as collections of records and documents actively created and maintained by official bodies such as governments, courts, churches and institutions for administrative purposes (Millar 2017). They contained materials deemed worthy of long-term preservation due to their permanent legal, fiscal or informational value. However, this restricted definition has expanded in recent years. Archives are now understood more expansively to encompass any grouping of historical materials brought together for conservation, regardless of provenance or format. They include personal papers, manuscript volumes, published texts, maps, artefacts, and born-digital records, which are accumulated for both official functions and knowledge accumulation (Charmantier and Müller-Wille 2014). Archives can refer to formal repositories as well as movable collections selectively compiled by individuals (Millar 2017). Their boundaries have necessarily blurred as digital technologies challenge traditional archival categories and practices.

Expanding conceptualisations of archives reflect transformations in their prevailing functions. Once bureaucratic needs are primarily served as unassailable stores of proof and precedent, archives have developed cultural roles as patrimonial assets and mnemonic sites (Ketelaar 2007; Nora 1996). They operate not simply as evidence of the past but as active agents in its construction, performing social as much as legal duties (Cook 2011; Portondo 2016). By increasingly acting as stewards of memory and history, archives facilitate recreational research as well as professional scholarship (McKemmish et al. 2005). However, closer scrutiny has revealed archives as partisan preservers of knowledge that never existed in a pure or objective state. Their impartiality has long been questioned (Cook 2013). The documents reflect the biases and priorities not only of their creators but also of their keepers and custodians over time (Yale 2015). Numerous silences populate archives due to accidental loss or intentional destruction, revealing unrecorded worlds left to the imagination (Head 2007). Records result from negotiating constraints of space, materials, expertise and resources, reflecting contextual pressures and exclusions (Rosenzweig 2003).

Fundamentally incomplete and selective in their holdings, archives can distort as much as they reveal (Nora 1996). They privilege the perspectives of recording elites while overlooking subaltern groups that feature only in scattered remnants (Guldi and Armitage 2014). There are few archives relating to subjects such as women, minorities and the disenfranchised through acts of social marginalisation and legal prohibition (Hill 1989). Their contents represent episodes, events, and facts that are amenable to registration rather than the fluid practices and experiences of everyday life (Stoler 2009). In brief, if archives are to illuminate the complex past, critical awareness is required of their fallibility, variability and subjectivities as structured sites of historical knowledge and documentation. Ideas of neutral facticity obscure how they inevitably narrate as much as they store up the past (Cook 1994). Their deficiencies and determinations must be recognised and interrogated rather than assumed away or ignored.

3 From Positivism to Postmodernism: Understanding the Roles of Archivists and Historians

Any consideration of archives and their significance for historical understanding necessitates examining the role of historians themselves. Traditionally, historians were envisioned as dispassionate excavators of the past, retrieving objective facts from archives much as archaeological remains are unearthed from the ground (Jenkinson 1922). By meticulously reconstructing sequences of events based on the empirical scrutiny of archival sources, historians were believed to be able to gain accurate, neutral knowledge untainted by personal biases or theoretical frameworks.

For much of the twentieth century, historians adopted a positivist approach to archives that reflected the influence of early scientific history pioneered by historians such as Leopold von Ranke in the nineteenth century. According to this view, archives were seen primarily as neutral repositories containing objective information about the past. The role of the historian was to carefully examine and interpret these original source materials to reconstruct what ‘truly happened’ in as factual and impartial a manner as possible (Iggers 2005). Archives were regarded as transparent windows onto the past that merely needed to be looked through by the diligent historian in their quest for historical truth.

This view was reinforced by the development of archival science as a professional discipline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pioneers such as Muller, Feith, and Fruin (1940) established principles of archival arrangement and description aimed at organising materials in a neutral, objective manner based on provenance and original order. Hilary Jenkinson, the leading British archivist and theorist, emphasised the passive, impartial role of archivists as custodians of records, separate from the interpretive work of historians (Jenkinson 1922). This lent further credibility to the notion of archives as objective, factual resources unaffected by human intervention.

For historians working within this paradigm, archives were essentially raw materials or building blocks from which historical narratives could be constructed. As Walsham (2016, p. 9) states, they were portrayed as the ‘factories and laboratories’ where historians did the work of sifting through sources and combining evidential fragments in a detached, scientific manner. The historian’s task involved piecing together facts from archives and weaving them into an accurate reconstruction and interpretation of past events and mentalities. Archives were thus primarily valued as sources for gleaning historical facts rather than as social or cultural constructs in their own right.

However, this positivist conception of the archive has increasingly been questioned since the late decades of the twentieth century. Influenced by broader postmodern, post-structural and cultural turns, historians and archivists have recognised that archives are not neutral reflections of the past but are themselves socially constructed and ideologically shaped entities. Archives do not simply passively contain and reflect facts, but actively participate in the production of meaning and versions of history. Postmodern critiques have demonstrated that all accounts of the past are inherently constructed artefacts, with historians deeply embedded within their own socio-historical contexts and framing efforts (White 1987). Attempts to penetrate foreign languages and cultural codes dividing the past from the present inevitably render the past ‘a world of interpretation’ rather than a brute reality (Burke 2013; Danto 1982). Emphasis has shifted from history as a transparent revelation of past ontologies to history as a discursive practice mediated through narrators’ perspectives, voices, and silences.

A key influence was the work of Foucault (1972), who drew attention to the systemic nature of discourse and knowledge. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault emphasised that archives are not transparent containers of facts, but are structured by deeper epistemological frameworks that determine what constitutes truth and legitimate knowledge within a given historical period. Facts emerge only within particular discursive formations and are subject to rupture and change over time. This opened up an analysis of how archives both shape and are shaped by wider power dynamics and sociocultural struggles over definitions of truth.

Subsequent scholars have built upon this conception to demonstrate that archives are always partial and situated renderings of the past that emerged from particular contexts of power and institutional imperatives (Cook 2013). The archival impulse itself has been shown to be a cultural and political phenomenon that varies historically, with archives rising at different times in relation to the formation of states, professions and institutions (Ketelaar 2001). What is preserved or excluded from archives reflects subjective priorities and decisions made at the point of creation as much as years later during appraisal and selection.

Recognition of the constructed nature of all histories does not entail relativism or dismissiveness of evidence-based methodology. Rather, it demands acknowledgement of historians’ subjective roles in shaping analysis and conclusions based on available sources (Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob 1994; Iggers 2005). The very questions posed, assumptions brought, and silences engendered all filter understanding in ways demanding transparency. Establishing intention or cause and effect requires inference over direct and complete explanation. Facts exist not as self-contained nodes but as texts produced through frames of reference, languages, techniques of examination and selective attention (Foucault 1972; Poovey 1998).

This interpretative paradigm shift sits uneasily alongside archivists’ traditional mandates to act neutrally as custodians and facilitators, not participants, in knowledge production (Jenkinson 1922). However, historians are actively involved not only as users but also as curators of the archival record. Through decisions around which materials warrant saving for posterity and how to organise them for future retrieval and interpretation, historian-archivists actively shape archival legacies and the parameters of subsequent historiography (Summit 2019). Disposals and techniques of ordering inevitably advance some narratives over others.

Recognising historians’ inevitable subjectivities and interpretative roles means that their activities cannot simply be extracted transparently from archives. Historians and archivists are best understood as co-producers actively engaged in contingent narrativisation, not detached compilers dusting stories effortlessly from source remnants. Subject positions and enabling conditions surrounding all actors’ contributions require scrutiny rather than occlusion or dismissal if we are to understand how our grasp of the past has been constructed.

4 Archives as Sources

Central to debates around archives and historiography is the consideration of what precisely archives offer historians to work with as sources. Traditionally conceived as transparent reservoirs supplying direct insights into past worlds, archives were assumed to provide historians with ready-made building blocks awaiting reassembly into faithful representations (Blouin and Rosenberg 2011). By diligently consulting archives’ objective record remnants, historians viewed themselves as able to reconstruct the past as it truly was through empirical analysis (Samuels 1985).

However, scrutiny of what precisely resides in archives challenges their portrayal as uncomplicated source quarries. While archival materials originated as active documents created to meet situational imperatives of their own eras, any record housed now in archives exists only in an afterlife of decontextualised fragments serving new functions (Burke 2013; Ketelaar 2001). Their original rationales, contexts of production and intended audiences have dissolved, rendering archives not direct windows onto the past but palimpsests contingent on later archivisation (Nora 1996).

Moreover, what constitutes the archival record at any point stems not from comprehensive accumulation but from selective retention to multiple contingencies (Portondo 2016). From filing errors and misplacements to natural decay and human intention, archives suffer continual depletion and transformation (Walsham 2016). Whether through accidents or design, their gaps and absences far outweigh extant remnants as historians are obliged to theorise both text and interstices alike (Stoler 2009). Additionally, archival collections were never holistic or static. They have expanded, shifted, and dwindled over time as keepers’ priorities periodically redefine inclusions and exclusions (Beniger 1986). Newly archived or rediscovered caches may transform interpretation as much as fill in lacunae (Shapin and Schaffer 2011). Retrospective recontextualisation leaves historians always working from a sub-set of once larger corpora whose undiscovered remnants hang like shadows.

Finally, archival content remains mediated through conventions of cataloguing and description that privilege some forms of knowledge while obscuring others (Rosenzweig 2003). Subject access points and container lists provide ‘metadata silences’ suppressing unexpected connections lying dormant in undescribed fonds. Organisational principles naturalise some narrative structures while obscuring alternatives (Head 2007). These considerations mean that archives can never be treated naively as straightforward sources or neutral research spaces. Their remnant traces attest not directly to past realities but to conditions of survivability and intelligibility imposed through time. Recognition of archives as constructed documents in their own right, not direct viewports, is key to responsible historiography (Cook 1994).

5 Archives as Factories?

A central claim propounded by Walsham is that archives function as ‘factories’ for historians, actively shaping the work they produce rather than simply enabling research from a neutral starting point. This metaphor demands closer analysis, given its implications for archives’ influence and historians’ agency. By depicting archives as factories, Walsham intimates that they stamp historians’ enquiries into predetermined moulds, dictating conclusions as strictly as industrial production lines do outputs. Archives play roles at least as determinative as facilitative, forming history as potter moulds porcelain. Their structures and contents allegedly condition what can be built from the raw materials provided to such an extent that the factory becomes history’s true driver rather than the historians themselves.

However, mechanistic analogies risk overstating archives’ deterministic sway at the expense of interpreters’ creative contributions. While archives frame understanding through biases, silences and organisational schemata, historian-artisans bring distinctive methodologies, questions and conceptual frameworks to bear. They select, compare and contextualise sources selectively within chains of inference not contained in singular documents. Historians collaboratively constitute knowledge that transcends single archives’ confined horizons (Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob 1994). Furthermore, active interrogation and recontextualisation extract archival remnants from their original function and redeploy them for unforeseen purposes. Sources facilitate historical problem-solving but do not inexorably determine conclusions in a factory-line fashion. Nor are archives closed worlds hermetically sealed from external ideas whose interplay with evidence guides creative reinterpretation over predetermined replication of intended meanings.

Recognition that archives shape interpretation does not imply inevitability or lack of agency for historians critically engaging multiple corpora. Far from reducing historiography to archival effects, acknowledging mediation demands alertness to competing narratives and perspectival framings, not resignation before archives’ ‘mastery’ over historians (de Certeau 1992). Archives also constrain yet also enable as tools that historians employ flexibly within evolving scholarly debates. While archives actively participate in historiography rather than neutrally supply, their effects emerge from dynamic interaction with inquirers, not from domination over mechanistic conduits stripped of analytical independence and creativity. Walhsham’s metaphor captures archives’ significance but risks overstating their determining influence at intellects’ expense if taken too far. A more nuanced appreciation does justice to both sources’ formative impacts and historians’ interpretive roles.

6 Archives as Laboratories?

Similarly, Walsham’s designation of archives as historians’ ‘laboratories’ merits critical examination. On one level, archives enable iterative and inductive heuristic processes akin to the scientific method through piecemeal analysis, comparison, and interpolation. Exploration across holdings resembling puzzle-solving generates tentative theories tested against accumulating evidence. Space for playful hypothesising, failure and revision resembles laboratories’ spirit of trial and refinement before results (Daston and Galison 2007). However, the metaphor overstates archives’ manipulability. Their remnants constitute patchy and unstable empirical foundations subject to chance survival rather than comprehensive standardisation. Unlike laboratories’ obedience to replicable procedures, archives necessitate imaginative bridging between fragmentary remnants according to imperfect and changing organisational principles reflecting archival circumstances, not eternal verities (Head 2007). They present historians with intractable interpretative conundrums requiring creative resolution rather than predetermined logical sequences. Moreover, their contents resist simple deduction or controlled experiments. Historical happenings cannot be isolated, repeated or recombined at will (Carr 1961; Jenkins 2005). The past resists reduction to variables that are adjustable according to preconceived systems (Daston 2000). Its fragmentation demands empathy and contextual understanding over simple verification through standardised testing. The untidy and unstable archival environment frustratingly defies neat replication or methodical structuring into laboratory benches and beakers.

Given these qualifications, archives might be better characterised not as laboratories but as spaces evoking detective work within scattered clues demanding inductive skill over technocratic reduction. Their contents invite speculative hypotheses tested by imaginative immersion, not positivistic formulas. While stimulating methodical study, they equally elicit humanistic appreciation of lingering uncertainties and contingent narrativisations in history writing. After all, no single metaphor can capture the complexity of archives and historiography. However, an overemphasis on laboratories risks naturalising source constraints more than recognising archives’ invitations to creative reconstruction and interpretative flexibility essential to responsible history writing.

7 Limitations of Comparison

The terms ‘factories’ and ‘laboratories’ invoke spaces of active experimentation, testing, and production. Factories are industrial sites where labour is divided and specialised processes combine to manufacture goods efficiently. Workers operating specialised machinery allow for mass production through standardised, repeatable workflows. The factory model revolutionised economic productivity through scientific management techniques such as Taylorism, which optimised each task (Littler 1978).

Similarly, laboratories imply experimentation and knowledge development. From their earliest medieval origins as apothecary workshops, laboratories became creative spaces for developing and testing hypotheses through observation, measurement, and trial-and-error procedures such as the scientific method championed by Francis Bacon and others (Yeo 2007). Laboratories encourage multivariate, collaborative approaches to problem-solving and hypothesis formulation rather than single-researcher experiments.

However, archives differ substantially from this model of focused, specialised work. While archives, factories, and laboratories all involve careful work, direct comparisons between them obscure important divergences in function, methodology, and aims. Fundamentally, the goals of archives contrast sharply with those of production-oriented spaces. Archives seek permanent preservation rather than output targets, necessarily entailing selective retention practices rather than comprehensive documentation (Millar 2017). They aim to safeguard records rather than systematise experimentation or the division of labour processes towards defined ends. Historians may test ideas through close analysis of archival materials, yet archives lack facilities or guidelines for structuring experimentation.

Additionally, archival contents arrive with their own histories rather than emerging de novo from research activities. Sources reach archives after passing through many prior contexts of creation and selection that shape what survives. They are dislocated from their original organisational schemes and intellectual frameworks, constraining the questions researchers can ask (Cook 2013). This contrasts with production environments where specialised workers transform raw materials into finished artefacts according to set procedures and standards. Furthermore, archives lacking a detailed provenance face methodological constraints that are absent from carefully regulated laboratory investigations.

Rather than producing new knowledge, archives hand over fragmented remnants of the past obscured by organisational frameworks, not of historians’ design. Focusing on archives as neutral suppliers to historical ‘factories’ risks naturalising the contingencies and constructions of available sources while portraying historians as autonomous makers of meaning. In fact, an archival description itself intervenes between contents and researchers, delimiting potential lines of inquiry before work begins (Ketelaar 2001).

Viewing archives as ‘factories and laboratories’ for historical research undermines the significance of archives and archivists in historical research. In the past, archivists were considered subordinate to historians, and archives were merely tools utilised for historical investigations. However, this perspective has become outdated since the late twentieth century. Historical archives now encompass more than just official repositories that predominantly document the privileges of the elite while disregarding marginalised communities, women, and disenfranchised individuals.

Archives no longer passively accumulate historical records by solely relying on government transfers or private donations. Since the late 20th century, numerous archivists have proactively departed from traditional bureaucratic roles and actively pursued collecting historical records. Their focus lies in acquiring materials about neglected groups and politically oppressed communities, leading to the establishment of various alternative archives.

8 Alternative Archives

Thus far, the discussion has centred on official archival repositories and scholarly uses of records. However, broadening conceptions of what constitutes an archive demand consideration of less conventional spaces and functions. Archives appear not only in governmental and educational institutions but also in less regulated community contexts, impacting lives in unseen ways. For instance, vernacular archives have long existed in forms such as personal letter collections, family bibles registering births and deaths, or photograph albums preserving remembrance outside trained archivists’ purviews (Stoler 2009). They testify to archives’ deep integration into quotidian experience, upholding memory’s continuum rather than discontinuity with bureaucratic documentation (Connerton 1989). Archives’ boundaries blur where private manuscripts meet published texts or images become imbued with keepers’ charged associations over generations.

Attention to the ‘intangible archive’ of oral tradition further fragments archives’ seeming to be unity (Wood 2013). Histories were told, songs were sung, and skills were displayed orally, yet social knowledge was transmitted no less securely, if immaterially. Erosion through forgetfulness interacts complexly with proliferation through new recording media to challenge archives’ supposed solidity. For example, attuning to non-dominant groups’ counter-archives results in prevailing narratives. Archives of pride nourishing black internationalism or raising feminist consciousness disrupt the singular trajectories of Western historiography (Scott 1990). Queer histories painstakingly reconstructed from criminal prosecution records repossess denigrated pasts (Scott 1991; Yu and Lam 2023). Meanwhile, ‘born-digital natives’ are reconfiguring archives for a participatory information era through social media profiles, digital diaries and crowdsourced collecting (Pearce-Moses 2005). For example, many protest-related materials, such as literature, photos, flyers, stickers, infographics and posters, were uploaded to different online archives during the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong in 2019 (Lam and Yu 2022). After the enactment of the National Security Law in Hong Kong in 2020, many digital archives related to anti-government activities were also transferred from Hong Kong to overseas servers to ensure that the archives would not disappear due to political reasons (Yu 2023). Citizen curation, e-mail troves and ephemeral online culture require rethinking archives’ material and institutional constraints. Archives disperse into cloud storage even as ownership congeals.

Archives permeate lives and communities more diffusely than their modern bureaucratic crystallisation implies. Their social functions emerge clearly only by decentring privileged sources to appreciate record-keeping’s creative integration into broader cultural dynamics of memory, identity and political action over time.

9 Collaboration with Archivists

Acknowledging archives’ centrality in knowledge production requires reflexivity regarding their active mediations. Historians must recognise how archival frameworks guide inquiries beforehand rather than viewing archives as merely passive suppliers of raw data. Adopting such reflexivity means historicising archives themselves as cultural products contingent on the times and biases that shaped available records. Above all, collaboration between historians and archivists is needed. The latter are no longer invisible custodians silently handing facts over but vital partners contributing contextual expertise unavailable elsewhere (Cook 2013). Their deep immersion in the records enables the reconstruction of arrangements, terminology and organisational logic obscured by time. They offer specialist guidance on preservation challenges, legal restrictions, and other practical dimensions that are invisible from a solely scholarly perspective.

Collaboration means that historians consult archivists regarding selection, arrangement, and description processes underlying source framings to better comprehend existing limitations and silences. This implies that archivists who advise researchers not only on technical search strategies but also on interpretive opportunities within the seemingly routinised finding aid. Joint cross-disciplinary projects integrating archival insights can avoid naturalising information flows between historical actors and later historians. On the whole, collaboration builds mutual understanding to circumvent archives becoming ‘black boxes’ transporting content between eras but barring insights into mediating structures. It recognises archives as active participants in knowledge production rather than neutral stages upon which discoveries play out. Such cooperation promotes historically rich perspectives, acknowledging archives’ deep imbrication within cultural dimensions that they also seek to illuminate for future generations.

Historians must also consider their own roles and responsibilities in interpretation. While archives provide essential source materials, historians bring their own perspectives, methods, and theoretical frameworks that shape how these materials are analysed and how historical narratives are constructed. Different historians may interpret the same archival sources differently based on their disciplinary interests or approaches. Therefore, historians bear the ethical responsibility to acknowledge how their own situated perspectives interact with and potentially distort the often fragmented and dispersed nature of archival evidence.

10 Conclusion

This article has examined Alexandra Walsham’s metaphor of archives as the ‘factories and laboratories of the historian’. It analysed this metaphor in the context of shifting understandings of archives and their relationships with historiography. Archives are now recognised not as neutral sources of objective facts, but as active mediators that shape historical knowledge production through their structures, contents, and organisational frameworks. At the same time, historians inevitably bring their own perspectives and interpretive skills to analyses of archival sources. No single metaphor can fully capture the dynamic, complex interactions between archives and historiography, as well as archivists and historians. Both archivists and historians participate in ongoing knowledge construction through archives. A collaborative, reflective approach is needed that acknowledges how archives inform but do not determine historical narratives. This article has argued for moving beyond simplistic understandings to appreciate the productive yet problematic nature of archives for historians. It highlights the value of pluralistic perspectives that are attentive to the situated roles of archives, archivists, and historians in co-producing our understanding of the historical records.