Carolyn Steedman once warned us that the archive is 'one of the few realms of the modern imagination where a hard-won and carefully constructed place, can return to a boundless, limitless space’, and that was before the mass digitization of so much of the historical record. Moving between the esoteric and the practical, the digital and the material, this talk will explore histories large and small, stories that may or may not be able to be told, and the perils and possibilities of writing about the ‘everliving, everworking chaos’ that is the past.