Klein - The Image of Absence- Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.pdf
P 663. This striking instantiation of archival silence illuminates the concerns that course through the archive of the antebellum United States. (I added annotations on the title since I could not annotate directly on the text) Comment: The digital humanities that shed light on archives show that not only documents have power inherently that leaves a legacy of the privileged, but also in the making of archives, the act of revisiting the documents, such as the moments of fact creation, fact assembly, fact retrieval, and retrospective significance may be a silencing one. Especially here, the featured antebellum archives show distinctive dynamics of gender, social hierarchy, and social vocabulary that scholars may not notice the archival silences.