Introduction

This introductory chapter places the preparation of the data for this book within the long history of the State Papers archive, shifting attention from the scholarly users of these papers to the caretakers who have expended labour on organising them and making them navigable at different stages in their afterlife. These include the clerks and secretaries working in the office of the Principal Secretary, the early modern keepers of the State Papers, the archivists and editors that ‘calendared’ the papers beginning in the Victorian period, and the workers who in recent years turned these calendar entries into metadata fields that could be queried for the online resource State Papers Online (SPO). The final stage of caretaking described is the authors’ own process of transforming the XML data from SPO into network data, a major feat of data curation. The contention of this chapter is that early modern filing processes, editing, metadata entry, and data cleaning are all acts of curation which are part of a continuous history. Each process also enacts a radical remix of the archive’s contents that not only transforms the way the letters can be found and accessed, but also the very system of knowledge within which they are framed.