Building ignorance by disseminating “evidence”: an agnotological look into the digital archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran

In democratic contexts, the discussion of digital technology in the field of archival heritage highlights its potential benefits for expanding access to archives to the wider public. It also focuses on the legal, moral, and ethical issues raised by copyright or privacy concerns. Using the digital archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) as a case study, this article thoroughly analyses another facet of digital technology, namely its role in building and perpetuating ignorance about the past through the mass digitization of archives in authoritarian contexts. The analysis scrutinizes digitally processed archives that are accessible as carefully curated data—some digitized and some born digital—through a network of open access web-resources developed by several institutions in the IRI. The article briefly considers the broader context of access restrictions to archives and information, and of the intentional and institutionalized opacity of this field in the IRI. These digitally processed archives are evaluated through the lens of archival science theory. Several macro- and micro-aspects of the kind of knowledge that scholars can produce from these digitally processed historical sources are considered.