Hecht writes: "He lambasts me for not single-handedly preserving the archive myself. In fact, I did my best to persuade the mine director to keep and organize that collection. But the company was never going to let me manage (or even influence) such preservation. When the mine finally did shut down, some (unknown) portion of those documents were kept . . . and sent to Areva headquarters in France, where they are now utterly in- accessible to researchers. Should I have declined to use these documents simply because they weren’t pre-organized into a tidy collection and because the company might not, in the future, preserve them for others to see? If historians limited themselves to documentation made permanently and publicly accessible by powerful institutions, our discipline would be mightily impoverished."
van Sittart responds:
"...why the failure to systematically work or digitize a condemned African mine archive to which the author was given unrestricted access is of no consequence. No such defense is offered on any of these fronts by either the author or her many defenders."
AO: this raises important questions about the responsibility of the researcher in preserving the data sources they use for the future. This seems to be much easier to discuss/lombast historians for because they are part of an ongoing disciplinary norm to have public archives. But what about other qualitative data that is generated daily as part of research work that goes on. Few if any discussions are going on about how this data should be archived/digitized and preserved for sharing and future inquiry. Might be worth reaching out to van Sittert to get his thoughts on my project. According to his university website, he is currently engaged in the creation of online databases inventorying the colonial and national gazette series for environmental and social history.
Hecht's responds to van Sittart by highlighting the following:
"He dismissively notes the twenty-six archival collections that I consulted for the project, then falsely claims that my arguments are built primarily on interviews rather than archives. Even a cursory glance at the footnotes reveals the deep archival foundation of my claims. A more sustained examination shows that many nuances in my arguments emerged by placing interviews and archives in dialogue."
"I faced secretive institutions that actively sought to keep their records from public view. In both, I interviewed workers, managers, and technical experts to discern patterns and narratives invisible in the written record."
"my main archival sources consisted of uncatalogued, disorganized collections located on in- dustrial sites, buried in dusty closets"
"van Sittert sarcastically wonders whether I’d written mine companies in advance of arriving. Of course I wrote— they would never have let me onsite otherwise. But any- one who has conducted comparable research knows that one does not persuade such corporations to pro- vide access to documentation with written queries. One needs to show up in person, to painstakingly explain why documents that managers consider outdated rub- bish actually have historical value. This is equally true for French nuclear reactors and for Gabonese uranium mines."
"He lambasts me for not single-handedly preserving the archive myself. In fact, I did my best to persuade the mine director to keep and organize that collection. But the company was never going to let me manage (or even influence) such preservation. When the mine finally did shut down, some (unknown) portion of those documents were kept . . . and sent to Areva headquarters in France, where they are now utterly in- accessible to researchers. Should I have declined to use these documents simply because they weren’t pre-organized into a tidy collection and because the company might not, in the future, preserve them for others to see? If historians limited themselves to documentation made permanently and publicly accessible by powerful institutions, our discipline would be mightily impoverished."
It is interesting that Gabrielle Hecht leverages the idea of "intellectual dishonesty" (several times) in her rebuttal against van Sittert (in comparison to his framing of Hecht as an (unethical) neocolonialist at the same level as extractive mining companies).