In February 1987, members of a queer-student group at Queens College, in New York, started jotting down their private thoughts in a communal composition book. As in a diary, each entry was signed and dated. Members wrote about parties they’d attended, speakers they wanted to invite to campus, questions they had about their sexuality. The book, now housed in an archive at the college, was also a place to vent and snipe. In November 1991, a student wrote in all caps, “I HATE QUEENS COLLEGE. I HATE HATRED. I HATE MY HAIR.” Below that, a member responded, “I hate your hair too.”
It’s hard to imagine a future historian getting such an up-close glimpse into the thoughts and anxieties of the club’s contemporary members. Around 2019, the group abandoned the composition books and migrated to the messaging app Discord. For students, the switch was likely a natural way to update the tradition of shared journaling. But for archivists interested in preserving the college’s queer history, it caused a small panic. How would they ever sort through the sprawling chat? Whereas the journal entries required concision because page space was limited, people might be “typing a mile a minute” on Discord, Caitlin Colban-Waldron, a Queens College archivist, told me. “We were like, ‘How do we take screenshots? Is there a way to export all of their conversations in a text file?’”
Archivists across the country are confronting similar challenges. It was long the case that archives were full of physical ephemera. Think of Oscar Wilde’s love letters to Lord Alfred Douglas; James Joyce’s incessant lust for his future wife, Nora Barnacle (his “little fuckbird”); Sylvia Plath’s shopping list; Malcolm X’s lost poem; and other scraps of paper buried in boxes. Today, text messages and disappearing voice notes have replaced letters between close friends, Instagram Stories vanish by default, and encrypted platforms such as Signal, where social movements flourish, let users automatically erase messages. Many people write to-do lists in notes apps and then delete them, line by line, when each task is complete.
The problem for historians is twofold: On the one hand, celebrities, artists, executives, and social-movement leaders are generating more personal records than ever, meaning a lucky researcher might have access to a public figure’s entire hard drive but struggle to interpret its contents. On the other hand, historians might lose access to the kind of intimate material that reveals the most—a possibility that has led some prognosticators to predict a coming “digital dark age.”
In some ways, archival research has always demanded sorting through verbal and visual detritus and working around unexpected gaps in records. But in the internet era, this laborious process threatens to become untenable. Our online lives will reshape not only the practice of studying history but also how future generations will tell the story of the past.
The work of history starts with a negotiation. A public figure or their descendant—or, say, an activist group or a college club—works with an institution, such as a university library, to decide which of the figure’s papers, correspondence, photos, and other materials to donate. Archivists then organize these records for researchers, who, over subsequent years, physically flip through them. These tidbits are deeply valuable. They reveal crucial details about our most famous figures and important historical events. They’re the gas feeding the engine of our history books.
Over the past two decades, the volume of these donations has increased dramatically. When Donald Mennerich, a digital archivist at NYU, first started working in the field, 15 years ago, writers or activists or public figures would hand over boxes of letters, notes, photos, meeting minutes, and maybe a floppy disk or a “small computer that had a gigabyte hard drive,” he told me. Now, Mennerich said, “everyone has a terabyte of data on their laptop and a 4-terabyte hard drive”—about 4,000 times as much content—plus an email inbox with 10,000 messages or more.
Processing this digital bulk is a headache. At the British Library, when a laptop arrives, Callum McKean, the library’s lead digital curator, makes a master copy of the hard drive. Then archivists create a curated version that filters out sensitive information, just as they do for paper records. Various software promises to ease the work, for example by scanning an email inbox for potentially sensitive messages—bank-account details, doctor’s notes, unintended sexual disclosures—but the technology isn’t foolproof. Once, Mennerich was surprised to find that the tool had not redacted the phone number of a celebrity. So archivists must still review files by hand, which has “created a huge bottleneck,” McKean told me.
Now many libraries possess emails that they don’t have the bandwidth to make accessible to researchers. The writer Ian McEwan’s emails, although technically part of his collection at the Harry Ransom Center, in Texas, have not been processed, because of “challenges in capacity,” a spokesperson told me. The archive of the poet Wendy Cope reportedly contains a trove of emails, but they are also not yet ready for the public and still need to undergo sensitivity review, McKean said. Recently, I visited NYU to examine the activist, artist, and onetime Andy Warhol acolyte Jeremy Ayers’s files, which include a collection of his emails and an archive of his Facebook account. The public description of the Ayers collection hinted at a labyrinth of insights into the late stage of his career, when he photographed scenes from Occupy Wall Street—the kind of deep look into an artist’s process and social calendar that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. But my requests to view both his emails and his Facebook account were denied; an archivist had not yet reviewed the records for sensitivity. For now, until Ayers’s digital files are fully processed, which could take a while, the archive promises more access than it can deliver.
Even when an email archive is made public, as Salman Rushdie’s is at Emory University and Chris Kraus’s is at NYU, it’s easy to get lost in the chaos. Jacquelyn Ardam, a writer and a literary scholar, was one of the first people to visit Susan Sontag’s archive, which she told me was filled with digital clutter: Sephora marketing emails, files with unlabeled collections of words (rubbery, ineluctable), and lots and lots of lists—of movies she’d liked, drinks she’d enjoyed. “There was so much material,” Ardam told me, “that it was hard to make sense out of, okay, which one of these lists matters?”
Among that mess of information, however, Ardam found emails confirming Sontag’s relationship with the photographer Annie Leibovitz, which Sontag had denied. All Ardam had to do to locate them was “search her computer for the word Annie,” she said. She didn’t publish all of her findings about Sontag’s romantic life, in part because they were so intimate.
Ardam was confronting a different, somewhat sensitive question about navigating a person’s digital history. When Sontag donated her laptop to the archive, did she realize how much she was giving away? In the past, even a writer of Sontag’s stature would typically have a small-enough correspondence collection that they could plausibly review the letters they were planning to donate to an archive—and perhaps wouldn’t have included missives from a secret lover. But the scope of our digital lives can make it much harder to account for everything (imagine giving up your whole social-media history to a researcher) and much easier for a historian to locate the tantalizing parts with a single search.
Of course, that’s if historians are lucky enough to access records at all. Many people delete their old texts to save storage space; with each swipe, years of correspondence might disappear. And even if they are saved, digital records are sometimes impossible to retrieve. Colban-Waldron, the Queens College archivist, told me about a visual artist who’d donated a word processor that simply doesn’t turn on. Mennerich said he’s been locked out of the email accounts of several deceased public figures because they never shared their passwords.
Problems multiply when you run into information stored on third-party platforms. If you don’t pay for Slack, for example, your messages will automatically delete after 90 days. Google Docs don’t self-delete, but you can view version histories and resolved comments only on the platform itself, which poses a risk if Google Docs ever shuts down or stops supporting older documents. Whereas Toni Morrison’s extensive notes on Angela Davis’s autobiography have been preserved on paper for years, newer back-and-forths between editors and writers might disappear into the digital void.
Archivists might be able to sidestep some of these problems by rethinking how they present collections of digital records. Today, after archivists do their initial review of a collection, visitors can typically get a complete box of someone’s letters with no questions asked. With emails, conducting that whole initial review up front would be so much more time intensive that blanket access might no longer be realistic. McKean suggested that someone’s complete email archive could be reduced down to metadata specifying whom they wrote to and when, and uploaded online. Researchers could then request specific conversations, and the archive could conduct a sensitivity review of those specific emails before releasing them, rather than tackling whole computers at once. Such a system might strip the archive of its potential for serendipitous findings. And it might disperse the complex ethical task of deciding what should (and should not) be released to multiple different archivists, who might have their own biases. But compromises like these might be unavoidable in an era of such inscrutable excess.
A laptop donation might actually be the easy scenario. The archivists I spoke with told me they’re all bracing themselves for the moment when, inevitably, a public figure donates their smartphone. It is in some ways the most personal kind of donation someone can make, offering access to text and WhatsApp histories, photos, Tinder messages, saved recipes, TikTok likes. Such a donation seems both likely to reveal more than a person’s emails ever could and even harder to sort through and interpret. Archivists might want to stock up on the Excedrin now. As for historians, they might be in for more revealing discoveries—if only they can separate the signal from the noise.
*Illustration sources: Flavio Coelho / Getty; gremlin / Getty.
