What We Do with Fragments in a Digital Age: Reflections on 927 Immigrants' Records from El Archivo del Estado de Sucre, Cumaná, Venezuela

In the barely-used state archives in Cumaná, Venezuela sit bundles of foreigner’s registry cards, seemingly untouched since they were generated. In 1931, Venezuela’s central government demanded registration of every foreigner in the country. Across the northeast state of Sucre—once a showpiece of cocoa-exporting prosperity, now fallen on lean times—officials called foreign-born residents before them, glued photos to forms, and inked in details of residence and travels. The 927 forms findable today include British West Indian men; men, women, and children from mountainous villages in the Maronite Christian heartland of Mount Lebanon; Corsican merchants; and US missionary couples.

What stories might historians tease from these detailed but happenstance sources? Before the advent of web-based search, the normal course was to turn select pieces of semi-structured information into structured data and aggregate it for quantitative analysis. The numbers produced would be guided by questions shaped by qualitative readings of other sources and by place-based expertise accumulated along the road to stumbling across these pages in this archive in the first place. In an era of massive digitization, an array of other possibilities opens. We can apply microhistorical methods across a corpus of target sources not limited by place—and indeed, whose outer edges may not be known to us at all. What are the potential rewards; and what are the concerns?

Meanwhile, the availability of off-the-shelf “Artificial Intelligence” tools raises a new set of possibilities, and of cautions. Aggregating information across multiple sources once required human-guided curation, but AI models seem to hold out the promise of algorithmic assistance—or even, fully outsourcing of the tasks of summarizing and finding. As a discipline, we need to explore and explain how archival fragments can generate knowledge in a digital age: including the hard-won caveats and concerns we may have to share.