Coda

Re-encountering James A. Emanuel’s “Christmas Notes” was, in some ways, like using an archive’s “finding aid.” The notes offered a map to locate Emanuel’s creative labor and understand his values during this critical period. I had seen them early on in my research in the Emanuel papers, but I didn’t fully grasp their significance until I began exploring interactive ways to present my work on Emanuel.

Initially, I visualized what I had gathered for the digital archive, but it duplicated some of the searchability functions of the Manifold platform. Also, in terms of a dataset, my archival selections lacked coherence. The network of materials was expansive: some were drawn from creative context and others from his personal life. Some I selected because they were rare and accessible and others because they represented his strongest work.

The meaning of the notes began to shift after moving through personal documents shared with me by James Smith, Emanuel’s nephew. Later, when I encountered them again at the Library of Congress, I observed them differently. These notes, like my own categorizations, were unruly. They blended the personal, professional, creative, intellectual, and collaborative. The activities moved across themes, forms, time, and geographies. Most importantly, they revealed themselves as a corpus that could stand on its own. The “Christmas Notes” are a body of work that both documents and performs Emanuel’s self-curation, and they continue to shape how we read him now.