From Visual Irony to Caricature

Content Warnings and Censorship

“…For example, if the archivist were to step too much into the historian's shoes when adding interpretation to outdated or potentially offensive descriptions, or were to engage in attempts to "critique the past," as Holterhoff characterizes one possible goal of contextualization. 80 Contextualization that expresses a personal (or institutional) judgment about language or content could easily be characterized as "prejudicial" because it is telling readers either what the archivist thinks or what the reader should think. Holterhoff discusses this tension, and while she supports adding identity tags, she cautions, "adding digital tags addressing identity politics related to race, class, gender, and religion, beyond the most blatant examples of bigotry, moves the archive away from objective and mimetic documentation of the past and into the realm of subjective editorializing."…”