Friday Lunchtime webinar: “Losing the Wonder in the Digital Shift: The Impact of Technology on Our Connection to Archival ‘Object-ness’”

This is a recording of the Friday Lunchtime webinar: “Losing the Wonder in the Digital Shift:  The Impact of Technology on Our Connection to Archival ‘Object-ness’”

Speaker: Ian Hicks, Collections Manager, Archives and Local Studies, Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre

Webinar was held on Friday 17th October 2025

“Losing the Wonder in the Digital Shift:  The Impact of Technology on Our Connection to Archival ‘Object-ness’” Studies that explore the emotional impact of handling analogue archival material and the importance of touch in understanding archives are scarce. My research intended to address this issue by employing the theories of affect and appraisal to investigate the impact of the digital shift on the user’s experience. I introduced the term numinous to explore the emotions that handling analogue archives evokes in the user and identified four numinous themes: wonderment, fascination, empathy, and spatiotemporal. Additionally, I explored the potential loss of the numinous during user interaction with digital archives. I identified three distinct user groups: emotion-seeking behaviourists, information-seeking behaviourists and holistic-seeking behaviourists. My presentation presents the findings of my research and offers insight into this otherwise understudied area.