Archive Preservation Bias / 档案保存偏差
Archive preservation bias is the source’s reminder that historical visibility depends on which institutions saved which records. In 168. 银与信：一部日本劳工移民的跨洋汇款史, Japanese foreign-ministry files and [[YokohamaSpecieBank|Yokohama Specie Bank]] records make Japanese Labor Migration Remittances / 日本劳工移民汇款 unusually legible, while Chinese Qiaopi Remittance Networks are more scattered across private, local, museum, and family holdings.
The concept is adjacent to Archive Access Tradeoff, but the emphasis differs. Archive Access Tradeoff asks who may access preserved materials; archive preservation bias asks why those materials, and not others, became preserved, cataloged, searchable, or publicly narratable in the first place.
Key Claims
- State and bank archives can make ordinary people visible, but usually because those people passed through official processes.
- Decentralized private systems may leave fewer centralized records even when they were socially and economically large.
- Museums and state archives preserve within narrative and institutional priorities, so researchers must read both content and selection.
- Privacy limits can protect individuals while also keeping rich personal data from broader public digitization.
Connections
- State-Mediated Remittance System / 国家中介汇款体系 — produces centralized records.
- Japanese Labor Migration Remittances / 日本劳工移民汇款 and Migrant Family Remittance Obligation / 移民家庭汇款义务 — source cases made visible by archives.
- Qiaopi Remittance Networks — comparison where records are more dispersed.
- Archive Access Tradeoff — adjacent archive-publication and rights-access concept.
- [[Su|素]] — guest researcher whose archive path motivates the concept.