This essay contends that the methodological questions raised by recent scholarship on digital archives and databases require reframing the selection of materials as a process of data creation. Using the physical archives of nineteenth-century American amateur newspapers, it treats the process of data creation as a heuristic for understanding the relationship between an archive or a set of archives and the textual field that they were assembled to represent. After theorizing archival research in relation to the digital humanities and quantitative book history, it uses the interarchive (a large geographically distributed archive composed of several individual collections that sample the same materials) of amateur newspapers to understand the changing size and shape of the public amateur journalists called “Amateurdom” between 1870 and 1890. Then, using the 1880 US Census and a sample of amateur papers from 1879, it shows that lower-middle-class amateurs participated in the hobby to gain a more secure foothold in the middle class.

中文翻译：

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绘制 19 世纪业余报纸档案

本文认为，最近关于数字档案和数据库的学术研究提出的方法论问题需要将材料的选择重新定义为数据创建的过程。使用 19 世纪美国业余报纸的实体档案，它将数据创建过程视为一种启发式方法，用于理解一个档案或一组档案与它们被组合起来代表的文本领域之间的关系。在对与数字人文科学和定量图书史相关的档案研究进行理论化之后，它使用业余报纸的跨档案（一个大型地理分布的档案，由几个对相同材料进行采样的个人收藏组成）来了解公共业余爱好者不断变化的规模和形态。 1870 年至 1890 年间，记者们将其称为“业余爱好者”。然后，