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: […]
Category Archives: media archaeology
New books!
posted by mdever
A quick round up of some new books: Archival Fictions: Materiality, Form, and Media History in Contemporary Literature by Paul Benzon Description: Technological innovation has long threatened the printed book, but ultimately, most digital alternatives to the codex have been onscreen replications. While a range of critics have debated the benefits and dangers of this media […]
New article: Critical Digital Archives: A Review from Archival Studies
posted by mdever
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
posted by mdever
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 […]
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 […]
A Short History of the Index Card
posted by mdever
For those who appreciate such things, this brief account of the life of the index card by Jonathan Schifman is worth a quick look. Schifman reminds us that not too long ago ‘if you wanted to find the best and most comprehensive information about anything, you headed to a library. You just had to check two things […]
Memory units
posted by mdever
“The memory-units of the past, mostly on paper, are increasingly replaced by dynamic, temporal forms of interim archiving in digital space. The transience of new archives, their ever shorter half-life, is their fate, their curse, and their opportunity.” From Wolfgang Ernst, ART OF THE ARCHIVE. The full text is available here. See also: Wolfgang Ernst, Digital […]
archivefutures 