"A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions"

If you've ever posted a comment on social media, you've created a potential source for future historians. But what problems does this mass of new material pose? Matt Elton asked historians JANE WINTERS and JOHN WILLS about how recent archives differ from those of the past - and how experts might make sense of them

- COMPILED BY MATT ELTON

Matt Elton How do the kinds of records created now and in the recent past differ from those left in previous centuries?

Jane Winters Records and sources now come in a whole range of formats. In some cases, they are very familiar analogue sources that have become digital, whereas in others they are in a completely new format. Newspapers offer a great example of how this has changed: we used to read them only in physical form. Then those physical newspapers were digitised, keeping essentially the same structure.

We now have both physical and digital newspapers, which differ in both form and content. An issue of The Guardian published in print today will not contain the same information as the online version: there will also be multimedia material and lots of online comments and conversations, whereas in the past you would have had only letters to the editor, for instance.

And to take the example of people’s reflective writing, that’s a type of source that has also moved into new formats. A diary is not exactly the same as a blog entry or a post on social media, for instance.

John Wills One example that offers an interesting way of thinking about some of these issues is the ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon - the point in 2023 when the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer were released at the same time. That’s a very recent instance of the kind of cultural moment that’s really interesting to research - but doing so is not easy, because you're dealing not just with the films themselves but also the digital content produced by the films’ fandoms, the actors’ response to that content, and the wider public responses to those two movies, in a way that we've never been able to do before.