Category Archives: digital preservation

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: […]

Reanimating Working-Class Writing

In a special issue of Across the Disciplines entitled ‘Unsettling the Archives’, Jessica Pauszek contributes an article entitled Preserving Hope: Reanimating Working-Class Writing through (Digital) Archival Co-Creation. In a section dedicated to ‘Bearing Witness in Unsettling Ways’, Pauszek traces how a working-class writing network, the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, hoped and tried […]

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 […]

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 […]

Archives: new special issue of ‘Anglia’

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 […]

New book: Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market

Just out from the University of Massachusetts Press is Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market by Amy Hildreth Chen. This new work will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the political economy of literary archives and how the US market for writers’ papers developed in the second half of the twentieth century. […]

New: The Digital Materiality of Digitized Manuscripts

A new book by Cornelis van Lit investigates how we might think about the materiality of digitized manuscripts. Of particular interest may be the chapter ‘The Digital Materiality of Digitized Manuscripts”. Often distinctions between analogue sources and digital surrogates turn on the latter’s apparent loss or lack of materiality, a proposition that is challenged here. […]

Now in paperback: Spontaneous Particulars by Susan Howe

Good news that a paperback edition is coming in May 2020 of Susan Howe’s wonderful short book, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. Originally published in hardback by Christine Burgin Gallery in association with New Directions, this glorious tribute to the importance of being in the archive will hopefully now reach new readers. Spontaneous Particulars […]

NEW BOOK: On manuscripts, materiality and ‘thinking through paper’.

New out from Palgrave: Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page. The emergence of digital technologies in the realm of archives has enlivened our understandings of archival materialities and lent a new intensity to our engagements with the archived page by prompting us to consider the potential of paper and the page in ways that we […]

Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research wins prize!

The Routledge collection, Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research edited by Maryanne Dever has been awarded a 2018 Mander Jones award from the Australian Society of Archivists. The prize is awarded to the “publication making the greatest contribution to the archives profession in Australia”. The judges’ citation reads: “An impressive scholarly work bringing together twelve thought-provoking and […]