Guest Lecture: James Baker (University of Sussex) Outlook: Email Archives, 1990-2007, 8 May 2018

Email is a primary source of historical change since the 1990s. Email archives are, therefore, a new, born-digital type of archives of near contemporary history, a history now starting to come under historical scrutiny. To ‘do’ the 1990s well, historians will need histories of email, methods for working with email, and reflections of whether email-as-archive creates tensions with archival practice and traditions. James Baker will outline the initial steps of this work. He will talk about three historical sources of how people encountered and negotiated this form of communication circa 1990-2007: the Mass Observation Archive, the Enron email archive and a linguistic email corpus from this period.

James Baker is Lecturer at the University of Sussex, UK, in Digital History and Archives, and a faculty member of the Sussex Humanities Lab.

When: 8 May 2018, 16:30-18:00
Where: LibraryLab, Vleugel Loveling, Faculteitsbibliotheek Letteren en Wijsbegeerte, Rozier 44, 9000 Gent (see: Library Floorplan).

Contact: Thorsten.Ries@UGent.be

This guest lecture is organised by the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities in cooperation with Digital Humanities Flanders (Dhu.F), funded by FWO, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek.