Category Archives: archival research

CULTURE MAPPING 2022 — Archives and Afterlives: recordings available

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, […]

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

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 […]

Posters with Glitter Issues: Online Colloquia with Jessica Lapp

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 […]

Definitely worth reading

The following works tackle questions of materiality across different archival settings, including the impact of the digital on our understandings of materiality and archival engagements. 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: […]

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

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 […]

NEW BOOK: Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration

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 […]

Virtual unfolding: New digital techniques for opening complex documents

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

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

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

“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 […]