Easy access to archival meaning signals the need for harder, more adversarial reading.

Evidence

When the archive … seems easily to give access to what one expects of it, the work is all the more demanding. On has to patiently give up one’s natural “sympathy” for it and consider it an adversary to fight, a piece of knowledge that isn’t to annex but disrupt. It is not simply a matter of undoing something whose meaning is too easy to find; to be able to know it, you have to unlearn and not think you know it from a first reading. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 142

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated research purpose on epistemic anxieties — this is a methodological commitment to reading colonial archives against their own apparent legibility.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that an archive’s ease of access demands MORE work is a genuinely counterintuitive methodological stance worth sitting with.