Collaboration and mediation: a guide to the creation of the Stephen Hawking Archive

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the creation of the Stephen Hawking Archive through processes of collaboration, and human and technological mediation.[1] We focus on the production of documents including scientific and popular writings, correspondence and lectures in different media and forms of communication from handwriting, diagrams and typing to word processing and digital communication. We consider these processes to think about what is important in the Stephen Hawking Archive, including where authorship is located, and what this shows about scientific collaboration and communication in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. We also briefly consider how archivists have mediated the Archive since it was received by Cambridge University Library (CUL) in 2021 through its arrangement and description, and we look forward to developing the Archive in the future, including the possibility of acquiring further digital files to include in the Archive.