Paid Confessions Became an Archive

Arthur Inman hired 'talkers' to tell intimate life stories and compiled their testimony into a 17 million‑word diary now housed at Harvard. The resulting archive was crowd‑sourced, transactional, and ethically ambiguous: many contributors trusted the setting, were paid small sums, and may not have anticipated future scholarly access. — Raises broader questions about consent, archival ethics, and how institutions should handle large troves of intimate material solicited under transactional or private conditions.