Silence in Noisy Archives: Reflections on Judith Allen's "Evidence and Silence - Feminism and the Limits of History' (1986) in the Era of Mass Digitisation

Feminist historians have long been concerned with the silencing of women's voices and experiences in archives. In 1986 Judith Allen was one of many feminists pushing back against the positivist idea that history comprised only those traces of the past that could be salvaged in the present. Archives are radically different now in breadth, composition, production and technologies to those in which Allen was working, but are her concerns about the nature of evidence and silence still pertinent? While digitisation, for example, has made more visible those who were previously obscured in historical records, are silence and silencing practices still a feminist problem three decades on from Allen's salvo?