[hinkley]

One aspect of this is to look at the ways that history is being rewritten now from original materials. All of the -isms of the 1900's painted a picture of straight, white (male) Captains of Industry paving a way to the future, and in revisiting the source materials we are discovering that this image paved over a lot of people that were doing a lot of heavy lifting.

History is full of assistants, spinsters and confirmed bachelors whose stories are being re-told now from diaries and correspondence letters that have been family heirlooms for generations. You can't trust the contemporary reports as accurate, because they have a different agenda than we do 20, 40, 100 years in the future. We only knew of Marie Curie within her own lifetime, less because her work was so profound, but because she had a husband in her own field who conspired with her to subvert a system that didn't want to give her standing. A partner outside your field can't do much for you, and a more selfish collaborator wouldn't.

Who knows what polite fictions are being told about people now that will be reframed by our grandchildren, assuming that scholars can find any of it. If I had to guess it will be neurodiversity. Probably/hopefully doing away with the Tortured Genius trope.

[CarelessExpert]

TBH, IMO this is all a non sequitur

My point is that the nature of digital technologies is such that information is far more ephemeral and closed off than it's ever been, not just for historians but for we, the people who are creating that information. We produce a lot more information, but control and long-term preservation is infinitely harder.

Your observations regarding the challenge of historians is absolutely true. But the effects of technology are entirely orthogonal to that problem.

After all, even if we had perfect digital preservation, what you say is still true, if only because subjugated groups are less represented in the digital discourse for many reasons, including socioeconomics, direct censorship/interference from power groups, etc.

[md8z]

"My point is that the nature of digital technologies is such that information is far more ephemeral and closed off than it's ever been"

I don't think I agree with that. For a lot of pre-historical research the only thing we have to go on is fossils and rock formations. Our picture about dinosaurs is extremely ephemeral and extrapolated from a very small number of things in the grand scheme of history, I don't think we can even begin to imagine the sheer number of events that happened in the total history of organic life forms that resulted in the current state of things. But knowing those things is really important for a lot of scientific fields.

Edit: Also I guess I just don't see why digital information is really significant here. It seems just as likely for a marginalized person without safety to have a physical notebook or photo album get lost or destroyed, for example.