UC Irvine Libraries

Archives and manuscript librarians use the term "born digital" to refer to personal papers that were created using a computer, received by the archives as computer files, and accessed by researchers electronically. Using Richard Rorty's word-processing files as illustration, this paper discusses the significance of these technological conditions of production and reception for how this type of manuscript may be handled by an archivist and presented to researchers seeking to learn about a scholar's intellectual work. The author works as an archivist at the University of California, Irvine Libraries, where she processed the Richard Rorty Papers for the Critical Theory Archive.