1. For example, the word “evidence” appears neither in the table of contents nor in the index of Hilary Jenkinson's,A Manual of Archive Administration (London: Percy Lund, Humphries and Co., 196), nor in T.R. Schellenberg'sThe Management of Archives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). On Jenkinson's notion of evidence, see Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift”,Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997): 17–63.
2. For a recent discussion of the record-evidence relationship, see Heather MacNeil, “Trusting Records in a Postmodern World,”Archivaria 51 (Spring 2001): 36–47.
3. The afterglow analogy can become unwieldy. The richness of light as a metaphor and analogy can take us in many directions and open up many interpretive frameworks. Looking at the study of gamma ray burst (GRBs) in high energy physics, for example, GRBs and the spectra in their afterglows are providing scientists with evidence related to various original events in the history and structure of the universe. Physicists who study these phenomena also refer to “dead time,” an intrinsic feature of any system set up to detect events. Dead time refers to the moments when a system is not active. This minimum time is what makes it possible for such detection systems to delineate activities as discrete, separate events.
4. On the influence of cultural context on notions of evidence and knowledge, see “Introduction”, in Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols (eds.),Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology (Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing, 1986).
5. On the process of institutionalization, homogenization, and imitation among social groups and organizations, see Paul DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields”, and other essays, in Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (eds.),The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).