Administrative Documents of Institutions as Sources for the History of Experience

The chapter by Johanna Annola explores how administrative documents can be used to reconstruct the past worlds of experiencing in residential institutions. It suggests that such worlds came into being in/as entanglements between people and their material surroundings. Building on the work of Henri Lefebvre, the chapter proposes that these entanglements were structured by socio-spatial practices such as groupings, movements, soundscapes, and routines. By using nineteenth-century spinhouses as an example, the chapter shows how traces of socio-spatial practices and negotiations around the same can be identified in sources, and how these can be used to estimate what kind of experiences were likely to take place in the institution in question. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how the seemingly unfruitful administrative sources may render the past worlds of experiencing open to the scholarly gaze.