Cara Giaimo talks about codes, redactions, and otherwise illegible records in archives in her article, “How Archivists Deal With Redactions, Codes, and Scribbles.” She discusses several different documents in archives in each category. She finds that in the case of redactions, it can be tricky to figure out why content is redacted. In some cases, the creator redacts stuff he/she thinks will have no historical value, such as salutations. Sometimes, others redact information that could be sensitive, such as the creators mother redacting information on the academic performance of the creator’s children. Of course, this is often speculation as it is usually impossible to tell what the redacted content is, so archivists have to guess based on context. Some records also use codes. Usually this is by businesses to protect shipment details and the like. If the archives also has the codebook, they’re in luck, otherwise, it takes dedicated study of the codes to unravel them. And sometimes handwriting just is not legible. For example, the writings of explorer Charles Hall is perfect when he wrote from a desk—but when he wrote in the field, his writing is very difficult to read. That reminded me of my own handwriting, except it isn’t very legible at the best of times, and is even worse at other times. When I’m taking notes, I often use a simple shorthand I developed in the army. We would receive operations orders read at a talking pace, and need to record that information as it was passed down, so each of us developed our own ways of writing very quickly. Mine is not legible to anyone but me, as I made extensive use of acronyms, shorthand, and the like. I doubt my papers will ever make it to an archives, as most of them are scribbled on notepads or folded papers and barely make it out of the field, but a dedicated archivist with knowledge of what will then be military history might be able to figure it out. On the other hand, even the nicest handwriting of 18th century people is hard to read until you’ve read a lot of it, especially because many of them spelled the same word differently even within the same document.
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