Decelerating Digital Archives: Critical Reflections on Computational Analysis

This paper thinks critically about the violence of digital archives and computational methods by engaging with the role they play in the erasure and flattening of marginal communities, advocating for a deceleration of digital archives. I place my methodological pitfalls from a computational project against the important theoretical work of archivist Dorothy Berry, art historian Jennifer Roberts, and scholars engaged in a post-colonial study of religion like Saba Mahmood and Tomoko Masuzawa to demonstrate the urgency of deceleration to prevent the further disenfranchisement of marginal communities. Reflecting on a computational project I conducted using Seventh-day Adventist periodicals on religious liberty from 1886 to 1919 to analyze positive rhetoric about the Catholic Church, I describe how my project and its shortcomings serve as a low-stakes example of the power in decelerating digital archives, and I use it to speak to the much higher stakes of digital work that involve marginal communities.