Archival Practices and the Making of “Memories”

Abstract

Following Derrida (1995), our article explores the relationship between archival practices and archival documents on the assumption that “archivization produces as much as it records the event” (Derrida 1995, 17). On this approach, archival practices are understood as non-innocent practices that, in the act of “preservation,” help make specific “memories” at the expense of others (Barad 2007; Derrida 1995; Foucault 1972). We take up this issue in relation to the curation of social science quantitative research data and argue that the ontological identity of data is constituted through historically- and culturally-specific data curation practices including data cleaning, data anonymization, and metadata preparation.