Ways of knowing: historians and the social construction of evidence

Abstract

Purpose Despite notable changes in both research practices and scholarly environments, few empirical studies explore historians' interactions with digital archival collections from a qualitative perspective. How do these new ways of manifesting knowledge impact scholarly epistemological practices, or “ways of knowing?” To begin to address these questions, the present study investigates how historians use digital archival photographs to build scholarly evidence. Design/methodology/approach The study uses a discourse-analytic approach rooted in social constructionism to study historians' information use. I conducted photo-elicitation interviews with fifteen historians, using participant-selected digital archival photographs as prompting scenarios for descriptions of their visual information use. To analyze each historians' textual and visual materials as sites of discourse, I used reflexive thematic analysis integrated with analytic techniques informed by the aims of the study and my research questions. Findings Results from my analysis show that historians use what I call “epistemic devices” in their social constructions of evidence. As discursive building blocks for historians' ways of knowing, epistemic devices are communicative mechanisms that are taken up in different informational contexts. They play a functional and rhetorical role in how historians construct evidence from their use of digital photographs. Originality/value This research builds on existing theoretical and conceptual perspectives on studying information use, contributing an empirical approach that models information use as a discursive social construction. Additionally, the study presents a novel approach for analyzing visual and textual materials as sites of discourse within an overarching qualitative framework, enhancing methodological rigor.