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 […]
Author Archives: mdever
Virtual unfolding: New digital techniques for opening complex documents
posted by mdever
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 […]
Poets and Archives
posted by mdever
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 […]
Colloquium: Information Studies at UCLA
posted by mdever
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 […]
New out: Producing the Archival Body
posted by mdever
“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 […]
Archives work is emotional work
posted by mdever
Reposted 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 […]
Poetry manuscripts: Two articles
posted by mdever
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 […]
Manuscript fragments: a webinar to catch up on
posted by mdever
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 […]
Archives: new special issue of ‘Anglia’
posted by mdever
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 […]
Boxes: A Field Guide — Download this new book free
posted by mdever
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 […]
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