Serial killers inspire both fear and fascination, and the criminal profilers trying to make sense of the almost incomprehensible nature of their crimes have become real-life and fictional heroes. Most episodes of the popular, newly-rebooted crime drama Criminal Minds are microhistories.1 Rather than focusing on physical evidence, the profilers that make up the show’s FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) piece together the unfortunate series of events behind the criminals and their victims. Catching the criminal means knowing who they are and understanding who or what led them to commit their crimes. The BAU’s lynchpin in writing these histories is Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness), the team’s technical analyst. Garcia is a former hacker who uses her vast knowledge of computers and computer systems to provide on-the-fly support to the rest of the team, detailing the lives of victims, suspects, and anyone else who may have crossed their paths.
When viewers watch Garcia work, her wall of computer screens is filled with digital surrogates of everything from medical records to newspaper articles to high school yearbook pages, virtual entryways into scattered archives.2 To have digital resources like Garcia’s would make possible a myriad of histories that have remained largely untold. After all, the core of a historian’s research is about searching and finding, which many of us do digitally.
Historians have their favorite online resources, but where in the digital world is Garcia searching? According to the series, Garcia is accessing a series of digital archives that are equal parts fantasy and aspiration. Watching her work and seeing her archives are opportunities to think about what it would take to make this fantasy the historian’s reality.
In the season 9 episode “Gatekeeper,” it takes Garcia all of ten seconds to find the exact digital documents she needs to tell the BAU’s prime suspect Tanner Johnson’s life story. From public records and a newspaper article, the team learns that Johnson lost his son in an accident and his wife in a divorce. The article’s pop up window reads, “Media Archive: Johnson, Tanner.”3 Supposedly, this archive is not solely digital and is a representation of a physical archive. In an ideal world, the digitization of archival material only happens with collections that have been properly arranged and described.4 This ideal, however, is often as fictitious as Garcia herself. Pre-digitization processing can be crucial to maintaining order and searchability from physical to digital, often beginning with metadata.5
Metadata, the attributes assigned to digital objects in a controlled format, are a mainstay of archival practice and are vital to how Garcia runs her searches. In the season 8 episode “The Lesson,” in the kind of stomach-churning and mind-boggling mystery that Criminal Minds is known for, the BAU deduces that their suspect suffered a trauma alongside his father and has a background related to puppets. As Garcia narrows her searches, we see a series of metadata tags appear on her screen, starting with Winslow, Arizona and refining to puppeteers between 1950 and 2000 involved in a father/son event. The result is Adam Rain, a puppeteer who lost his father in a robbery gone wrong. As heavy of a lift as it is to organize and scan 50 years worth of newspaper articles, without more time spent assigning metadata, the project is at best only halfway done.6
The population of Winslow, Arizona is a little under 9,000, leaving Garcia with a labyrinth of people through which to navigate. Archivists organizing physical archives, technologists scanning objects, and librarians adding metadata, are our guides through that labyrinth. The archives that Garcia accesses are a combination of technology, policies, planning, and unending staff time.7 For Garcia to successfully navigate the labyrinth of her digital archives, countless professional archivists, librarians, and museum professionals all had to roll up their sleeves.
Acknowledgement of these practitioners working behind the archival scenes are a rare occurrence in Criminal Minds. Garcia herself recognizes their existence in the season 10 episode “Nelson’s Sparrow.” She tells another agent that she’s waiting on a case file from the 1970s that had yet to be scanned. More specifically, she’s waiting on a person to produce the digital version of the file.8 Despite ever-growing info-lust and dreams of mass digitization on the scale at which Garcia works, digital archives often rely on infrequent grants and temporary positions to keep the people employed that produce Garcia’s scanned files.9 The precarious labor responsible for scanning, tagging, storing, and preserving includes adjuncts, postdocs, students, librarians, archivists, and more.10
Because of technological advancements, and as human practice around digital archives has grown, the kinds of archives under the care of archivists and historians has increased. While Garcia’s digital archives don’t exist now, it is not to say that they never will. Engaging with this digital archival fantasy involves thinking about technology, and, more crucially, thinking about people, without whom we could not have the sense of information control that a searchable archive provides. In fact, it may be the case that the fantasy persists specifically because of the people often missing from the narrative of digital archives. It is much easier to imagine recreating Garcia’s virtual world without thinking of the humans behind it all. In the academic world specifically, it is far too often the case that the people performing the tasks of digitization are not part of the story of that archive.
For now, searching with the speed and ease of Penelope Garcia exists only on TV. But, audiences can continue to watch and fantasize about the future of digital archives in the service of uncovering more of history’s mysteries.
- Criminal Minds premiered in 2005 and ended in 2020. The show was revived in 2022 as a 10-episode series, Criminal Minds: Evolution. Microhistory is a genre of historical inquiry that focuses on smaller portions of the past such as a single event, a community, or even a single person.
- It is common in the digital humanities (DH) to refer to the digital version of a physical item as a surrogate to acknowledge that while the digital version may display the same information, it is a kind of proxy for a physical item that exists elsewhere.
- “Gatekeeper,” Criminal Minds, Nov. 6, 2013, 41:00.
- Kathelene McCarty Smith et al., “‘Who’s Driving the Bus?’ or How Digitization is Influencing Archival Collections,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 6 (2019).
- Before an archive becomes digital, it should be organized, curated, and processed to better maintain order in the digital realm and in the physical realm. This pre-digitization processing includes organizing the contents of cases and containers, standardizing and updating any taxonomic language, and repairing or conserving fragile materials.
- “The Lesson,” Criminal Minds, Dec. 5, 2012, 43:00.
- Trevor Owens, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
- “Nelson’s Sparrow,” Criminal Minds, Jan. 28, 2015, 43:00.
- Christina Boyles et al., “Precarious Labor in the Digital Humanities,” American Quarterly 70 (Sept. 2018).
- For more on the ever-growing info-lust and why the dream of mass digitization remains very much a dream, see the Contingent mailbag, “Why Do Historians Still Have To Go To Archives?,” March 25, 2019.
