This digital archive tells a story — one that is personal, cultural, and historical — through the original artifacts contained within my great-grandmother’s scrapbook. As researcher and editor, I organize and elaborate the scrapbook artifacts in the construction of a story, or rather multiple layered stories. These are (1) a personal story about Jane Logan, (2) a cultural story about teen life, and (3) a historical story of America (in particular, North Carolina) during the Great Depression. This project is rooted in Hayden White’s theory of historical text as “story,” as “fiction-making,” as “narrative.” For White, history is “as much invented as found” (his italics) (1385); it is the making of “stories out of mere chronicles” (1386). What White calls “mere chronicles” (i.e., historical events) are narrativized through the subordination of certain events and the highlighting of others in a manner that makes significant the relationships between events. His theory of narrativization of historical events (or artifacts of events in this case) fundamentally guides my research, analysis, and presentation of Jane’s scrapbook in this archive.1 

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In order to construct my personal/cultural/historical story — in order to narrativize — I incorporate methodologies from a variety of academic disciplines including scholarly editing, ethnography, sociology, and history. As researcher and cultural commentator, I draw heavily from ethnographic strategies, including Stacy Holman Jones’ and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater’s theories of autoethnography and Bonnie Stone Sunstein’s and Chiseri-Strater’s elucidations of ethnohistory and family archiving.

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Ethnography is particularly suited to digital humanities scholarship in both philosophy and methodology, and linkages between these two disciplines — which are really umbrella disciplines 2  — will be demonstrated throughout my rationale. It is important for me to identify such connections in order to continually question and revise how the content of my research (ethnohistorical/autoethnographic narrative) is compatible with the form of presentation (digital archive). Common themes between ethnography and digital humanities include self-reflexivity, acknowledgement of the affordances and limitations of form, the inclusion of multiple resources for knowledge building, and recognition of the partiality of all work. I encourage the reader to recognize these crucial points of convergence throughout my rationale. I hope to make clear the ways in which my ethnographic approach to narrativizing my great-grandmother’s scrapbook directly shapes the editorial decisions, forms of presentation, and overall construction of this digital archive.

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1 My approach to narrativizing Jane’s scrapbook is first and foremost influenced by White’s notion of history-making (as story construction) as a matter of the point of view and personal preference of the author. In White’s view, the historian studies a given “complex of events” and “perceive(s) a possible story form that such events may figure” (his italics) (1388). His conception of history as literature, of historian as fiction writer, provides the basis for my approach to constructing a layered personal/cultural/historical narrative through the selection, organization, and elaboration of Jane’s scrapbook artifacts. Throughout the rationale I explain my personal relationship with Jane’s scrapbook, as well as the reasoning behind my selection and organization of its artifacts, in order to make explicit to my readers the constructed nature of the archive’s narrative while I create that narrative.

2 Both ethnography and digital humanities can be considered umbrella fields because they include methodologies and forms shared by a variety of academic disciplines. Ethnography, which has its roots in Anthropology, has been adapted to cultural research in fields like Education (Gonzalez et al.), Sociology (Cintron), and History (Terkel). Likewise, digital humanities encompasses diverse scholarship in fields like History, Art History, Modern Languages, Literature, and Anthropology/Archeology (Rice). Digital humanities scholarship can take a variety of forms, from textual analysis to document encoding to electronic libraries. (For more about digital humanities as an umbrella field, see the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations website, adho.org.)