ARCHIVES FOR OPEN KNOWLEDGE

‘The Archive' is Not an Archives

I’d like to begin with just a little bit of introduction to the theoretical underpinnings of archival theory and practice. This is well summed in the title of UCLA’s Michelle Caswell’s epochal work, '‘The Archive’ is Not an Archives: Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies', in which she defends archival studies as a field in its own right, proposing greater interdisciplinary collaboration with humanities scholars. In opposition to a gendered trope, Caswell argues that archivists are not the ‘handmaidens of history’, but active shapers of what can be known through methods of appraisal, description, and access. Eric Ketelaar calls this “archivalization,” or the decision to transform a material by entering it into an archive. Caswell also argues against the abstraction of “the archive,” this transcendental concept so often obscuring the intellectual and physical labor of archivists, and their importance to the research process. In distinction to the archive of Derrida’s Archive Fever, Caswell situates “actually existing archives” as collections of records, the institutions that steward them, the places where they are physically located, and the processes that designated them ‘archival’. In the following presentation, I will be outlining some of the key concepts functioning in archives, and demonstrating the multitudinous forms archives can take through archival theorist Terry Cook’s four paradigms – although this is slightly extended to include some more contemporary concerns. We will conclude in a consideration of how archives relate to the concept of the open, and a small assignment that you can spend the rest of today’s session pondering.

Archival Concepts

The first concept is the fundamental element of an archive, that of the record. As defined by Geoffrey Yeo, records are ‘persistent representations of activities, created by participants or observers of those activities or by their authorized proxies’.^[1] Records differ from other types of documents in that they have the potential to also serve as evidence of actions, bound to one another and to the systems in which they preside by their authenticity, reliability, and trustworthiness. This has been extended by postcolonial and poststructuralist scholars to include less tangible elements: thoughts and memories, images and recordings, even land itself. Many scholars have situated the dynamic temporality of records as their major defining characteristic, a record changing upon each use, transforming what we call the provenance of the record.

Provenance is another concept that has a robust theoretical framework. The essential concern of provenance is the record’s context: often understood as the origin of something, provenance is today defined by archivists as an “ever-changing, infinitely evolving process of recontextualization, encompassing not only the initial creators of the records, but the subjects of the records themselves; the archivists who acquired, described, and digitized them (among other interventions); and the users who constantly reinterpret them.”^[2] Provenance is defined by postmodern archival theorist Tom Nesmith as ‘the social and technical processes of the records’ inscription, transmission, contextualization, and interpretation, which account for its existence, characteristics, and continuing history.’^[3] In response to the generative complexities of records of Indigenous, Black, and queer life, records are increasingly seen as “co-created,” positing that the subjects of records (colonized peoples, slaves) should be considered co-creators of the records documenting their existence.

Regarding our next concept Caswell states:“Value refers not to the monetary value of records, but their value in attesting to the events from which they emerged, their value in representing some important aspect of the past, and, in some strands of archival thinking, their value for present and future users.” Records are subject upon entering an archive to a process of appraisal,  in which archivists determine the enduring value of records. It is here that the archivist’s power is most realized: the power to determine what records will be retained, what will be disposed of, and upon what parameters such decisions are made.

And finally, the concept of representation or archival description. This is the process by which archivists produce descriptive metadata, or data about the data stored in collections. This descriptive metadata then ‘allow[s] users to locate, distinguish, and select materials on the basis of the material’s subjects.’^[4] These are the elements that constitute finding aids, providing doors into the collections for researchers. While previously this was seen as an objective action, as with records, provenance, and value it has undergone great change in response to critical archival studies scholarship. Now it is understood that representation is another site of power, one in which liberatory practices of narration come into play, the archivist recognized as one node in the chain of the record’s legibility.

Four Paradigms

In the late archival theorist Terry Cook’s article “Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms,” the role of archives is reconstructed historically across these four fault lines: evidence, memory, identity, community. With each paradigm, I will also provide an example.

As I’ve already mentioned, the evidentiary function of archival records is of primary importance. As British archival theorist Hilary Jenkinson wrote in his 1922 Manual for Archival Administration: The archivist’s “Creed, the Sanctity of Evidence; his Task, the Conservation of every scrap of Evidence attaching to the Documents committed to his charge; his Aim, to provide, without prejudice or afterthought, for all who wish to know the Means of Knowledge… the good Archivist is perhaps the most selfless devotee of Truth the modern world produces….”^[5] As Cook states, the “central professional concepts of respect des fonds, original order, and provenance were designed precisely in order to preserve records as evidence of the functional-structural context and actions that caused their creation.” Providing transparency regarding this context assures that records are considered trustworthy, and this has not changed with the advent of electronic records.

My example of an archive of evidence is the NYC Municipal Archives 1940s Tax Department Photographs. This collection contains photographs of real estate parcels in the five boroughs of New York City, dated between 1939-1951, with the bulk of the images dating from 1939-1941. These photographs were part of a new property card system for assessing real property tax in the city, carried out by the Works Project Administration (WPA) and the New York City Tax Department. These photographs have now all been digitized, and are available to view in a user-friendly manner via 1940s.nyc. This is an amazing way to witness the New York of the early 1940s, including your own blocks or favorite locations. It is also a wonderful inroad for discussions of evidence, how to read a photograph against the grain as an aesthetic object, and the finding aid provides a detailed contextual note on the collection’s provenance that demonstrates how archives function.

The next paradigm is memory. As discussed in the context of value or appraisal, archivists play a role in determining the “collective memory” of a culture. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past…Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.”^[6] Memory is a slippery concept, and it’s worth troubling it: as Cook writes, “with memory comes forgetting. With memory comes the inevitable privileging of certain records and records creators, certain functions, activities, and groups in society, and the marginalizing or silencing of others.” So when accessing an archive that can be classified as “of memory,” one must consider the partisan nature of appraisal.

The archive I chose to demonstrate the memory paradigm comes from our very own archivist Roxanne Shirazi: the CUNY Digital History Archive. As many of you may be aware, the CDHA “is a participatory project, a counter-institutional archive that centers the experiences of students, workers, faculty, community residents, retirees, and alumni. We take an active approach to documenting CUNY history from the ground up, because we believe that today's students deserve to know the people's history of the people's university.” Counter-archives are often sites of contested memory; bureaucrats  have for time immemorial exercised hegemony over the authoritative record. A project like the CDHA, which collects against the grain of the institution, seeks to form a new image of our community’s experience. This is an amazing website; divided into subject and time period, the interested person can discover a world of activist history at CUNY.

With the postmodern turn in scholarship, a new paradigm arose: that of identity. With the shift from there being one single Truth that could be preserved as evidence or deducted as collective memory, it was determined by scholars that there were a plurality of truths; many perspectives and narratives. Archivists sought now to document the breadth of the human experience. Cook writes:

“Appraisal was now based not on anticipating historical research trends or the societal values articulated in retrospect through historiography, but rather on reflecting the functions and activities of society itself, based on research by archivists into the features, characteristics, and ideas of society worth preserving as documentary memory.”^[7]

The identity paradigm is different from what we consider identity politics, though it does contain the same predilection for justice, and for the archivist as societal mediator. The identity movement centered around “archives as a societal research…that increasingly respected the pluralistic and ambiguous nature of the postmodern and digital world.”

        My choice for an archive that may be considered formed in the identity paradigm is the Northeast Slavery Records Index, a project formed by John Jay professors Ned Benton and July A. Peters. “The Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI) is an online searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and enslavers in the states of New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut,  New Jersey and Pennsylvania. NESRI indexes census records, slave trade transactions, cemetery records, birth certifications, manumissions, ship inventories, newspaper accounts, private narratives, legal documents and many other sources. The goal is to deepen the understanding of slavery in the northeast United States by bringing together information that until now has been largely disconnected and difficult to access. This allows for searches that combine records from all indexed sources based on parameters such as the name of an owner, a place name, and date ranges. NESRI also serves communities seeking to understand their histories of enslavement, with their Community-Locality Reports presenting enslavement records for a state, county, town or city.” This is a perfect example of an identity archive – this is a resource constructed out of other materials to form a record of slavery in the Northeast. It also responds to the challenges of digital life as detailed by Cook, living as a searchable database of formerly disparate records.

Finally, we have community archives. These are collections that seek to create local and “glocal” (global/local) bonds between people of particular communities. This paradigm has challenged all of the prior tenets of the archival profession, calling upon archivists to share their work with communities to preserve a more intimate record. - “…the endeavour by individuals and groups to document their history, particularly if that history has been generally subordinated or marginalized, is political and subversive. These ‘recast’ histories and their making challenge and seek to undermine both the distortions and omissions of orthodox historical narratives, as well as the archive and heritage collections that sustain them.”^[8]

The community archive I’m highlighting here is the Lesbian Herstory Archives, an archives which “exists to gather, preserve and provide access to records of Lesbian lives and activities.” “They encourage Lesbians to record their experiences and to donate to the Archives any materials that are relevant to their lives, including books, magazines, journals, news clippings, bibliographies, photos, herstorical information, T-shirts, tapes, films…the list goes on and includes any possible ephemera or documentation of Lesbian life. This manner of collecting is emblematic of the community archive paradigm: the collection serves a self-affirming group with cultural/ethnic/geographical ties, and does not rely on expertise but instead on forms of situated knowledge borne of community practice.

Since Cook’s piece, others have argued that data needs to be constituted as a fifth paradigm, as its revolutionary impact changes how we relate to records. With the advent of what has been called “big data” or “surplus data,” the archival paradigm is shifting once more; many archivists are experimenting with (or rejecting passionately) applications of artificial intelligence in the archives. The possibilities for description and access enabled by machine learning may prove another Copernican revolution in archival processes. One example of an open data archive is nyc Open Data, which has been rendered vastly more useful for classrooms by a Brooklyn College professor Christian Martinez, who has created a tool that “removes the need for users to interact directly with application programming interfaces, lowering technical barriers and making civic data more accessible for teaching, research, and public scholarship.”

Data archives also challenge the elements of love and care that others consider so vital to the material aspect of archival work. This points me to what I think can be reasonably argued is a final, pervasive paradigm, that of affect. As archival scholar Jamie Lee writes, “Archival bodies are in states of flux, what I consider, generative states of (un)becoming through which bodies respond, shift, change, engage and become again and again.”^[9] If we think back to the ways in which archival concepts have expanded in the modern age, we may recognize that archival bodies are, in fact, contested sites of power whose form shifts with time. Breaking down archives into these paradigms (four? Five? six?) I hope it provides some insight into the plethora of types of archives that exist in the world today.

Archives as Open Knowledge

Finally, I want to impress the importance of teaching with primary sources for its benefits in the realms of information literacy, media literacy, and centering the core tenets of openness as a pedagogical praxis. It is not simply trying to get students interested in old things, but rather introducing them to the ways in which knowledge is produced. As Wendy Hayden writes, “Primary research in archives requires students to adopt a more nuanced approach to information literacy. Synthesizing these primary sources into a coherent narrative involves further development of that nuanced approach. Student engagement in such projects often increases, and they learn valuable skills they could not in a traditional research project.”^[10] In teaching with primary sources, students are taught to navigate the systems of memory and materiality emblematized in archival processes such as appraisal, arrangement, and description. By exploring an item’s provenance, they are shown that materials are always contextual, never neutral, and require subtle, complex, and intimate analyses in order to analyze and extend the meaning of the materials. To archive is to approach eternal memory in the knowledge of our forever forgetting. May we all forget forever, archivally.

Assignment

Now we’ll conduct a short experiment to get you thinking about how you might introduce archives into your classroom. Step one will be to find an interesting collection at your teaching campus, something you find interesting on one of the aforementioned sites, or something wholly other that you discover yourself. Then, I want you to imagine a teaching module in which these archival materials are integrated. This could include using a digital collection to color your presentation images, conducting a visit to the archives and giving students hands-on experience, or assigning your own students a sort of search-and-discover lesson. Once you’ve developed an idea, please write your proposal down, and then we’ll share some of them.