TY - JOUR
AU - Wright, Rebecca, K
AB - Abstract This article examines how the digital is politicizing medium within historical studies. Through a critical evaluation of Mass Observation Online (MOO: the online portal for the Mass Observation Archive), the paper traces how OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has established a new hierarchy in a key archive of British social memory, centred around the typewriter, whose products can be transformed into searchable digital text. It shows how a new economy of representation has been created based not on what Observers wrote, but what they wrote with. This has serious historiographical consequences for research drawn from MOO. Typewriting during the interwar period was connected to wider historical forces, including changes in white-collar work, gender roles and cultures of representation. Privileging typewritten material, therefore, is changing how we understand MO materials: from the constitution of the national panel, to the identity of Observers, the form and content of materials, and the nature of life-writing. This distortion is not limited to MOO, but this article will show how the digital has made medium a key site around which primary source materials, archival collections and digital interfaces are being structured. As historical collections are increasingly accessed through digital interfaces, it is argued that increased attention must be paid by historians and archivists to the historiographical dimensions of media and its impact on digital historical collections. *** During the Mass Observation 80th Anniversary Conference held at the University of Sussex in July 2017, scholars drew from the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) to develop rich studies on diverse areas of British experience, affirming Mass Observation’s role as the dominant archive for British social memory.1 The conference however overlooked a major change in Mass Observation studies that has occurred in the past ten years.2 This is the transformation in the way scholars and students access the MOA following the launch of Mass Observation Online (MOO) by Adam Matthew Digital in 2007. Today few researchers consult the material objects gathered by the organization between 1937 and the early 1950s, housed in the MOA at The Keep, University of Sussex. Indeed, on arrival researchers are directed to a computer and the website MOO to start their archival journey with the click of a button. Even though the majority of researchers access the archive through the online interface, there has been little acknowledgement that the MOA is now experienced almost exclusively as a digital archive. Despite the tendency to see the two archives as interchangeable, it is highly problematic to view MOO as equivalent to the MOA.3 Not only is the digital interface transforming how we access and engage with Mass Observation materials, it is also changing the archive, building in new hierarchies and power dynamics. In particular, typewritten documents in MOO have increased in prominence, since they remain the only documents to have been processed for digital text. This has built in a new hierarchy within the MOA, one in which media is upsetting the promise of democratic representation at the heart of Mass Observation’s original mission. This is not without serious historiographical consequences for understanding Mass Observation materials. As media archaeologists such as Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan taught us long ago, media is never neutral but embedded in the politics of identity, form and representation, all central to our engagement with Mass Observation materials.4 As more people – deliberately or unwittingly – utilize digital text to navigate around Mass Observation Online, the elevation of typewritten material over handwritten documents will amplify selective viewpoints, content and collections, with serious ramifications for the understanding and representation of British social memory. In an ironic turn then, the process of digitization is forcing us to be more critical about the physicality of medium and its impact on how and what Observers wrote. This article draws upon MOO, in particular the collection of ‘Day Surveys’ collected between 1937 and 1938, to examine how the digital politicizes the medium in which Observers wrote. Although presented as fully searchable, roughly only twenty-nine percent of the Day Surveys were typewritten and thus now have digital text, meaning that there is an unevenness of visibility across this online collection. Examining how typewritten text distorts the MOA through the collections accessed, the representiveness of the national panel and the content and form of observation, this article traces the impact the digital is having on a formative archive of British social memory. I argue that more attention needs to be given to what Joshua Sternfeld has called ‘digital historiography’ (‘the interaction of digital technology with historical practice’) in the field of Mass Observation studies, adding to a long list of methodological challenges researchers confront when using the MOA.5 But I also use MOO to understand how the digital archive is politicizing media in new ways as it becomes critical to the physical structure of the digital interface. As visibility in history depends on writing media (as much as writing content), increased attention must be paid by historians and archivists to the historiographical dimensions of media and its impact on digital historical collections. * * * Mass Observation was founded in 1937 by a group of left-leaning British intellectuals, the ornithologist Tom Harrisson, the poet Charles Madge and the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings.6 Democratic in mission (if not always in practice) the organization sought to uncover the ‘collective unconscious’ of Great Britain. Mass Observation grew as an organization, with paid (and unpaid) employees, known as investigators, who studied the lives of ordinary people in locations that included Bolton and London. The organization also fostered a national panel of Observers, who responded to questionnaires (known as Directives) and completed Diaries and Day Surveys detailing their everyday lives. Running until the mid 1950s, Mass Observation remains the largest collection of primary materials about everyday life in Great Britain. The project was revived in 1981, as the Mass Observation Project (MOP) and continues today. In 2007 the original collection of materials was digitized and began to be made available on MOO by Adam Matthew Digital, a member of the Sage Publication Group. The advent of MOO signals a new stage in the life of the Mass Observation project, which has evolved through many iterations since its inception. The opening of the MOA at the University of Sussex in 1975 transformed Mass Observation from being largely forgotten (its materials in boxes in an office basement in London) to becoming the major archive for the study of everyday life in Great Britain.7 The archive itself (and its former archivist Dorothy Sheridan) has thus been critical in influencing the visibility of Mass Observation materials and how they are utilized and interpreted by scholars. Over its lifetime, changes in the way collections were accessed, selected and made visible evolved parallel to scholarly interest in specific collections and ways of using the archive.8 MOO is the latest stage in framing the scholarly apparatus of the MOA.9 The result has been an exponential growth of interest in the archive, which between November 2016 and November 2017 has seen 338,504 active sessions.10 The digital interface has expanded the geographical reach of the archive, with active sessions undertaken from subscribing institutions across the world. MOO has thus dramatically increased access to MOA materials, becoming the critical matrix through which British social memory is accessed and generated. To understand how MOO is transforming the field of Mass Observation studies, however, we have to better comprehend how the digital interface frames historical materials. Just like the physical archive, any computer interface, as Margaret Hedstrom argues, presents ‘symbols to users in pre-determined and pre-programmed ways … they mediate between users and vast stores of digital information’.11 Before the MO archive became digital, the archivist was the principal interface between the archive and the user, guiding the order in which researchers accessed materials. The restricted space of the reading room in the University of Sussex Library (the archive’s former home before it moved to The Keep) limited the numbers of researchers allowed in the MO archive, enabling archivists to provide a bespoke service to researchers, with its own logic and order. To navigate through the large amount of materials, researchers were first given ‘File Reports’, then ‘Topic Collections’, ‘Directives’, and then the ‘Diaries’ (which were the most difficult collection to access). As research space grew, catering to up to twenty researchers at a time, the influence of the archivist was diluted, though they remained the primary point of reference for researchers.12 When Adam Matthew Digital created the digital interface in 2007 the principal objective was to preserve the curatorial voice in the online environment.13 To maintain this continuity, the online database replicates the physical form of the archive, divided into eight collections, through which researchers can view individual artefacts. The central feature that changed how researchers access Mass Observation materials, however, was the keyword search function. This design feature transforms how we navigate through the archive and read Mass Observation materials. While some researchers start moving through the collections from the contents screen, many start their journey with the invitation to search located in the top right-hand corner. Today, historians and students are used to starting their research process with a keyword search. As a 2012 National Endowment of the Arts study into the changing nature of historical practices recognized, keyword searching is ‘a primary mechanism – indeed a ubiquitous practice’ for locating historical material.14 As Google has normalized the search function within everyday practices, historians have transferred this skill to accessing historical archives and databases. Lara Putnam has shown how the search facility is transforming historical disciplines, the nature of historical inquiry and the institutional structures that support historical practices.15 The impact of these changes can be seen on MOO. Between November 2016 and 2017 222,054 searches were completed on MOO.16 On the website the search function has the second highest number of user hits (after page views), followed by search results, with the advanced search function coming in after details. Moreover, in contrast to the previous twelve months, the average time spent on the archive had dropped considerably (from 7.32 minutes to 5.55 minutes), although researchers are viewing an increased number of pages per session, which suggests that users are locating material with greater ease and facility.17 It is safe to say that on MOO the keyword search has replaced the curator. The shift from curatorial guidance to the keyword search, therefore, establishes a new relationship between researcher and archive, placing the onus on the researcher to curate their journey. However, the invitation to search gives the impression that MOO is indeed fully searchable. This is a misconception, since the searchable data on MOO is a small percentage of the overall collection: namely, materials that were originally typewritten. The search function only covers typewritten documents because OCR technology cannot yet transform handwritten texts with the ease and accuracy that is possible with typewritten text.18 Until OCR technology improves its capacity to translate handwritten text with higher accuracy (or Adam Matthew invests in manual transcription) the digital text available on MOO will continue to be drawn only from the typewritten materials. Not only does the search function cover a selective collection of materials, however, but the digital text produced from typewritten documents is also far from accurate. There has been growing scholarly concern about the quality of OCR technology and the impact this is having on research practices and results.19 For printed material published between 1900 and 1950, accuracy rates are about 95% (roughly five in 100 characters are wrong).20 However, the typewritten documents collected by Mass Observation were rough, and their material qualities varied considerably, meaning that accuracy rates are much lower than for materials in other online archives. Within MOO, the OCR accuracy rates vary, depending on the strength of the ink, the clarity of type-font used and the condition of paper, often damaged by long periods in inadequate storage. Human errors also inhibit accuracy, and the poor skills of typists means that text is often overwritten, with letters struck over and poor alignment. Observers, moreover, frequently corrected, rewrote and annotated typewritten documents, adding additional observations by hand and sometimes doodles – all untranslatable by OCR software. While the published materials produced by Mass Observation have an accuracy rate similar to typeset print archives and newspaper databases, the digital text produced from typed documents written by the national panel vary considerably in accuracy. For example, the digital text for a page from a typical 1937 Day Survey (Fig. 1) can read as follows: I SaXnasy i'otiL∧S∧∧Vu-7 . ?a P «4U A Mti JJlci, j Mtca- b∧i. LJrp /4tru-AU«∧6. . f∧eo-sr t& SK 3-.' -nn. - 1 A, rv o ∧ 9C 1. - ed- 7 /∧.g e d 26. %M–TfexgickLJBaa∧ i crksMxs*- ( nr .–Btre∧ngham-)- politics - None of the political parties are sufficiently altruistic for me. I vote Labour in the elections. Religion - Brought up in the C. of S. (father a lay-reader now training to become a clergyman when he retires from bank ) ftsi-Wd- the LIherak- Gath oVio Chur-∧h-wh&n. as- 14-, i»s4s4∧–ha»arHS6-m-y– f 1- a-nc egh f nw-my- h-us b and X -i-s-4x-p-r∼j∧∧t- in ttes–tBrrarch–a-nd -t-h e-f'-re-e-id i ng Bi-S-hnp-i stone of m-y-g-r-e-a-te-gt fra-e-n-feh - £∼-vmr8-iTraa,Trcd–anu-m∧ son-bap∧ireo4-4-H- tb e I. . CaBBiJxUrQ–?-. I never attend church and am not in the least interested in it. 1 am a mystic by temperament. 2. - Housewife, i.e. Cook-sceneral-Nurse-Dressmal.er-Laundress-Secretary &c fj c>k*)v. i I > BvcSPl H'R t)(; | ..*.?<. to -15 rs #0-3∧ 3. - Health. Had an attack of lumbago yesterday (after spending nearly two hours shovelling snow). Better today, but back a little 'uneasy*.21 Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide The material object from which the OCR text is drawn; DS80, Day Survey for March 1937. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide The material object from which the OCR text is drawn; DS80, Day Survey for March 1937. The varying quality of OCR data is not just a technical issue to be ironed out. Growing reliance on digital text, as Tim Hitchcock has argued, has significant repercussions for research procedures and results.22 OCR accuracy rates affect research results because poor precision limits the success of locating an item, minimizing its visibility in search results. The accuracy of OCR transcription is of serious consequence then because it structures what becomes visible and what gets lost. This has its own implications for Mass Observation due to variation in the material qualities of the collection, which lead to fluctuating accuracy rates (and thus visibility) across the collection. Equally concerning for the adoption of the search function, as Hitchcock points out, is the fact that there is often little information on digital databases about what is being searched. In his words, ‘the user is only ever presented with an image of the original, there is no way of judging the quality of the results’.23 Indeed, nowhere on the Adam Matthew website is there detailed information about the accuracy of digital text across the collections. It does detail which collections are searchable, but it does not specify the variation of digital text within each collection.24 The unevenness of searchable text on MOO is in contradiction to the promise of completeness embedded in the search interface. Relying on the search function therefore shrinks the archive. The corpus is reduced to typewritten documents which themselves vary in terms of visibility, depending on the material conditions of the document translated into digital text by OCR. This has created a new hierarchy within MOO, structured through the physical qualities of the medium in which Mass Observers wrote and the clarity of their typewriting. * * * The challenge of securing digital text within the archive is not just a technical problem limited to the usability of the online environment. It matters because it embeds new power hierarchies in the archive, controlling which voices are heard. On a structural level, it determines which collections are made visible for researchers. The Diaries (even when typewritten) have yet to be made digitally readable and are excluded from the search function. They do have a keyword index that connects search terms to text. To date, only the Directive Questionnaires (rather than responses from the panel) have digital text, meaning that directives written by panel Observers are not searchable. Roughly twenty-nine percent of the Day Surveys have digital text, although this number is reduced by the accuracy of the OCR transcription.25 The ‘Topic Collections’ contain handwritten and typed documents and other ephemera such as newsprint, meaning that the OCR quality is variable, while the ‘File Reports’ were typed (although not typeset) and contained tables, corrections, overwriting and paper damage that reduce the accuracy of the digital text. The publications have the highest quality OCR due to having been typeset.26 This variation builds a hierarchy into the collections. A simple keyword search on the topic ‘electricity’, for example, captures how digital text embeds navigational pathways in MOO. Although hits for ‘Day Surveys’ and ‘Diaries’ emerge at the top of the list of search items, eighty-five percent of the results derive from the ‘File Reports’ and ‘Topic Collections’ and ‘Publications’, with only a small fifteen percent from the ‘Day Surveys’, ‘Diaries’ and ‘Directives’ (the content written by the panel of Observers). One Directive Response is visible and can be retrieved because it was written by an electricity substation attendant and thus linked to the metadata collected on occupation. Not only do these results reduce the scope of electricity in the MOA to 209 hits, a number that minimizes its overall presence in the archive, they also alter our perspective on Mass Observation materials.27 Most of the search results refer to materials gathered by the paid cohort of Observers, meaning that the search function privileges this material over that gathered from the national panel of Observers. The material that dealt with observation (rather than self-observation) is therefore elevated in MOO through the search function. This minimizes the voices of the national panel and exaggerates the contribution of the paid investigators, filtering observation through a group that came with their own assumptions about working-class life.28 Relying on typewritten material also transforms the social demographics of the national panel. The lack of representativeness of the Mass Observation panel has been at the heart of criticism of Mass Observation since its inception. It has long been acknowledged that Mass Observation is statistically inaccurate and does not reflect the wider demographics of the nation. During the early period, when the Day Surveys were collected, the majority of the panel were middle-class (ten percent being working-class) and half the national panel was drawn from London and the Home Counties, with only around one hundred Observers from the North, the Midlands and Wales.29 This distortion is exaggerated on MOO as it elevates a particular social subgroup: those who had access to a typewriter. By 1937 the typewriter had become integrated into British professional life and office culture and entered upper-middle-class homes. Owning a typewriter, however, was only the first step in typewriting. Typewriting was a learned skill. Traces of this learning is built into the material objects collected in the archive. Dropped lines curve across the page, words spill together and pencil lines rework sections. One unemployed male Observer captured his process of learning to type by describing his visit to a regular evening class (where he copied from ‘Pitman’s Business Typewriting’).30 Straight after his class he practised this skill by typing up his Day Survey, celebrating his lack of mistakes. This record of an Observer learning a skill that would allow him to enter the workplace as a low-level clerk or assistant reminds us that Mass Observation objects are records of skill-acquirement tied to specific social hierarchies in twentieth-century Britain. Analyzing the distribution of medium (between handwriting and typing) across the Observers who responded to the 1937–8 Day Surveys thus reveals distinct social patterns. From a total of 743 Observers who responded to the Day Survey, 290 used a typewriter to complete one or more of their reports, meaning that roughly sixty-one percent handwrote their survey in opposition to thirty-nine percent who used a typewriter.31 This percentage is spread unevenly within the group, demonstrating the social dimensions of typewriting in 1930s Britain. A higher percentage of women (forty-five) than men (thirty-six) responded to Mass Observation using a typewriter. This is unsurprising given that by the 1930s typewriting was gendered, associated with modern working women. Since the 1880s, the position of ‘type-writer girl’ had enabled educated women to enter the workplace to fill a growing range of positions that included secretaries, stenographers and typists.32 These roles attracted younger middle-class educated women, affording them a degree of independence prior to marriage, when they were pressured to resign from their jobs. As more women entered administrative roles a gendering of work occurred that deskilled clerical labour, tying it to routine typing activities.33 Having learned to type to enter the modern office it is no surprise that working women emerge as the largest group from the collection of typewritten Day Surveys. Forty-one percent of women typewriting listed their occupation as working in administrative or professional roles (as secretaries, typists, office-workers, stenographers, clerks, assistants, civil servants, editors, copywriters, researchers and journalists) compared to seventeen percent in the handwriting pool. (Table 2) These female Observers were working in institutions such as the BBC, the Foreign Office and publishing houses, as well as in solicitors’ offices.34 The majority experience emerging from the typewritten documents, therefore, is bound to the office and single working woman. Given that in 1931 only thirty-four percent of women conducted any form of work outside the home, let alone in clerical roles (which accounted for only eleven percent of working women), this provides a distorted view of female experience during the interwar period.35 The demographic breakdown of the handwriting group comes closer to reflecting the experience of women during the interwar period, although it shares the problem of representativeness built into the national panel.36 The largest group to respond by hand were housewives. Within this category, fifty-six percent wrote their Day Surveys by hand, in contrast to forty-four percent who typed. The housewives who did type their surveys tended to be educated and to have been employed prior to marriage. A number absorbed the skills learned in the workplace into their domestic life, with some listing secretarial duties amongst their responsibilities as a housewife.37 These women helped their husbands in offices and businesses, while some worked in part-time voluntary secretarial roles, such as one who worked as the part-time secretary for the Ancient Order of Foresters.38 Secretarial skills might therefore extend into domestic life. For one housewife, learning typing and shorthand and spending an afternoon typing letters was something ‘interesting to do’.39 Table 1. Number of female Observers who handwrote or typed, by occupation Table 1. Number of female Observers who handwrote or typed, by occupation With use of the search function the voices of specific groups of female Observers are minimalized. Housewives who lacked a formal education and never learned to type become less visible. Another key group, women who worked as teachers (one of the best represented and most diligent Mass Observation groups in the national panel) would also be almost entirely excluded. Out of the thirty-one female teachers who sent in Day Surveys, six typed while twenty-five wrote by hand. Working-class women too, employed in domestic service and occupations such as hairdressing, were unlikely to type and would thus forfeit their limited representation in the archive. The online interface thus loses the experience of a large portion of female Observers, whose handwritten observations are much less visible to researchers. Not only does this give a distorted view of the life of the national panel, but for an archive valued as a key resource for gender and women’s histories, it has serious consequences for the representation and understanding of interwar female experience.40 Table 2. Number of male Observers who handwrote or typed, by occupation Table 2. Number of male Observers who handwrote or typed, by occupation The men who responded to Mass Observation by typewriter were similarly drawn from distinct occupational groups and social classes. (Table 2) The largest group to send typed responses were professional workers (journalists, doctors, businessmen, architects and accountants), followed by those in administrative positions (clerks and administrators).41 Unlike with the female respondents, however, there remained greater flexibility between social class and the medium in which Observers wrote. This illustrates the more complicated status of typewriting for men, which was symbolically loaded with connotations of femininity and lower-level deskilled work. Men in administrative positions, for example, were as likely to respond by hand as by type, which may mean that handwriting might have been a deliberate choice to distinguish themselves from lower-ranking work associated with typing. Interestingly, more professional males sent in typed reports, an indication that in this class there was access to secretaries who would have typed up the reports, perhaps even from dictation. Male teachers (in contrast to female teachers) were more likely to type, however, as were males who identified themselves as creatives, such as writers and poets. There were other subtle hierarchies built into the distribution of writing medium. Observers classed as unskilled and skilled manual workers, in agricultural professions, or working in the service sector in shops and restaurants, wrote by hand, with only a limited number counted in the typewriting class. Another key group more likely to write by hand were students, and out of the small group of students who typewrote, seven were from Oxbridge, demonstrating how typewriting was tied to specific social classes.42 (Table 3) Reliance on typewritten material thus elevates particular social experiences above others. It also distorts the geographical distribution of the national panel. Although roughly half of the Observers were drawn from London and the Home Counties, Nicolas Stanley’s detailed study of the overall representativeness of the national panel suggests that it was not too far off the spread of population across the country.43 However, the reliance on typewritten documents maximizes imbalances, and for some categories, eliminates a large sector of voices from outside the capital. Given the distribution of professional services in London and the South East, it is hardly surprising that ninety percent of the females identified in administrative positions were located in the capital, in contrast to fifty-four percent of those who handwrote. A similar distribution can be found in women who identified as housewives. More housewives used a typewriter in London and the South, with only a few using a typewriter in the North East and North West. There are entire regions, including Scotland and Wales, where only one typewriter is present. As such, female typewriters were concentrated in London, at the expense of the regions. This speaks towards the variation in social roles of women across the UK, and the distribution of education, skills and women in the workforce. Once again the male group is more balanced when it comes to geographical location. The London bias remains across both the hand and the typewriting collection. There is more of a spread of typewriters outside the capital, distributed across the regions, including Scotland and Wales, suggesting that for men typewriting was distributed more evenly outside of London. However, despite the more even spread, hand-writers far outnumber typists across the regions. Depending on typewritten documents therefore minimizes the experience of groups in Yorkshire, Wales and Scotland. The heightened visibility of the typewritten documents thus amplifies the existing London bias in the archive. Elevating typewritten materials has the effect of undermining the democratic intent of Mass Observation to give an equal voice to the mass. By making one form of experience more visible, it distorts the constitution of the national panel, elevating particular social identities over others. It decreases the voice of key groups, particularly in categories already under-represented, such as working-class responders. The conversion from physical object into digital text thus embeds new hierarchies in the archive based on the medium in which Observers originally wrote. * * * The problem is not only one of visibility and representation, however. One need only recall Marshall McLuhan’s adage that ‘the medium is the message’ to understand how medium is essential to understanding what Observers wrote. Handwriting and mechanical writing have long carried distinct social meanings. The automatic writing enabled by the typewriter was seen to eradicate authorial agency, its outputs marked with the connotations of objectivity, efficiency and bureaucracy. Conversely, the pen was associated with authorial agency, a graphical trace of its author and subjectivity.44 These cultural associations influenced how responders approached their role as Observers, and determined the types of experiences documented as well as the content and form of the writing. The typewriter exerted its own materiality on Observers’ writing. The machine changed the speed of writing, and its rigid directionality structured the page. Moreover, its staccato rhythm, as one Observer (irritated by his aunt’s typing) noted, was ‘not quite the most pleasing accompaniment to Mozart’.45 The output of Observers, therefore, was intimately tied to their writing-machines. One student was ‘disgusted’ by his Remington 12, whose keys tapped ‘rather too stiffly’ compared with the Underwoods he had ‘handled lately’.46 One female typist excused her poor typing, noting that she had begun using an ‘unfamiliar typewriter and consequently making many mistakes in the first few pages’.47 ‘It is strange’, she noted, ‘how a change of machine throws one out at first.’48 A male teacher was more frank about his badly typed report, admitting that he was ‘no virtuoso of the typewriter and am rather hurried’,49 while a student apologized for the poor state of his report by blaming the ‘illiteracy of my typewriter’.50 Not only did the mechanics of typewriting feed into the act of writing, but true to Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of the typewriter, it also influenced thought.51 For some Observers, typing was more natural than handwriting. One housewife, for example, found ‘it difficult to think comfortably with pen in hand, but perfectly happy writing direct on the type-writer’.52 The associations attached to the typewriter also affected the way Observers performed their role as chroniclers of everyday life. Believing it eliminated subjectivity, some Observers maintained type was the only medium to ‘accurately’ reflect experience. A male hospital clerk, for example, apologized for his late report, delayed because he was forced to borrow a typewriter at ‘odd’ moments at work, adamant that his ‘handwriting would never be equal to the occasion’.53 When he got access he embraced the capacity of the typewriter to order experience, producing an extensive tabulation that documented the intricate layers of his social life.54 One outcome of typing then was that it distanced the Observers from the world they observed. Many took notes by hand and typed their finished reports, inserting a delay between the experience and its record. One admitted to taking three days till she ‘felt inclined to bother with a typewriter’.55 This separation transformed the Observer’s relationship to experience, which raises questions about distancing, the operation of memory and information retention. After a three-day delay, one housewife binned her handwritten notes, for ‘the day being very clear in my memory’. However, she did confess that some ‘very small details have not been put down’. 56 The degree of separation introduced by the typewriter (which thus could result in loss of detail) situates the typing Observer in a different relation to experience than the Observer who might have captured it on the spot by hand. Medium, moreover, draws into focus the Observers’ writing environments. For some, the typewriter tied their Mass Observation activities to the realm of work. Getting the typewriter out for work was a natural segue to writing up their report; an activity that occurred somewhere between invoices and letter writing.57 For others, its connection to work limited it to certain times of the day. One report was delayed because the Observer was ‘rather busy and too tired in the evenings to sit down at the typewriter’.58 Each medium thus set up a different set of relations to the act of writing and the writing environment. For example, the portability of pen and paper allowed Observers to complete their reports on public transport, in bed, or at odd times anywhere. In contrast, the location of the typewriter in the office meant that many reports were written during stolen moments at work. One Observer would take his portable typewriter to the canteen to complete his assignment over lunch. Some would use their typewriter late at night, copying their reports in the privacy of their own room.59 One Observer wrote up her report while simultaneously making fudge (‘wrote a few lines, and then went into kitchen and stirred concoction on stove, and so on’).60 Historiographical questions about the writing environments of Observers, in turn raise problems about how privacy, portability and physical space factored into the substance and nature of the material Observers recorded. Most importantly perhaps, the typewriter transformed the overall shape of the page. The order imposed by the monospaced typewriter established a grid-like structure whose rigidity, as Darren Wershler-Henry has pointed out, extended beyond the paper document. In his words the typewriter ‘rewrites first language itself, then the body of the typist, then of the world around the typist, in its own image’.61 The regularity of the typewritten page influenced how Observers structured their writing and the nature of the content included. One can track the impact of the monospaced typewriter on experience by comparing two Day Surveys, one written by hand and one by pen. Both were written by the same person, a young office clerk named Joan, who worked for the BBC and lived in Chelsea. Observers were not restricted to one medium and it was common for them to move between pen and type.62 Joan’s choice of medium reflected not only what she believed would best represent the type of experience recorded, but also how time was captured, the level of detail included and the way in which the Observer situated herself as a recorder of the world. Written in September 1937, Joan’s handwritten Day Survey describes a Sunday excursion to Cambridge, where she roamed through colleges, visited a chapel and went for tea. This was a day where she ‘wandered at will and without purpose’.63 Time does not intrude too much here, but is referred to only fleetingly; markers which orient the reader in morning, noon or night. Rather than being schematically bound, references to time remained loose and unregulated, changing between ‘10–9’, ‘25 to 1’ and ‘3 o’clock’. When clock-time was mentioned (the ‘11.20 train’, ‘10.15 went to bed’) there is a sense of routine life intruding. In contrast, Joan’s typewritten Day Survey in November captures a morning in the office, cataloguing the routine commute to work, and the mundane tasks, phone calls and interruptions that punctuate the morning.64 The diary follows a regular form as each paragraph begins with a clearly marked time determinant. Whereas several hours were contained in one paragraph in the September Day Survey, here each paragraph is broken down into well-defined chunks: 8.40, 8.50, 9.00, 9.35. The importance of time, therefore, is central to the directive, and one of her first actions on waking is to put on her watch, which because it is running slow makes her leave the house at 8.43 rather than 8.35. The tone of the diary is bureaucratic: precise observation and detailed accounting structure the record of the day. She even goes so far as to record her own activities, turning the gaze back on herself and describing in detail the process of getting the typewriter ready to perform her office duties. Where the handwritten September Day Survey captures Joan’s emotions about being in Cambridge impressionistically, especially her feelings about the colleges (Queens College being ‘the best thing in Cambridge’), the typewritten diary eliminates overt value judgement and emotion for a tone of objective and impartial observation. The typewriter (as opposed to the pen) becomes a tool to assist her critical role as an objective Observer, dispassionately capturing the outside world. The significance of the medium in which Observers wrote thus extended beyond issues of ease and facility. It reflected the experiences recorded and the way that those experiences, emotions and models of subjectivity were organized and represented. It structured the relationship between Observer and observed, delineating lines of objectivity and subjectivity, proximity and distance, detail and memory. Medium, furthermore, was central to the performative nature of Observers – how they understood their role as Mass Observers, and the content they recorded for posterity. To rely on the documents visible through the keyword searches function thus limits understanding of the nature of the writing which emerged from Mass Observation. The project as a whole might seem closer to objective observation than if the larger collection of handwritten materials were given equal attention. The distortion has obvious repercussions for historiographical conclusions, influencing what historical evidence and documentation is accessed by scholars. As importanly, it has serious ramifications for an archive that has been privileged for what Dorothy Sheridan has called historical ‘autobiography’ or ‘life-writing’.65 Where narrative construction becomes the site of analysis, we have to understand how medium transformed the modes in which Observers narrated ‘the self’. If researchers increasingly rely on Mass Observation as a valuable source for historical autobiography and the construction of ‘subjectivity’, we need to remain alert to the ways medium affects how that ‘self’ is constructed. The hierarchy of medium will only be exacerbated when the Mass Observation Project (MOP) undergoes the same process of digitization as MOA. Revived in 1981, the MOP captures the transition to a new writing culture that occurred with the rise of the word-processor and the personal computer in the late 1980s and 1990s. Like the old MOA, the MOP collection remains divided between those who handwrote and those who used a writing machine, such as a typewriter, word processor or PC. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the percentage of handwritten text to type mirrored that in 1937–8, with roughly thirty-five percent of Observers using a mechanical or electronic writing device to compose their day diary.66 By 2006, this weighting was reversed, with roughly sixty-eight percent of Observers typing up their ‘Day Diaries’.67 A few Observers responded to the 1989 directive by computer, despite their being expensive items to own, while the rest continued to use typewriters, electric typewriters and word-processors. Throughout the 1990s, more Observers began using the PC as it increasingly became a feature of British households, even though many clung to their old typewriters. The 1995 collection of ‘Day Diaries’ reflects this transitional moment, as the medium used by Observers became increasingly diverse, with some writing in pen, some staying with their old typewriters and an increasing number using the word-processer and PC.68 The variety of media within the MOP embeds a new ranking system into the archive, as the physical materials are transformed into digital text. OCR technology works best on computer-typed documents printed by a laser-jet printer. Material produced by those who continued to use manual typewriters, electronic typewriters and word-processors, as well as those who printed from early dot-matrix printers, will therefore have lower accuracy rates when converted into digital text than writing produced on a home computer and with a laser-jet printer. At the bottom of the hierarchy will be those who clung to their pen. Once again, this will transform the demographics of the national panel, reflecting the social dynamics of Britain in the early information age. Here the technophile, or the early adopter of computer hardware and software, will win over the technophobe, becoming easiest to locate through the search function. The thirty-two percent who continued to use the pen in 2006, likely to be of an older demographic, will decrease in visibility. Alongside this, the new wave of information technologies has transformed what and how Observers write. The ability to cut, paste, edit and save data has revolutionized writing culture once again, and as a result, has transformed the way Observers constructed subjectivity.69 Just as we have to pay increased attention to the historiographical implications of medium in the MOA to understand how it creates new power structures within the digital environment, so too we should be alert to the complexity of writing cultures in the early digital age so as to understand which groups and subjects will be privileged by the search function. * * * Digital tools are transforming the way we read and process Mass Observation materials. The search function allows us to locate relevant texts, removing the labour of sifting through collections. However, it is often through such material encounters that meaning emerges from the MO archive. The digital is fundamentally, as Tanya E. Clement describes, a ‘logocentric practice’, elevating the word as the prime carrier of meaning.70 But in reading Mass Observation materials meaning often extends far beyond the word, forcing us to read between the lines to recover nuance, innuendo and insinuation. Moreover, as Liz Moor and Emma Uprichard warn, the digital eliminates the materiality of Mass Observation documents, removing the rich array of meaning carried in material features such as the weight of paper or the smudge of a fingerprint.71 The digital imposes new rubrics of interpretation and emphasis, transforming how meaning and value are located in the archive. An understanding of how the digital is transforming scholarship within Mass Observation thus needs to be included in the canon of methodological issues facing Mass Observation studies. Methodological issues have surrounded the use of Mass Observation materials since its foundation, as outlined by Annebella Pollen in her foundational article on Mass Observation methodologies.72 But just as researchers have developed methods to grapple with issues of representativeness, singularity and mass, quantification, scale and sampling, and format, all at the heart of MO studies, we need to add a new category to this list so as to confront the methodological issues introduced by the digital. This digital awareness might resemble what Joshua Sternfeld has termed ‘digital historiography’ – the application of historiographic methods to the generation, representation and preservation of sources within digital environments and the modes in which we access them.73 Digital ‘observation’ would turn the lens back on MOO to understand how the digital interface introduces new historiographical issues in Mass Observation studies. ‘Digital historiography’ would not deny the role that digital methods can play in the next generation of Mass Observation studies. Indeed, the digital has the potential to intervene in Mass Observation methodologies in new ways. Natural Language Processing Software such as Voyant and AntConc are enabling researchers with little programming experience to process large amounts of data and recognize patterns within large bodies of material.74 These tools will allow us to conduct what Franco Moretti termed ‘distant reading’ within the MOA and MOP, opening them up to new forms of interpretation.75 Digital methodologies could provide new perspectives on key subjects in Mass Observation studies, such as the ‘everyday’ or the ‘home’. They would allow us to approach these subjects not through object description but by mapping linguistic structures, sentiment and narrative analysis, to name only a few applications of this software. We could also drill down into the archive by organizing results into demographic groups that could be mapped onto each other. Moreover, digital tools could track objects, terms and patterns across time, allowing us to process comparisons across the MOA and MOP, as well as to chart relationships between the individual and the mass. Indeed, the application of digital methodologies could move us closer to Harrisson’s original goal of developing an ‘objective social science’, attracting new disciplines (such as linguistics and information science) to the archive. As media archaeologists such as Wolfgang Ernst and Jussi Parikka have demonstrated, since historical memory is intimately tied to new media, we need now to ask what new historical imaginaries will emerge from Mass Observation as these new tools are developed.76 Digital historiography does not mean eliminating traces of the digital from Mass Observation studies. Nor must it distance us from the material qualities of Mass Observation objects. Instead, it makes us confront the materiality of Mass Observation objects in order to better understand how they structure the digital environment and as a consequence, our interpretation of British social memory. Rather, therefore, than dematerializing the object, the digital has politicized it as the key site in which knowledge is catalogued, represented and accessed.77 Librarians are becoming increasingly attuned to the need for objects to be preserved in their original formats and not just mined for digital data.78 However, we need not only to appreciate the materiality of the object, but also to understand how its materiality is translated into digital text and how this structures the digital environment. Studying the media in which Observers wrote, therefore, emphasizes the importance of factoring media into our studies of human history and material collections.79 It also demonstrates how the historical particularity of medium and materiality shape digital environments. We need to be alert to the ways the digital de-materializes objects, but we must also be more aware of how the materiality of medium when translated into the digital environment entrenches new mechanisms of power and representation in the archive. Rebecca Wright is a Lecturer in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. Prior to this, she was a Research Fellow in Future Health at the University of York, a Research Fellow in Mass Observation Studies at the University of Sussex and a Research Fellow on the AHRC Collaborative Project ‘Material Cultures of Energy’ at Birkbeck College. She is currently finishing a book, Moral Energy in America: From the Progressive Era to the Atomic Bomb. Acknowledgement I am grateful to the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive for funding this research, to Fiona Courage, Tim Hitchcock, James Baker, Ben Jackson and all the members of the Sussex Humanities Lab and the Mass Observation Archive for their insights, and to Alex Butler and Ben Lacey at Adam Matthew Digital for generously providing data about Mass Observation Online. My thanks also to the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive for permission to reproduce material from the Mass Observation Archive. Footnotes 1 Mass Observation 80th Anniversary Conference, Jubilee Building, University of Sussex, 10–11 July 2017. 2 One panel did address digital media issues: ‘Technological Developments: Digital, Online and the Challenges of Curation’. The focus of the panel, however, was online cultures and it did not confront the historiographical implications of MOO. 3 Liz Moor and Emma Uprichard have addressed the implications of the digital for Mass Observation studies. See Moor and Uprichard, ‘The Materiality of Method: the Case of the Mass Observation Archive’, Sociological Research Online 19: 3, 2014. Alongside this there have been reviews of MOO, but these fail to critically unpack the historiographical implications of the online interface. See Nick Hubble, ‘Mass Observation Online’, Reviews in History, 2010, https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/969 (accessed 21 Dec. 2018). 4 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, New York, 1964; Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, transl. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford, 1999. 5 Joshua Sternfeld, ‘Archival Theory and Digital Historiography: Selection, Search and Metadata as Archival Processes for Assessing Historical Contextualization’, Society for American Archivists 74: 2, 2011, p. 550; Kate Theimer, Joshua Sternfeld, Katharina Hering and Michael J. Kramer, ‘Digital Historiography and the Archives’, Journal of Digital Archives 3: 2, 2014; Annebella Pollen, ‘Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present: “Scientifically, About as Valuable as a Chimpanzee’s Tea Party at the Zoo?”’, History Workshop Journal 75: 1, 2013, pp. 213–35. 6 For a history of the origins and development of Mass Observation see James Hinton, The Mass Observers: a History, 1937–1949, Oxford, 2013. 7 Dorothy Sheridan, ‘Reviewing Mass-Observation: the Archive and its Research Thirty Years On’, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Qualitative Social Research 1: 3, 2000. 8 One critical shift was the increased access to the ‘Diary’ collection which transformed the archive into a key source for life-writing. Dorothy Sheridan, ‘Writing to the Archive: Mass Observation as Autobiography’, Sociology 27: 1, 1993, pp. 27–40; Dorothy Sheridan, ‘Damned Anecdotes and Dangerous Confabulations: Mass Observation as Life History’, MOA Occasional Paper Series, no. 7, 1996: http://www.massobs.org.uk/images/occasional_papers/no7_sheridan.pdf (accessed 21 Dec. 2018). James Hinton did a lot to popularize the diaries for historical and life-writing research with his Nine Wartime Lives: Mass Observation and the Making of the Modern Self, Oxford, 2010. 9 There have been many iterations of MOO since it launched in 2007. New content was added in 2009, 2011 and 2013. The latest iteration was in 2014. In this article, I draw on this last iteration of MOO as it stands in November 2017. 10 All user analytics for MOO are provided courtesy of Adam Matthew Digital. They are drawn from the period between 15 Nov. 2016 and 15 Nov. 2017. 11 Margaret Hedstrom, ‘Archives, Memory and Interfaces with the Past’, Archival Science 2: 1–2, 2002, p. 32. 12 Fiona Courage, Head of Special Collections and Curator of Mass Observation, Personal interview, Falmer, 13 Oct. 2017. 13 Fiona Courage, Personal Interview. 14 Jennifer Rutner, Roger C. Schonfeld, ‘Supporting the Changing Research Practice of Historians’, Ithaka S + R, December 2012, p. 16. 15 Lara Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digital Sources and the Shadows they Cast’, American Historical Review 121: 2, 2016, pp. 377–402. 16 See note 10. 17 See note 10. 18 Software developing this capacity includes Transkribus, which is using Machine Learning Software to convert handwriting into digital text. Transkribus software is developed by the Digitisation and Digital Preservation Group at the University of Innsbruck: https://transkribus.eu/Transkribus/. 19 Tim Hitchcock, ‘Confronting the Digital: Or How Academic History Writing Lost the Plot’, Cultural and Social History 10: 1, 2013, pp. 9–23; See also Joanna Swafford, ‘Messy Data and Faulty Tools: Overcoming Obstacles in Large-Scale Text-Analysis’, in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, Minnesota, 2016, pp. 556–8; Carolyn Strange, Daniel McNamara, Josh Wodak and Ian Wood, ‘Mining for the Meanings of a Murder: the Impact of OCR Quality on the Use of Digitized Historical Newspapers’, DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 8: 1, 2014. 20 Simon Tanner, Trevor Muñoz, Pich Hemy Ros, ‘Measuring Mass Text Digitization Quality and Usefulness: Lessons Learned from Assessing the OCR Accuracy of the British Library’s 19th Century Online Newspaper Archive’, D-Lib 15:7/8, 2009. 21 DS80, Day Survey for March 1937, Day Surveys, Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex (henceforth DS). 22 Hitchcock, ‘Confronting the Digital’. 23 Hitchcock, ‘Confronting the Digital’, p. 13. 24 The website does provide information as to which collections are searchable. However, it does not detail which materials are searchable within those collections: http://www.amdigital.co.uk/m-products/product/mass-observation-online/detailed-information/, accessed 21 Nov. 2017. 25 This is based on the number of individual Day Surveys that were handwritten and typed, rather than the number of Observers who typed one or more Day Survey. 26 The full digital text extracted from the OCR process for the Day Surveys was provided courtesy of Adam Matthew Digital. 27 Keyword search for ‘electricity’ on MOO, accessed 21 Nov. 2017. 28 Hinton, The Mass Observers, p. 24. 29 For a detailed breakdown of the panel see Nicholas Stanley, ‘The Extra Dimension: a Study and Assessment of the Methods Employed by Mass-Observation in its First Period, 1937–1940’, PhD Thesis, Birmingham Polytechnic, 1981, pp. 147–229. See also Hinton, Mass Observers, pp. 61–89. 30 DS300, Day Survey for December 1937. 31 I have based my calculations on whether or not an Observer typed one or more of their Day Surveys because this demonstrates access to a typewriter and/or the skills to use it. Of course, some Observers would have dictated their Day Survey, or have had a typist copy it, but this in itself tells us something about the social demographic of the Observer and their access to resources. Overall 775 Observers sent Day Surveys in to Mass Observation. I have eliminated a group of thirty-two who only completed the April 1938 Day Survey, as this was a ‘Time Chart’ to be filled in, and thus did not allow a choice of pen or typewriter. Included within this group were a few Day Surveys omitted because they were not visible on MOO. 32 For more see Christopher Keep, ‘The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl’, Victorian Studies 40: 3, 1997, pp. 401–26. 33 See Gregory Anderson, The White-Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers Since 1870, Manchester, 1988. 34 Occupations for the female group included: Administrative: office-worker, typist, shorthand, secretary, clerk, stenographer, book-keeper, civil servant; Professional: doctor, chiropractor, social worker, speech therapist, researcher, editor, journalist, lecturer, press secretary; Service: governess, housekeeper, hairdresser, shop worker; Creative: writer, actress, musician, photographer, poet. The only female who fitted into an unskilled manual occupation was one listed as a cardboard-box maker. Housewife, Teacher, Student are more homogenous categories including all those who self-identified as such. When no occupation was listed the Observer is categorized as Unknown; although we can assume many within this group were housewives without occupation. 35 Gerry Holloway, Women and Work in Britain Since 1840, London and New York, 2005, p. 149. 36 It is worth noting that working women were well represented on the national panel overall. However, the typewritten selection weights the collection further towards their perspective. See Stanley, ‘The Extra Dimension’, p. 167. 37 DS80, Day Survey for March 1937. 38 DS72, Day Survey for July 1937. 39 DS96, Day Survey for July 1937. 40 Claire Langhamer, ‘Mass Observation and Histories of Women’, Mass Observation, University of Sussex, 2007. 41 Occupations for the male group included: Administrative: office-worker, clerk, bank clerk, cashier in building society, secretary, book-keeper, proof-reader, copywriter; Professional: doctor, optician, dental surgeon, radiographer, chemist, sanitary inspector, barrister, civil servant, accountant, architect manager, engineer, journalist, lecturer, export buyer, preacher, estate agent; Skilled-manual: factory manager, upholsterer, draughtsman, electrician, instrument maker, railway signalman, switchboard attendant, aircraft fitter, factory under-manager, car mechanic; Manual; lathe turner, machinist, wood worker, moulder in factory; Service sector: salesman, waiter, cleaner, shopkeeper, grocery salesman, postman, shop assistant, hairdresser; Military: forces, major, corporal, petty officer; Agricultural: farmer and farm worker; Creative: writer, artist, poet, film director, actor. Teacher and student included all who self-identified as such. When no occupation was listed the Observer is categorized as Unknown, and this included the unemployed. 42 This included entries by DS346, DS274, DS195, DS304, DS561, DS332, DS287. 43 Stanley, ‘The Extra Dimension’. 44 See Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era, Stanford, 2000, pp. 184–219; Dennis Baron, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, Oxford, 2009. 45 DS287, Day Survey for September 1937. 46 DS557, Day Survey for August 1937. 47 DS160, Day Survey for December 1937. 48 As previous note. 49 DS477, Day Survey for July 1937. 50 DS158, Day Survey for August 1938. 51 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, pp. 183–266. 52 DS147, Day Survey for July 1937. 53 DS214, Day Survey for August 1937. 54 As previous note. 55 DS12, Day Survey for September 1937. 56 DS93, Day Survey for July 1937. 57 DS471 Day Survey for November 1937. 58 DS431, Day Survey for September 1937. 59 DS140, Day Survey for July 1937. 60 DS147, Day Survey for July 1937. 61 Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: a Fragmented History of Typewriting, Ithaca, 2007, p. 136. 62 DS152, Day Survey for September and November 1937. 63 DS152, Day Survey for September 1937. 64 DS152, Day Survey for November 1937. 65 Dorothy Sheridan, ‘Writing to the Archive: Mass-Observation as Autobiography’, Sociology 27: 2, 1993, pp. 27–40. 66 This number is based on the number of printed and handwritten texts sent in to the Summer 1989 Directive ‘Diary for Thursday 15th of June’, the Spring 1992 Directive ‘One Day Diary’, the Spring 2006 Directive ‘One Day Diary’, Mass Observation Project, The Keep, University of Sussex (henceforth MOP). 67 Figure based on the Spring 2006 Directive, ‘One Day Diary’, MOP. 68 Spring Directive 1995, ‘One Day Diary (Meals)’, MOP. 69 Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: a Literary History of Word Processing, Cambridge MA, 2016; James Baker and David Geiringer, ‘Space, Text and Selfhood: Encounters with the Home Computer in the Mass Observation Project Archive, 1991–2004’, Contemporary British History, 2018, DOI:10.1080/13619462.2018.1539828. 70 Tanya E. Clement, ‘The Ground Truth of DH Text Mining’, in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold, Lauren F. Klein, Minnesota, 2016, p. 534. 71 Moor and Uprichard, ‘The Materiality of Method’; Maryanne Dever, ‘Provocations on the Pleasures of Archived Paper’, Archives and Manuscripts 41: 3, 2013, pp. 173–82. 72 See Pollen, ‘Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present’. 73 Sternfeld, ‘Archival Theory and Digital Historiography’. 74 Voyant Tools is a web-based text analysis environment: www.voyant-tools.org. Laurence Anthony has developed a suite of software programmes for concordancing and textual analysis: www.laurenceanthony.net. 75 Franco Moretti, Distant Reading, New York, 2013. 76 Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, Minnesota, 2012. 77 For more on the materiality of digital text see Johanna Drucker, ‘Intimations of Immateriality: Graphical Form, Textual Sense, and the Electronic Environment’, in Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, ed. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat, Madison, 2001. 78 Marlene Manoff, ‘The Materiality of Digital Collections: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives’, Libraries and the Academy 6: 3, 2006, pp. 311–24. 79 A special issue of Critical Inquiry addressed this question. See James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Adrian Johns, ‘Arts of Transmission: an Introduction’, Critical Inquiry 31: 1, 2004, pp. 1–6. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Typewriting Mass Observation Online: Media Imprints on the Digital Archive
JF - History Workshop Journal
DO - 10.1093/hwj/dbz005
DA - 2019-04-01
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VL - 87
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DP - DeepDyve
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