Sorting and Seeing: Digitization and Ways of Reading the Archives of French West Africa

This essay provides a brief overview of themes that emerge in historical research when we consider the low-technology and simple methods of digital photography in archives of empire. A brief consideration of how to incorporate aspects of digital capture in the classroom is also discussed. The core of the article is a case study of gun permit applications and the circulation of guns between France and French West Africa in the 1950s. The increased capacity to amass material through digital technologies—namely, digital photography in archives—pushes historians to develop sorting methods that open up new analytical terrain in histories of the French empire. Deconstructing the deceptively straight-forward and formulaic gun permit as the primary text in question, the essay explores the following question: what is the relationship between close reading and aggregate methods, and how do we use them together to see different angles on historical process?