The National Archives Podcast Series

This Big Ideas seminar consists of three short presentations exploring the theme 'surfacing the page'. In the first talk, Professor Maryanne Dever looks at how the presence of digital technologies for the reproduction and circulation of archival artefacts have placed questions of materiality at the centre of how we value analogue originals. New debates around the materiality of the archived page are pushing us away from focusing simply on physical properties of the page and toward a consideration of the page in terms of its potential. In the second talk, Dr Jacqueline Lorber Kasunic looks at how attention to the materiality of the archived page has often assumed a literal reading, one that fails to engage with how readers come to understand a text not only through the linguistic signs but also through the graphical and formal properties of the text. She argues for the acknowledgement of the role of the visual as integral to the relationship between the archived page and its interpreta