This essay does some very important and much needed work naming and defining “critical archival studies”. It was published in 2017 in the online journal Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. In this essay Michelle Caswell, Ricardo Punzalan and T-Kay Sangwand highlight how “critical archival studies broadens the field’s scope beyond an inward, practice-centered orientation and builds a […]
Category Archives: article
“The Archive” is Not An Archives: new link
posted by mdever
Many of us have enjoyed reading Michelle Caswell’s important piece, ‘”The Archive” is Not An Archives: Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies’ which appeared in the online journal Reconstruction in their special issue Archives on Fire. The issue is not currently accessible so here is a link to the article on the University of […]
Article: Of mind and matter: The archive as object
posted by mdever
In the following article in Archives and Records (39.1 2018) Peter Lester advances an argument about materiality and the nature of archival evidence. Of mind and matter: The archive as object Abstract Archives are not only sources of evidence and information; they are also material objects with physical, tangible characteristics such as size, weight and […]
New article: Paper tools
posted by mdever
Boris Jardine’s article, “State of the Field: Paper Tools” in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science (Volume 64, August 2017, Pages 53-63) makes interesting reading for those concerned with questions of paper and materiality. Jardine asks whether scholars across diverse fields are talking about the same thing ‘when they talk of paper, its qualities, affordances and […]
News article: New Email Archive Tool to Sift Literary Legacies
posted by mdever
An article in The Wall Street Journal reports on a new free software called ePADD that has been developed to assist archivists in managing writers’ emails. Extract from the WSJ: Email archives pose many of the same challenges as paper ones, such as privacy concerns, copyright questions and decisions about organizing an unwieldy cache of material with a […]
The Materiality of Method: The Case of the Mass Observation Archive
posted by mdever
New article in Sociological Review Online by Liz Moor and Emma Uprichard: The Materiality of Method: The Case of the Mass Observation Archive Abstract: The Mass Observation Archive presents numerous methodological issues for social researchers. The data are idiosyncratic, difficult to analyze, and the sample design is nonsystematic. Such issues seriously challenge conventional […]
It takes 4500 pages to analyse and archive one second of Twitter
posted by mdever
From an article on http://www.fastcodesign.com/ “How best to physically archive our digital lives seems an insurmountable task, and previous attempts to do so–like this plan to print out Wikipedia as a 1-million-page book–downright quixotic. But Philip Adrian‘s #oneSecond benefits from a far more limited scope: printing out every message sent on Twitter at a given […]
The Digital Life of Salman Rushdie
posted by mdever
Dan Rockmore in The New Yorker for 29 July 2014: “In 2006, the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL), at Emory University, acquired the archive of Salman Rushdie. The collection included the usual papers and letters along with a trove of Rushdie’s digital materials, including his personal computers (one desktop and three laptops, as well […]
Photo tales lost in the digital wave
posted by mdever
“Digitisation will also inevitably change the way we do research. Many researchers in archives will tell you how they like to touch an old photograph or pore through old newspapers to get the feel, the smell, the weight. They are not saying that because they are sentimentalists but experience has told them how our senses […]
Paris Review: Mysterious Skin: The Realia of William Gaddis
posted by mdever
Paris Review: Mysterious Skin: The Realia of William Gaddis “Most people with scholarly inclinations will visit a novelist’s literary archive to follow the paper trails, as manifested through gathered correspondence, stray postcards, marked-upon stationery, and scattered drafts. A couple of months before the recent publication of his collected letters, I visited the William Gaddis Papers […]
archivefutures 