Rummaging in the Dark: ECCO as Opaque Digital Archive

While the staggering breadth of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) has made it an indispensable research tool for scholars, ECCO is not (and can never be) comprehensive. Yet the scope and bounds of its collection remains obscured. This article outlines the dangers of such archival opacity and begins to shed light on the collection as a whole, including its provenance, history of curatorial decisions, intellectual order, gaps and biases, and scope. Such an intervention is necessary given that archives can powerfully shape the research that comes out of them— particularly when their own contours and limitations remain unseen.