The digital archive is often described in opposition to its physical counterpart. Media theorist Wolfgang Ernst has coined the term “dynarchive” to describe the former, a phrase that neatly contrasts digital archival remixability with the statis of the physical archive and its hierarchical fond structure. The article both uses and questions this characterization by examining the archive’s physical and digital document practices in three areas: (1) Hierarchical collection description versus individual document description; (2) Original order versus relevance-based results; and (3) Archival selection practices and the illusion of completeness. Archival structure and description have been central to the authority and evidentiary value of archival documents. Yet both the market logics of the internet and criticism from historically oppressed groups have challenged these connections. Using the dynarchive as a conceptual frame, this article examines archival digitization's potential for decolonization of the archive via its fragmentation into a non-hierarchical web of interrelated documents.

Kapitlet behandlar läsning av böcker i olika format bland kvinnor och män samt hur ålder, utbildningsnivå och bostadsort påverkar i vilken utsträckning man läser. Vi undersöker hur årets siffror ställer sig gentemot föregående års nationella SOM-undersökningar. Vi noterar i årets undersökning att läsning av böcker någon gång per år fortsatt ligger högt och att de som läser mest återigen är högutbildade kvin-nor som bor i en storstad. Läsning av digitala böcker ökar med någon procentenhet men lyssning av ljudböcker har saktat in och ökar inte i samma utsträckning som tidigare år. Det är de yngre (16–29 år) som läser mest digitala böcker och med sti-gande ålder ser vi att den digitala läsningen minskar. Biblioteken är populära för lån av böcker men vanligast är att tryckta böcker införskaffas via fysisk bokhandel eller lånas eller fås av familj eller vänner och digitala böcker införskaffas i första hand via prenumerationstjänster.

Feminist historiography is rife with debates about the nature and boundaries of women’s movements. Arguments over who to call an activist or a feminist sit at the heart of these definitional debates, which provide the groundwork for how scholars understand contem-porary feminisms. Given the heated nature of ongoing disputes over the complicated identity politics of feminism and its archives, it is sur-prising that scholars have afforded so little attention to the technical infrastructure that defines and provides access to digitized primary source material, which is increasingly the foundation for contem-porary historical research. Metadata plays an outsized role in these definitions, especially for photographic material that cannot be made word-searchable but is favored by digitizers because of its popularity.

This article uses qualitative content analysis to examine how two digital archives define the Swedish suffrage movement – a histori-cally contested concept, here understood through the theory of Susan Leigh Star as a “boundary object” subject to “interpretive flexibility”. The study uses keywords attached to photographic material from the the National Resource Library for Gender Studies (KvinnSam) and metadata within the related Swedish Women’s Biographical Lexicon platform for women’s biographies. The findings indicate that the hier-archies of archival organization do not disappear with individual document digitization and description. Instead, the silences built into physical archives are redefined in digital collections, obscuring the tensions between individual and movement feminisms, as well as the contested nature of movement boundaries.

Both the photograph and digitization are often defined as democratizing forces. But neither exists outside the system of power dynamics that structure art, history, and cultural heritage. This article uses postmodernist theorization of knowledge hierarchies in the archive developed by archival scholars Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz to examine the gendered nature of metadata and data connected to digitized photographic material available on the platforms of the three major Swedish memory institutions: the Royal Library, the Nordic Museum, and the National Archives. Given that digitized photographs require the addition of machine-readable data and metadata to be findable, this information demonstrates the extent to which digitization staffs have consciously thought about the visibility of gender in their online collections. The research questions of this article are thus twofold: (1) to what extend have Swedish memory institutions embraced a postmodern approach to the archive in their photography digitization projects, and (2) has this approach resulted in the greater visibility of women-oriented material? The findings indicate that Swedish institutions have adopted postmodernist thinking about archival flexibility to varying degrees, but none have thought thoroughly about increasing the visibility of woman-oriented material.