26.Archival research

Research on archives is research on relations: relations between data, records and context elements. When merely formal relations are involved, for instance when the question must be answered how a system which is dominated by sets of formal rules will behave in given circumstances, this research can bring about formal conclusions. In other cases, archival science tends to be an interpretative science, aimed at the interpretation of relations. Records and archives are not surrogating for the real world but not more (and less) than representations of what clerks and secretaries had in mind when documenting their part of the world more or less according to what they thought their masters wished to document. And many times, records and archives are not even such remote representations of reality, but only remnants of representations, mixed up, fragmented and decontextualized. Archival research, looked upon from this angle, is not only about how memories be kept, but also and maybe even more about how memory is created and how memory works.