Digital Archives and the History of Pornography

[para. 1]: "One of the most significant challenges that historians of pornography face is locating and accessing sufficient primary material. Due to the joint forces of censorship and the passage of time, only a small proportion of literary and visual materials produced for the purposes of erotic entertainment before 1900 survive, scattered among collections across the globe. Acquiring knowledge of and access to the contents of private collections can be difficult, and there are few collections dedicated to such works in public institutions. Examining how pornography was produced, regulated, and consumed in the past is equally fraught because of the state of the historical record. In the British context, for instance, few readers documented their consumption of ‘obscene’materials, making it difficult to assess how readers experienced them in the past (Sigel 2002, 7–8). Meanwhile, court records of obscenity trials and government reports on the pornography trade are often incomplete, and producers actively worked against leaving traces of their activities (Siegel 2002, 6). These factors made pornography difficult to study, as the Victorian bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee famously lamented, even for well-connected comporary scholars (Fraxi [1877] 1962, xxvii-xxix). It is therefore necessary for historians of pornography to become archival magpies, seizing on any document that might shed light on the details of its authorship, material production, and consumption in the past."