Why Build a Historical Research Archive?

I studied Latin American history in undergrad and grad school. Over the years I accumulated sources, notes, bookmarks, half-written analyses, scattered across Google Docs, Zotero libraries, browser bookmarks, and notebooks.

This archive is an attempt to bring all of that together into a single, interconnected, searchable system that I can add to for the rest of my life.

What this is

• A personal knowledge base, not an academic publication
• A place to connect sources to events to people to ideas
• A reading list and research log
• An evolving map of my intellectual interests

What this isn’t

• Comprehensive or authoritative
• Peer-reviewed
• Static. It will grow and change as I learn more.

The connections between entries are as important as the entries themselves. A source connects to the people who wrote it, the events it describes, the topics it addresses, and the notes I’ve written about it. Those connections are what make a collection into a system of knowledge.