ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how Unit War Diaries are re-presented and re-interpreted by The National Archives (TNA) in Kew, U.K., the institution responsible for their curation. War, as this chapter will show, has played a crucial role in shaping the state archive’s institutional identity. But this chapter will also argue that the archive has a key role in mediating the experience of interacting with records of war. It reveals how the reading spaces, both virtual and actual, of the archive generate meanings that inflect the reading and understanding of Unit War Diaries, and how navigating these spaces involves sometimes affective encounters with TNA’s institutional identity. The investigation of the mediation of processes of record keeping in Archives of War is intended to stimulate a re-appraisal of the ways in which textual traces of the past are interpreted and used in historiography, bringing into question this book’s own use of historical records. This chapter therefore details the interactions with the documents and the technologies used to access them by all who worked on Unit War Diaries for this book, with the aim of discovering what might have been lost, or gained, as the records cycle through analogue and digital formats.
