The author reflects on the attitudes of scholars in the humanities and social sciences to digitalization and to work with data stored in digital archives. Her aim is, first, to point out concerns in regard to making source material from research available, and second, to discuss the ethical and methodological dilemmas connected with reusing existing data in qualitative studies. The author presents the pragmatic and ideological motivations that could incline scholars to share material from their research. She also reviews the reasons for not sharing data from source material and not making use of semi-raw materials accessible in digital archives. She explains why researchers may have reservations about participating in the digital circulation of existing data: such reservations result mainly from methodological and ethical questions, consciousness barriers, and the economics of humanist scholarship.
