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CARING FOR YOUR COLLECTIONS: fact sheets

12 december 2022 - 11:15pm

The State Library of New South Wales in Sydney has published a series of fact sheets on collection care. They are helpful for both professionals and those storing paper-based materials at home. Together they make handy set of fact sheets on preserving, storing and protecting your precious items.

Fact sheets cover:

Care of paper-based materials

Caring for photographs

Dealing with mould

Storage of newspapers

Drying a wet book and more.

CULTURE MAPPING 2022 — Archives and Afterlives: recordings available

9 mei 2022 - 8:00am

If you did not manage to catch up with this wonderful conference event live on 7-9 April 2022 you can now find recordings for most sessions online. Keynote sessions feature Professor Jacqueline Wernimont, Dartmouth College:

On Dying and Being Dead in an Archive, Jacqueline Wernimont

Abstract: What are the temporalities of archives? In this talk, I would like to invite us to use the insights of scholars like Hartman, Caswell, Johnson, and Dimock to see if we can think about all of the temporalities of archives and the ways of knowing that we imagine them to produce. Queer, Indigenous, Black, and postcolonial scholars have productively observed that linear time serve colonial, straight, and white supremacist ends. If we take this as our starting point, how can we theorize the lives and afterlives in and of archives in a way that enables more just archival engagements? I’ll be focusing on mass mortality events like those seen in pandemics, environmental catastrophe, and war as a kind of case study for these questions.

Individual sessions covered:

Teaching With Archives

Archives of Space and Place

Activist Archives: Historical Memory and World-Remaking

Medium, Matter, Method

Information, Surveillance, and the Body

and more.

The full program for the event can be located here.

READ: On curating filing holes

11 januari 2022 - 9:07am

Those working on the material text may be aware of the glorious new enterprise that is Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History. Created and edited by Gill Partington, Adam Smyth and Simon Morris, the journal exists both as a lavish large format physical production and an online marvel. Two issues have appeared so far, Issue 1 on ‘Beginnings‘ and Issue 2 on ‘Holes‘. Each is a work of art in itself, but they also offer lively engagements with the aforementioned themes as well as presenting the work of artists. The first two issues also represent something of a nod to the artist book.

One compelling offering from Issue 2 is an essay by Heather Wolfe, curator of manuscripts and associate librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, entitled ‘On curating filing holes’. Wolfe researches and writes on overlooked and unusual material features of early modern manuscripts, including styles of clips and fastenings now unfamiliar to us. In this essay she explores the holes and marks left on paper when such things are removed. Such holes carry meaning and Wolfe is particularly concerned that they not pass unnoticed or unrecorded:

As curators, conservators, archivists, catalogers, researchers, digitizers, we can
collectively start recording the presence of holes in catalogue descriptions, finding
aids, conservation documentation, and digitization metadata. Rule 7B10.1 of
Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (MSS), published in 2016, states: ‘Make
a note on physical details that are not already included in the physical description
area, including whether the material is damaged, fragile, or heavily restored if considered
important.’ The first example is ‘Filing hole at top of leaf ’.15 The modern
analogs to filing holes need similar standards of description, before the technologies
behind them are forgotten.
(p. 42)

Detail of hole in a note concerning boxed and bagged fifiles received by
William Banyard from John Owles, servant to Lady Jane Townshend.
5 November 1590. Folger MS L.d.795.

Wolfe’s full essay can be viewed online or downloaded as a PDF from the same place.

The journal Inscription available open access so can be viewed in full online and individual hard copy issues can also be purchased.

CFP: Feeling(s) in the Archive: Emotions, Expressions, Experience

9 januari 2022 - 11:40pm

The Spring 2022 meeting of Archival Kismet will be held virtually April 8-9, 2022. Its theme is “Feeling(s) in the Archive: Emotions, Expressions, Experience.” They particularly encourage scholars whose work deals with issues of emotion, affect, memory, and trauma in historical research, as well as proposals that reflect the emotional labour and experience of historical archival research, to submit proposals.

This non-traditional virtual conference is a forum for history researchers and those in allied disciplines to share early research findings, focusing on the objects, artifacts, and ephemera of the archive.

All presentations should be informal and centered around a specific “cool thing” or archival “find” relating to the theme—a poster, a letter, an object, a film clip, a concept, etc., or a small set of related materials. “Think of your presentation like history show-and-tell”.

Presenters do not need to have conclusions or interventions staked out, and should not present on material that has previously been published. This is a space for scholars to share new archival finds and what is exciting about them, without worrying about what conclusions they will reach.

Presentations should be roughly 10 minutes long. Substantial time will be given for discussion with conference participants. Presenters are expected to attend and participate in the conversations in other panels.

The conference will take place April 8-9, 2022 hosted virtually at Mississippi State University. Please contact the co-organizers, Courtney Thompson (cthompson@history.msstate.edu) and Bridget Keown (keown.b@pitt.edu), with any questions or concerns.

Submissions via their online form will be accepted through 15 January 2022.

Posters with Glitter Issues: Online Colloquia with Jessica Lapp

29 december 2021 - 5:19am

As part of the University of British Columbia School of Information Colloquia, on 3 February 2022 Jessica Lapp will be presenting her work on the Newberry Library’s collection of 2017 Women’s March ephemera. The paper builds on her research program which conceptualizes feminist records creation, expanded notions of provenance and records attribution, and the creation and circulation of digital records of feminist organizing. Her paper, “Posters with Glitter Issues” engages quite literally with questions of preservation and messy materiality.

Abstract

The  Newberry Library’s Chicago Protest Collection is bright, glitzy and glittery; these materials shed, spread, and intermingle in the stacks.  This talk explores the ‘leaky’ nature of feminist and queer protest ephemera by ‘following the glitter’ through the Newberry Library’s collection of 2017 Women’s March ephemera. Thinking alongside archival theorizing on the archival body, and feminist and queer studies of glitter as world-building, I trace and corral glitter across four distinct, but interpolated acts of records shaping that constitute the Newberry Library’s collection of protest materials: Initial inscription (glitter on the hands), collective constitution (glitter on the street), institutional archivalization (glitter on the floor), and artistic use (glitter in the air). In undertaking this analysis, I demonstrate how this bright and glittery archival body continually creates, sustains, obscures, and fabulates feminist and queer life worlds.

From the Newberry Library Chicago Protest Collection Submission site.

Details on booking for the webinar can be found here.

You can also find Jessica Lapp’s recent article on this research, ‘Posters with Glitter Issues: Exploring Archival (W)holes at the Newberry Library’ in Australian Feminist Studies (Routledge/Taylor & Francis).

Kenneth Karmiole Lecture in Archival Studies – The Black and Latinx Experience in the Literary Archive Market

29 december 2021 - 4:49am

Coming up on 21 January 2022 is the Kenneth Karmiole Lecture in Archival Studies presented this year by Amy Hildreth Chen, author of Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market (University of Massachusetts UP, 2020). She will be speaking on the topic of “The Black and Latinx Experience in the Literary Archive Market”.

Abstract for the lecture:

The sale of authors’ papers to archives has become big news, with collections from James Baldwin to Arthur Miller fetching record-breaking sums in recent years. In Placing Papers, published with University of Massachusetts Press in 2020, Amy Hildreth Chen described the history of how this multimillion-dollar business developed from the mid-twentieth century onward and considered what impact authors, literary agents, curators, archivists, and others had on this burgeoning economy. In her Kenneth Karmiole in Archival Studies Lecture, Chen will revisit the demographic data and trends she analyzed in her monograph from the writers listed in the Norton Anthology of American Literature (2007) before expanding her discussion with new data highlighting the unique circumstances faced by the authors of color listed in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2014) and the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010). Chen will conclude with a meditation on the future of the market, including the quandaries that archivists, authors, dealers, and researchers of all backgrounds must face.

The lecture is offered as an online webinar and details for booking can be found here.

Placing Papers

The lecture is a UCLA Department of Information Studies Colloquium Event.

Definitely worth reading

23 december 2021 - 5:19am

The following works tackle questions of materiality across different archival settings.

Carrie Smith. The Page is Printed: Ted Hughes’s Creative Process. Liverpool University Press, 2021

This monograph offers the first full-length study of Ted Hughes’s poetic process.  Smith poses the questions: Does it matter when and where a poem was written? Or on what kind of paper? How do the author’s ideas about inspiration or how a poem should be written precondition the moment of putting pen to paper?

Extract from the chapter, ‘Birthday Letters: An Archive of Writing‘:

Some of the typescripts have up to seven layers of paper. Coming across these pages in the archive is a shock: some of the papers are entirely made up of many separate slips of paper attached together, which dangle, fold in on themselves, and move precariously as you turn over the page. These papers are delicate, and, because Sellotape loses its adhesive qualities as it ages, it is difficult to see how these papers can be preserved in their nebulous form without being taken apart and remade. The papers taped over the top are only fastened at one edge and can be lifted to read the words beneath. These pieces of paper create a draft in which two versions exist simultaneously in a physical expression of the uncertainty that characterises both the final printed poems and their drafting.

The Page is Printed

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

In this new book, Matthew Kirschenbaum returns to the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives. He asks: What are the future prospects for literary knowledge now that literary texts—and the material remains of authorship, publishing, and reading—are reduced to bitstreams, strings of digital ones and zeros? What are the opportunities and obligations for book history, textual criticism, and bibliography when literary texts are distributed across digital platforms, devices, formats, and networks? Indeed, what is textual scholarship when the “text” of our everyday speech is a verb as often as it is a noun?

Extract from the chapter, ‘Archives Without Dust’:

I am looking at a high- resolution digital image of a hard copy printout of a working draft of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book. It is one of the manuscripts that survived the house fire that engulfed Toni Morrison’s Grand View-on- Hudson residence at the foot of the Tappan Zee Bridge on Christmas Day in 1993…The haunting digital image in front of me registers as a testament not only to the resilience of paper and ink in the face of fire, smoke, and water but also to the efficacy of the collective array of memory institutions that ensure that treasures such as this are—in the novel’s own parlance—passed on. Despite the screen that separates a researcher from the painstakingly preserved originals, it is easy to picture scholars doing much the same work they have always done: scrutinizing drafts for variants, poring over the author’s correspondence, squinting to decipher handwriting on the pages of yellow legal pads.

Bitstreams

Laura Hughes. In the Library of Jacques Derrida: Manuscript Materiality after the Archival Turn. New Literary History Vol. 49, Iss. 3,  (2018): 403-424. 

DOI:10.1353/nlh.2018.0026

Abstract:

Based on research in the Jacques Derrida collection acquired by Princeton University in 2015, this article takes an expansive view of what is considered to be a manuscript through close readings of the material makeup of literary artifacts. In particular, Derrida’s copy of Hélène Cixous’s first book, interleaved with surprising documents, and a handful of small notes Cixous gave to Derrida, suggest that the two writers’ overlapping collections extend the scope of their friendship posthumously. These overlaps allow for the reader in the archive to contribute to the afterlives of these artifacts. The article invokes the ontological fluidity posited by new materialisms and new philologies to show how the holistic consideration of a literary artifact offers inroads into the divide between life and matter.

See also: Princeton University Library Acquires Jacques Derrida’s Personal Library

 Editions du Seuil, 1963).Derrida’s annotations on a page from Sur Racine by Roland Barthes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963). Photo: J. L. Logan

New books!

5 december 2021 - 6:52am

A quick round up of some new books:

Archival Fictions: Materiality, Form, and Media History in Contemporary Literature by Paul Benzon

Description: Technological innovation has long threatened the printed book, but ultimately, most digital alternatives to the codex have been onscreen replications. While a range of critics have debated the benefits and dangers of this media technology, contemporary and avant-garde writers have offered more nuanced considerations.

Taking up works from Andy Warhol, Kevin Young, Don DeLillo, and Hari Kunzru, Archival Fictions considers how these writers have constructed a speculative history of media technology through formal experimentation. Although media technologies have determined the extent of what can be written, recorded, and remembered in the immediate aftermath of print’s hegemony, Paul Benzon argues that literary form provides a vital means for critical engagement with the larger contours of media history. Drawing on approaches from media poetics, film studies, and the digital humanities, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how authors who engage technology through form continue to imagine new roles for print literature across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Publication: December 2021 from University of Massachusetts Press.

 Materiality, Form, and Media History in Contemporary Literature (Page and Screen) by [Paul Benzon] Archival Virtue: Relationship, Obligation, and the Just Archives by Scott Cline

Description: Archival literature is full of examples of what archivists do and how they do it. In Archival Virtue: Relationship, Obligation, and the Just Archives, Scott Cline raises questions that grapple with the meaning of what archivists do and, perhaps more important, who they are. Embracing the language of moral philosophy and theology, the book explores ideas of moral commitment, truth, difference, and just behavior in the pursuit of archival ideals. Cline proposes that if virtues are sources of power that inspire us to act justly on behalf of a better world, then archival virtue is a form of radical empowerment, one that obligates us to cherish and sustain human dignity, which is the essence of archival justice. 

Publication: October 2021 from the Society of American Archivists.

 Relationship, Obligation, and the Just Archives by [Scott Cline]

Elusive Archives: Material Culture Studies in Formation, edited by Martin Brückner and Sandy Isenstadt.

Description: Taking cues from a wide variety of objects and their unusual circumstances, the essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed, or subjective, and as ethereal as distant memories? Such things would resist descriptive conventions and definitive value, scholarly or otherwise. Certainly, they would fall outside the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What holds these disparate things together here are the questions the authors in this volume ask of them. Placed into relief through carefully calibrated inquiry, objects that appear incongruent, inscrutable, or otherwise indistinct suddenly cohere. Simply put, each essay in its own way creates by means of its method a provisional collection of things, an elusive archive. Scattered matter then becomes fixed, however momentarily, within each author’s analytical framework rather than within the walls of an archive’s reading room or arrayed in so many cases along a museum corridor. With contingency itself underpinning them, the essays reverse the usual direction of scholarly inquiry by following the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered, arranged, conceptualized, and even displayed rather than by “discovering” artifacts in an ordered archive and then asking how they came to be there.

Publication: August 2021 from the University of Delaware Press.

 Material Culture Studies in Formation

Reanimating Working-Class Writing

21 november 2021 - 8:34am

In a special issue of Across the Disciplines entitled ‘Unsettling the Archives’, Jessica Pauszek contributes an article entitled Preserving Hope: Reanimating Working-Class Writing through (Digital) Archival Co-Creation. In a section dedicated to ‘Bearing Witness in Unsettling Ways’, Pauszek traces how a working-class writing network, the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, hoped and tried to preserve their writing for nearly forty years.

Reflecting on her work with the FWWCP, Pauszek writes how “alongside the story of preservation, I need to tell a story about materiality, about the precariousness of building archives with working-class communities when resources are unstable: when there is no archival space, no archivist, little money, and sometimes not even the belief that working-class writing is worthy of publishing, let alone preserving”. Her detailed account of co-creating a digital archive is intended, she notes, “to [make] visible the conditions that enabled and constrained our work”.

Pauszek offers a compelling and theoretically sophisticated account of the specific work with the FWWCP but also highlights the larger framing concerns for all such projects:

Print and digital archives represent the social in/exclusion of people and texts within a discipline as well as within larger communities, and we were committed to continuing the FWWCP/FED’s work through collaborative curation in digital spaces. Such decisions for digital archives link to questions of ethics, in a similar way that Cheryl Glenn and Jessica Enoch (2010) note about traditional print archives. Within Writing Studies, scholars have also argued for the need to explore the decolonization of archival work (Cushman, 2013), the use of digital tools for feminist historiography (Enoch, 2013), the use of multimodality to think across print/digital archival representations (Neal et al., 2013), and the need for accessible user-center interfaces (Potts, 2015). With digital archival work, we must continue to build spaces and practices that encourage the cultural importance of collaboration and preservation, particularly as they allow us to think about how we can expand our processes for and “sites of knowledge making” (Cushman, 2013, p 116), as well as “recente[r] cultural stakeholders” (Ridolfo et al., 2010). Said another way, with the proliferation of digital and archival scholarship, we must find ways to prioritize the knowledges and histories of those we work with.

Read the full article here.

Cover imagesFrom the FWWCP Digital Collection website

New article: Critical Digital Archives: A Review from Archival Studies

21 november 2021 - 7:23am

New out in The American Historical Review (September 2021) is an article by Itza A. Carbajal and Michelle Caswell that explores how archivists and historians might come together in the digital realm. The authors argue that a more developed understanding of digital archival theory and practice can provide the basis for “doing digital history better“.

ABSTRACT

Given the blurring of boundaries between historians and archivists in the digital realm, this article urges historians to pay more attention to discussions surrounding digital records and archival practices emerging from critical archival studies. More specifically, this article identifies and summarizes seven key themes and corresponding debates about digital records in contemporary archival studies scholarship: (1) materiality, (2) appraisal, (3) context, (4) use, (5) scale, (6) relationships, and (7) sustainability. A deeper knowledge of digital archival theory and practice—how records came to be in digital archives, the infrastructures that maintain them, and the tools necessary to provide access to and context for them—is not ancillary to historical work, but provides important context to do digital history better.

Issue Cover

NEW BOOK: Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration

23 mei 2021 - 6:05am

Jane Birkin‘s new book, Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), will almost certainly be of interest to readers of this blog.

Birkin writes in her introduction that she aims ‘to communicate the meaning of the archive through its operations, which I have observed on a day-to-day basis. At the same time, I want to reveal archive objects as more than memorials, as objects that remain with us in our contemporary milieu, ready and waiting to be put to use.’

Of particular interest is Birkin’s focus on questions of materiality:

‘The experience of working behind the scenes in a large university archive has not only brought an understanding of the importance of the catalogue and the hidden objects and storage systems that it parallels and describes, it has also led me to recognize the vast amounts of hidden labour that is involved in the keeping of archives. I am constantly struck by how something so physically static as an archive has so much human activity based around it. The researcher only sees the tip of the iceberg in terms of space and the objects, and the many people involved in maintaining both. With all this in mind, this book emphasises the material aspects of the archive: the physical space made up of shelves, boxes and files, and the situating of the single object within this controlled space, together with the systematic, performative, human practices of cataloguing and description that record and uphold both’.

Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration does not attempt to reveal what individual photographs might ‘mean’. Birkin writes that ‘instead of the ‘what’ they might mean, I focus here on the ‘how’ they might mean; in particular, how the archive catalogue, with its hierarchical system of ordered and juxtaposed descriptions that mirror the physical storage systems, might advance the understanding of the archive and the photographs within it. The catalogue is presented not as a simple finding aid, but as a compact tool for deep thinking around single images, image sets and the temporalities inherent in both’.

The full introduction can be downloaded here from the Amsterdam University Press site.

Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration

Table of contents:

Introduction

  1. The archivization of the image
  2. The social archive
  3. Catalogue, list, description
  4. The archiving camera
  5. Archival arts, performativity and poetics
  6. Afterword: the post-digital archive

Bibliography

Virtual unfolding: New digital techniques for opening complex documents

3 maart 2021 - 11:31pm

An exciting breakthrough has been announced this week, one that permits researchers to read letters without unfolding them, offering new ways of managing sealed and fragile documents. Using a combination of X-rays and 3-D imagining techniques, researchers virtually “opened” four letters from the Brienne Collection, a trunk filled with 2,600 notes sent from Europe to the Hague between 1689 and 1706. The team published its findings in the journal Nature Communications.

A gif animation of the virtual unfolding processThe researchers virtually opened the letters with an advanced X-ray machine. They then used computers to analyze the folds and create a readable, digital model of the unfolded message. 
(Unlocking History Research Group Archive)

The following is drawn from a report in The Smithsonian Magazine:

The documents concerned were especially intriguing and challenging because they used a technique known as “letter locking”. Here the page was folded to create its own envelope with the complex folding, cutting and interlocking techniques both preventing others from viewing the contents and creating a kind of tamper-proof lock.  Study co-author Daniel Starza Smith, a literary historian at King’s College London, told Wired, “what letterlocking is doing is giving us a language to talk about sorts of technologies of human communication security and secrecy and discretion and privacy.”

Lead author Jana Dambrogio, an MIT Libraries conservator, said in a statement, “Letterlocking was an everyday activity for centuries, across cultures, borders, and social classes,” says “It plays an integral role in the history of secrecy systems as the missing link between physical communications security techniques from the ancient world and modern digital cryptography.”

The team’s insights also also point to new possibilities for working with fragile paper documents that cannot be safely handled.

The full article in The Smithsonian Magazine can be found here.

The team’s research is published in the article Dambrogio, J., Ghassaei, A., Smith, D.S. et al. Unlocking history through automated virtual unfolding of sealed documents imaged by X-ray microtomography. Nature Communications 12, 1184 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21326-w

Abstract: Computational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans of damaged historical documents, but have so far been limited to scrolls, books, and documents with one or two folds. The challenge tackled here is to reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of unopened letters secured shut with “letterlocking,” a practice—systematized in this paper—which underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes. We present a fully automatic computational approach for reconstructing and virtually unfolding volumetric scans of a locked letter with complex internal folding, producing legible images of the letter’s contents and crease pattern while preserving letterlocking evidence. We demonstrate our method on four letterpackets from Renaissance Europe, reading the contents of one unopened letter for the first time. Using the results of virtual unfolding, we situate our findings within a novel letterlocking categorization chart based on our study of 250,000 historical letters.

Brienne trunkDuring the late 17th and early 18th centuries, postal workers at the Hague held on to unclaimed letters. 
(Sound and Vision The Hague / Brienne Archive)

Poets and Archives

1 maart 2021 - 10:14pm

An online event from the Institute of English Studies (School of Advanced Studies, University of London) for those in UK and compatible timezones.

Tuesday 9 March 2021 Online | 18:00-19:15 GMT

As museums, archives, and libraries adapt to a series of lockdowns, we have a stronger sense than ever of the challenges involved in providing access to the objects that carry our collective memories. While one-way routes and Perspex shields may be new, the complexities around acquiring, preserving, finding, and using collections are not. How can the hidden histories of collections be shown? What tools are emerging for recording and sharing cultural heritage? How can writers and researchers engage with, and make innovative use of, collections?

The Institute of English Studies and The Warburg Institute are delighted to announce this special event, held in connection with the School of Advanced Study ‘Open for Discussion‘ series, to explore the relationship between poets and archives.

The event will feature poets Linda Anderson, John Challis, and Theresa Muñoz. They will each give a reading of their poetry, followed by a discussion, co-chaired by Clare Lees, Director of the IES and Bill Sherman, Director of the Warburg. 

REGISTER HERE

Colloquium: Information Studies at UCLA

26 januari 2021 - 5:10am

One of the small upsides of the pandemic has been the move to offer research seminars online via Zoom. What were once small gatherings advertised to a local few are now events available (time zones permitting) to interested scholars globally.

For those who can line up with Pacific Time (PT), the offerings for the Department of Information Studies at UCLA are worth registering for. The Colloquium features local scholars and visitors zooming in from elsewhere in North America. Upcoming 2021 events feature Jennifer Douglas, Miriam Posner, Johanna Drucker, Anne Gilliland and more.

Colloquia usually take place virtually on Thursdays at 3pm Pacific Time (PT). Attendees are advised to register ahead of time using the advertised webinar link for each session. All events are free and open to interested members of the community unless otherwise noted.

The program is here.

New out: Producing the Archival Body

24 januari 2021 - 10:47am

“What can the body do in and for archives?” is the provocation that Jamie A. Lee sets out in Producing the Archival Body. Newly released in the Routledge Studies in Archives series edited by James Lowry, Lee’s book brings critical archival theory together with queer theory to argue for a new understanding of how archival subjects are produced. Central to this project is an engagement with bodies. As they write in the opening chapter:

What can a focus on the body tell us about ways of being in and with the past? What can recentering the body in archives offer to individual and collective memory-making in time and space? What can the body do in and for archives? And what can the archives, in turn, do in and for bodies? (p. 5)

Lee proceeds via a series of case studies to explore how archives and bodies are mutually constitutive, developing a novel account of bringing questions of bodies and embodiment to bear on archival theory can can make us think differently about archival bodies. The result is a beautiful challenge to our thinking.

Through a series of critical interventions and reimagined storytelling practices, I have illuminated the archives and its generative and liberatory potentials. Through my hands-on work, I offer insights into both methodological and theoretical approaches to archives and bodies to highlight their complex and relational productions…I have practiced a critical archival studies approach to archives here to tell a different story; to actively and emphatically disrupt the taken-for-granted notions and practices that have upheld archival power and its work to perpetuate historic hierarchies that function to continue to oppress those who do not fit into named categories and standardized descriptions…Life is complex and complicated; bodies, too. The archival body is no exception. (p. 161)

Table of contents:

Introduction: Producing the Archival Body  

Part I: Body Parts –  1. Archival Underpinnings;  2. Time;  3. Bodies  

Part II: Bodies in Action –  4. Relational Reciprocity: Bodies As Archives / Archives As Bodies;  5. Bodies Producing Archives Producing Bodies: The Power of Storytelling 

CODA: The Moving Body

Producing the Archival Body  book cover

ISBN 9780367182199

Archives work is emotional work

22 november 2020 - 11:40pm

Reposed from Archive Steph, a reminder of the work of archivists:

“More technically, archives work is emotional work. This can be through the cataloguing of the outputs of people’s intimate inner lives (personal papers, email, correspondence, family photos). Sometimes we are taking meticulous care over documenting the life of someone who we don’t like very much. Perhaps sometimes, we fall a little in love with them. Perhaps it will put you off enjoying a person’s life’s work once you learn what they were ‘really like’ and that lifelong joy has been soured. Maybe it’s a collection documenting something really traumatic or sickening. Or a volunteer or staff member going through a tough time. Even ourselves, suddenly in the spotlight, that gnawing anxiety that can’t be shifted that we’ve failed, publicly. Worst professsional nightmare, am I right?”

Read the full post here.

Poetry manuscripts: Two articles

9 oktober 2020 - 10:24am

Two recent articles from Alison Fraser, assistant curator of the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo may of interest. Both focus in part on questions of materiality — the manuscript as ‘trash’ and the clipping. The articles are:

Creating the Twentieth-Century Literary Archives: A Short History of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo‘. Information & Culture Volume 55, Number 3, 2020, pp. 252-270.

Abstract:

This article describes the unfolding idea of the literary archival collection through the early history of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo (UB). The influence of founder Charles Abbott’s innovative idea on special collections libraries, literary study and pedagogy, and book history helped to change these fields in dramatic and unforeseen ways, most provocatively by insisting that materials that were once assumed by librarians, scholars, and university administrators to be trash had the potential to be some of the most valuable artifacts for scholarly pursuit and collegiate education. The Poetry Collection was assembled from the efforts of its staff and the cooperation of its authors rather than from the tastes of an individual collector, demonstrating what it means for an institutional repository to design and compile its own collection democratically.

Mass Print, Clipping Bureaus, and the Pre-Digital Database: Reexamining Marianne Moore’s Collage Poetics through the Archives‘. Journal of Modern Literature Volume 43, Number 1, Fall 2019, pp. 19-33.

Abstract:

For the duration of her writing career, Marianne Moore maintained a system of clippings files inspired by early twentieth century clipping bureaus. Her files confirm scholarly observations about her proclivity for quotation and assemblage, and her devotion to unliterary, anonymous sources, but they also show an alternative to the narrative that Moore’s interest in collage stemmed from the visual arts. Moore’s clippings files and the phenomenon of clipping bureaus anticipates yet-undeveloped digital technologies and redefines the purpose and use of printed text. Moore’s clipping files are a pre-digital database searchable by metadata categories and available for micro as well as macro readings. The influence of clipping bureaus and her personal clipping files on Moore’s poetics demonstrates the profound impact of mass print on the modernists. The clippings files also show how Moore—and the American public—grappled with mass print management strategies in the early twentieth century and re-envisioned the status of the book.

The above article are paywalled so access to the full article will need to be via a library.

Marianne Moore and Her Circle - Libraries News Center ...

For more on the Marianne Moore Collection at Buffalo, there is also this article ‘Marianne Moore and Her Circle‘ on their Marianne Moore exhibition which was to run in conjunction with the conference, ‘Marianne Moore and the Archives’. The conference has since been postponed until 2021.

Manuscript fragments: a webinar to catch up on

9 oktober 2020 - 9:47am

The Rare Book School at the University of Virginia has been running a lively set of lectures and panel discussions that are now available online for anyone slow to catch on or living in incompatible time zones. For those interested in manuscripts there is:

A Fractured Inheritance: The Problems, Challenges, and Opportunities of Collecting Manuscript Fragments.

“Fragmentology” has emerged as one of the dominant subjects in the broader manuscript studies field, as digital technologies have facilitated the identification, location, and reaggregation of widely dispersed individual folios originally from the same common manuscript. The reconstruction of broken manuscripts raises questions across the spectrum of medieval book studies, including codicology, paleography, art historical and textual research, historical provenance, modern consumerism, and the contested and shifting value of manuscript fragments as either objects of connoisseurship or scholarship. Collecting fragments is a highly contentious topic, and this session addressed it from institutional, private, commercial, and scholarly perspectives.

Presented on 15 September 2020, the panel discussion involved Sumayya Ahmed, Tom Bredehoft, Lisa Fagin Davis, Rose A. McCandless and Jim Sims with Eric J. Johnson as moderator.

Archives: new special issue of ‘Anglia’

25 september 2020 - 10:43am

Anglia: Journal of English Philology has published a special themed issue on Archives, volume 138, issue 3 (2020). First published in 1878 Anglia claims to be the oldest journal of English Studies in existence.

The Archives issue was guest edited by Daniel Stein. Stein’s wide ranging introductory essay provides both an engaging survey of “the state of the art in ongoing debates about archive” and a reading of the special issue’s essays as an archive in themselves. A more interesting and ambitious special issue than many on the topic.

  Anglia

Table of Contents

Daniel Stein: What’s in an Archive? Cursory Observations and Serendipitous Reflections

David Kerler: Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats

Tim Sommer: Between Aura and Access: Artefactuality, Institutionality, and the Allure of the Archival

Alexander Starre: The Document as Epistemic Object: Notes on Archival Knowledge Cultures

Katrin Horn: Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive

Michael A. Chaney: Words, Wares, Names: Dave the Potter as American Archive

Diana Folsom, Renee Harvey and Kristen T. Oertel: From Parchment to Podcast: The Collaborative Process of Building and Unlocking an Archive

Birgit Däwes: “The People Shall Continue”: Native American Museums as Archives of Futurity

Ryan Cordell: Speculative Bibliography

Boxes: A Field Guide — Download this new book free

6 september 2020 - 3:32am

Mattering Press has published this quirky book, Boxes: A Field Guide edited by Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, Maria Rentetzi. This is not a book that deals explicitly with archives, but it does raise some exciting questions about archival materiality, given we often first encounter archived papers via boxes. As the Mattering Press site observes:

“This book explores boxes in their broadest sense and size. It invites us to step into the field, unravel how and why things are contained and how it might be otherwise”. 

From the website:

“Gathered in the format of a field guide, it offers an introduction to ways of ordering the world, unpacking their boxed-up, largely invisible politics and epistemics. Performatively, pushing against conventional uses of academic books, this volume is about rethinking taken-for-granted formats and infrastructures of scholarly ordering – thinking, writing, reading. It diverges from encyclopedic logics and representative overviews of boxing practices and the architectural organization of monographs and edited volumes through a single, overarching argument”.

The following chapters may be of particular interest:

Navigation Tools for Studying Boxes: A User’s Manual
Susanne Bauer

Contesting the Box: Museums and Repatriation
Stewart Allen

Deep Time History: The Lure of the Black Box
Dagmar Schäfer

Cardboard Box: The Politics of Materiality
Maria Rentetzi

Guarding the Memory: Photographic Glass Plates Negatives’ Boxes
Mirka Palioura, Spyridoula Pyrpili, Myrto Vouleli

Reliquary: A Box for a Relic
Lucy Razzall

The Research Box
Bonnie Mak and Julia Pollack

The book can be purchased from Mattering Press or downloaded as a free PDF.

Word of warning: don’t hit the print button too quickly as the full book is over 600 pages in length!

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