Part of my desire to digitize these diplomatic cables was to get a better sense of the full spectrum of the embassy’s activities. Usually in archives, I order folders and boxes that I think are related to my topic. Howerver, because of the way the American embassy files are classified, which is largely by place name, I wasn’t sure what to request and what to ignore. One way I think most historians get around this issue is through trying to order as much material as possible, and then just spend hours taking images and reading them at a later point. While this strategy is useful at the time, I find the prospect of processing this mountain of materials after leaving NARA a bit daunting.
While I’ve outlined how digitizing these materials helps add efficiencies in our workflows, especially for finding relevant documents, I also think digitizing these files can help us get a better sense of the embassy’s activities in a holistic way. Now one important point to acknowledge is that these archival materials only represent an abstraction of the full breadth of any embassy’s work since so much gets destroyed prior to archiving. Nonetheless, in understanding even parts of the embassy’s work, I believe it’s helpful to be able to contextualize this slices within the full scope.
So to get a 30,000 foot view of the embassy’s work, I ran box 9 and 10 through textplot to visualize this overview of the embassy in Cairo.
There’s a lot to unpack in this visualization, but the most visualizing striking part is the far top cluster that is so distant from the rest of the corpus.
Turns out this cluster represents the diplomatic correspondance that was in French. In fact, the exchange of credentials between embassies were still written in French. These documents are ones I tended to skip over in the archives since they aren’t relevant to my project. But, seeing this cluster helps place these documents within the context of the embassy, and helps me think through how this relates to my work.