Editors’ Introduction: Human Documents and Archival Research

[From introduction] Our concern in these volumes is with a research tradition that engages centrally with sources that, in different ways, document human experience. Typically, such sources include ‘life documents’: letters, diaries, personal correspondence, narrative accounts, oral histories, and informal sources of data that are usually neglected by formal histories and official records. More recently, such sources have come to include electronic documents: blogs, micro-blogs, social networking sites, online forums, e-mail records, and so forth. As this array of examples might already serve to demonstrate, what constitutes a ‘document’, or ‘archive’ or, more generally, material that can be considered to serve as a legitimate source of data for social analysts concerned with researching human experience is by no means a straightforward matter.