The CRM represents a world ofmaterial facts(IV:3.2), since it is empirically based on the analysis of metadata standards, which in turn primarily represent such material facts. The contents of archival descriptions also mostly consist of material facts; that is, typically do not explicitly describe psychological, collective or statistical facts. The archival and historical inquiries posed to an archive may, on the other hand, very well be interested in such kinds of statements and facts, for example the motivations or intentions of an actor, as discussed in the previous chapter (IV:2.1).
Such inner states of an actor, however, cannot be reasonably expected to be explicitly docu-mented in an archival description. In other words: There are observable facts; that is, material facts, and facts that are not directly observable, of a psychological or social nature. Only the former can be reasonably expected to feature in archival descriptions. In order to find docu-ments in the archive which may provide insights on such inner states or other states that cannot be directly observed, a question would need to be broken down into secondary or auxiliary questions that pertain to a framework of material facts describing and pointing to appropriate documents.
An important step during the interpretative analysis is therefore the categorization of ques-tions according to whether the initial question can be directly answered by a potential query pattern. In other words, whether or not potential adequate documents or facts for answering the questions can be immediately described by material facts.
At the same time, the categorization represents the specificity of the interest of the inquiries posed to an archive and has evolved from the iterative interpretative analysis of both these inquiries and the ontological modelling of their interest. Three categories have been identified:
material factquestions,psychologicalquestions, andcollective statisticalquestions.
Material Facts
Material factquestions seek a directly observablerelationshipbetween two entities. A question such as: “Is it true that Adenauer sent his son to Bordeaux?” or, in more general terms, “Has a specific actor been at a certain place?”, would be amaterial factquestion because the adequate
answer to this question can be found in a statement such as: “Person – has been at – Place”.
Questions such as “Did Fritz work for the Stasi?”62 or, more generally, “Did a specific actor work for a specific institution?”, would also be amaterial factquestion even though this historical relationship would not have been “observable” by arbitrary actors. However, the relationship is in principle observable and potentially documented in archival records.
All inquiries need to be represented as material facts in order to enable an archival inform-ation system to serve the interest of an inquiry. Most questions, as will be shown, fall into this category, and their translation into probable and adequate answers proved to be relatively straightforward.
Questions which cannot be answered directly with material facts need to be interpreted further in order to break them down into secondary questions that can be answered indirectly based on material facts leading to appropriate documents or facts. Such questions can be differentiated intopsychologicalinquiries, which primarily consider the inner states of actors, andcollective statisticalinquiries, which primarily focus on the actions of groups and particular regularities of behaviour.
The process of deducing relevant secondary questions and breaking down original or initial questions into more specific sub-questions is pivotal to the methodology of historical inquiry.
Psychologicalandcollective statisticalquestions need to be investigated and conclusions substanti-ated by evidence based on primary facts, which again pertain to material-fact statements. In the archive in particular, archive users as well as archivists explicitly or implicitly apply such techniques when conducting research for documents or factual information.
Psychological Questions
Psychologicalquestions are about inneror mental states of an actor, a person or group, and relationships which arenot immediately observable. The comparison of a statement or action of an agent with the inner state of mind or intention of said agent, for instance, are of a psychological nature. Further, such questions typically inquire as to reasons, intentions and motivation of actors with regard to activities in which they have participated.
The question, “Why has no German chancellor or president visited Oradour?”, for example, does not ask whether a person has or has not been at a certain place, but inquires as to the reasons and motivation for the decision to visit or – as in this case – to refrain from doing so. These kinds of questions typically demand a higher level of interpretation in order to find material facts providing adequate and probable answers to the question.
Another example is the perception or appraisal of activities by an actor. For example, the question, “How did the responsible authorities in the GDR see the policy of the GDR towards the UN?” refers to the psychological and inner state of an abstract governmental body or, in other words, how agents may have perceived a specific policy.
62“Stasi” is the colloquial abbreviation forMinisterium für Staatssicherheit, the Ministry for State Security of the German Democratic Republic, acting as an intelligence and secret police agency.
Collective Statistical Questions
Collective statisticalquestions focus on how groups have acted, which may entail questions about their reasons for doing so, regularities and frequencies of collective or individual behaviour, of certain types of events, or other phenomena. These phenomena take on a relevant statistical form that cannot be considered random or coincidental and that thus has consequences for society or other actors. Questions of acollective statisticalnature are not always clearly distinguishable from questions of a psychological nature. Some questions may fall into both categories or constitute the basis for answeringpsychologicalquestions.
The question “Was Fritz an avid informer of the Stasi?” is an example of acollective statistical question. The adjective “avid” indicates that the interest is not in the fact as to whether Fritz worked for the Stasi or not but rather in the intensity with which this person made a contribution or in the quality of the delivered contents.
The intensity of an activity could be assessed based on the frequency with which specific types of activity occurred or were carried out by the person in question over a certain time-span.
For example, the inquirer could investigate how many reports were delivered by Fritz to the Stasi within a certain time-frame and which can be found in an archive. Finding documents created by a particular person and delivered to a particular group then is amaterial factquestion and therefore suitable for an archival information system.63
Based on such documents, the inquirer could then begin to assess whether or not the person in question could indeed be characterized as an avid informer, based, for example, on the dates of the documents. Whether the contents exhibit high quality in terms of, for example, comprehensiveness is a matter which can only be judged by the researcher. The archive only provides the empirical source material in order to investigate such questions.
Furthermore, the type of initial question as to whether or not Fritz was an avid informer of the Stasi could be categorized either as afact-findingquestion or even aresearchquestion during the linguistic analysis. As afact-findingquestion, the user would expect the archivist to evaluate the eagerness of Fritz’s contribution and possibly to provide some examples or evidence for the verdict. For this reason, fact-finding questions are also assumed to require documents as evidence for a fact or as the source for finding the fact.
The question as to whether “the wives’ joining of a political party coincided with the political influence of their husbands or if the women had been politically engaged before they met their future spouses” also belongs to the typecollective statisticalbecause in order to provide an answer two dates need to be compared: the date of joining a political party, if any, and the date of marriage.
Of course,collective statisticalandpsychologicalquestions cannot always be precisely assigned or strictly delimited. For example, a question such as “What was the course of action of the
63Of course, there would be various practical and legal obstacles to identifying a particular person as an informant of the Stasi and to finding documents which have indeed been created by that person, such as being listed only under an operative name. Such legal issues, however, lie beyond the scope of this study and the ontological model.
Greens while trying to achieve their goals in theirDeutschlandpolitikregarding the GDR?” is primarily a collective statistical question, yet reasonable secondary questions may very well ask for the personal motivation of leading figures among the Greens, thus rather focusing on psychological aspects.64 The categorization therefore should not be taken as absolute but rather as an approximation of the general level of interest expressed in the single inquiries.
Indirections
Inquiries may not only suggest reasonable secondary questions but also exhibit more than one recognizable interest. Additional possible interpretations which may serve the interest of an inquiry are calledindirections. This is especially, but not exclusively, the case with psychological and collective statistical questions which often also allow for various degrees of adequate inclusiveness or exclusiveness in terms of potential query patterns. Inquiries may therefore be served by more than one query pattern.
Questions may be answered more exclusively with a more specific query pattern, or more inclusively with a broader query pattern. Queries may “move up or down the ladder” in order to increase or decrease the result set. The query patterns represent only selected and the most relevant and instructive aspects of inquiries. Especially in cases where inquiries are very general or unspecific, for example research inquiries, or are of the typepsychologicalorcollective statistical, they entail several indirections.
These emerging different layers of interest; that is, of the epistemological interest of the questions, are reflected in the general patterns constituting the AKM which allow for movement from more specific and exclusive levels to more general and inclusive levels. This hierarchical organization of the general patterns, which will be discussed in greater detail in the following section, facilitates the representation of nearly all questions with respect to their interests.
Selected indirections will be discussed in the context of the examples provided with each general pattern and some will also be displayed in the diagrams accompanying the exemplary query patterns. However, it is neither the objective nor within the scope of this study to extrapolate all possible indirections resulting from the interpretation of the inquiries.
Summary
Figure20shows the relative distribution of inquiries among the three levels of interest. In the whole sample, consisting of 476 substantial questions in total, 399 (84%) are material fact questions. The remaining 77 questions (16%) consist of 24 (5%) psychological questions and 53 (11%) collective statistical questions. A comparison of the relative distribution of the three levels of interest in the two samples of the German Federal Archives and National Archive of Norway reveals that only psychological questions differ significantly. The high number of fact-finding questions in the NAN sample may explain this, since these tend to be material fact questions.
64Suchindirectionsduring the interpretation process are discussed below.
Figure 20– The level of interest of inquiries.
One conclusion which can be drawn from these figures is that most users consciously or subconsciously produce many of their inquiries as fitting to an archival context. In other words, the user already conceptualizes and formulates questions as more-or-less appropriate potential queries to an archival information system. Manymaterial factquestions demand less interpretation in terms of what the user’s interest is and how this interest can be adequately represented in the form of general patterns. The challenge then is to interpretatively break down psychological and collective statistical questions into appropriate material facts which adequately represent the perceived interest of the questions. As previously discussed, the material facts constitute the general patterns and are essentially the result of reducing complexity to an adequate ontological level of abstraction and simplification.
The interpretative analysis further produced and, at the same time, evolved around an ontological core frameworkwhich formalizes and describes pivotal entity types and relationships pertaining to the essential interests of the inquiries. This framework will be discussed in the following.