Seeking the Truth: Using comics to depict archival research

In historical research, archival collections offer proximity to objects, records and other primary sources. Yet while they are valued as evidence, it’s understood that these sources cannot speak for themselves, requiring careful interpretation and contextualisation.

In this paper, I’ll examine scholarly norms for finding and representing evidence of the past, suggesting this process navigates a tension between coherence and disorder in both the content and form of historical research and its representation. By considering academic texts as but one form for representing history, I’ll examine comics as a form that can both present the evidence of the research process, as well as this temporal and archival ambivalence that typifies historical labour. Ultimately I’ll ask what this form can offer that’s distinct, and how might it be effectively integrated into mainstream history.