Journal special issues
While there are obviously excellent journals in the archives field, the following is a curated list of journals from outside the field with special issues on archival themes:
Anglia: Journal of English Philology has published a special themed issue on Archives, volume 138, issue 3 (2020). Of particular interest are essays by Alexander Starre on The Document as Epistemic Object: Notes on Archival Knowledge Cultures and Katrin Horn on Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive.
Feminist Review 125:1 (2020) is a special issue on archives which ‘pays specific attention to how conversations on preservation, documentation and cultural memory shape the futurity of archival collections’. With a particular focus on feminist and queer approaches, the contributors ‘engage with existing institutional archives, and artistic and community archives, and situate the archive as an experimental place’.
Papers on Language and Literature 55:1 (2019) is a special issue on ‘Archives, Authority, Aura: Modernism’s Archival Turn’. Of particular interest is Emily Ridge’s article, “Close Reading an Archival Object: Reflections on a Postcard from Salvador Dalí to Stefan Zweig, Circa 1938”.
Public 57 (2018) is on the theme of Archive/Counter-Archive and explores “the changing nature and political realities of audio and visual heritage in the twenty-first century”. Of particular note is Kate Hennessy and Trudy Lynn Smith’s essay on the section “Materialities” entitled, “Fugitives: Anarchival Materiality in the Archives”
Australian Feminist Studies 32: 91-92 (2017) is a double issue on the theme of Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research. Included is new work by Marika Cifor, Michelle Moravec, Jenna Ashton and others. There is a special focus on queer archives, history, literature, film and photography with traditional, digitised and born-digital materials under discussion.
Sens Public (2016) Recreate the Archive/(Re)constituer l’archive. A series of six essays including: Archive the present: the daily and its attempts at exhaustion, by Bertrand Gervais and (Re) constitute the archive, by Sylvain David and Sophie Marcotte.
Caribbean Quarterly 62.3-4 (2016) is a special themed issue on Caribbean Literary Archives. Contents include Leah Rosenberg on Refashioning Caribbean Literary Pedagogy in the Digital Age, Alex Gil on Placing Césaire and Monique Roffey on Private Notes Made Public.
Limn Issue 6 (2016) The Total Archive. All articles are available online. Includes: Judith Kaplan explores the possibility of a new GOLD standard for archiving the world’s endangered language data; work from the Artist Collective UA explores whether art can be an archive, or an archive art; and Geoff Bowker asks Just What Are We Archiving? and what kind of people will we become if we keep trying to archive everything?
Reconstruction 16.1 (2016) Issue entitled Archives on Fire: Artifacts & Works. Communities & Fields. All articles are available online. Of particular interest is Michelle Caswell’s contribution The Archive is Not An Archives: Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies which nails humanities scholars for their frequent failure to acknowledge the work done in archival studies when talking about ‘the archive’.
TSQ Transgender Studies Quarterly 2.4 (2015) Issue on Archives and Archiving. Sections on Emerging Archives, Established Archives and Engaging Archives.
Performance Matters: A Journal About the Materiality and Consequentiality of Performance. 1.1-2 (2015). Issue on Archiving Performance. Of particular interest is Joy Palacios on Archival Liveness: The Paper Archive in the Digital Age.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 21.1 (2015) special issue on Digital archives and open archival practices. Focuses on digital archives and examines the affordances of digital technologies for archival practices, including the archiving of the creative process.
Flow Journal 11.14 Special issue The Archive. Flow is a Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture. This issue explores ‘not only the media present, but the past and the past’s place in the present.’ Contributors include Alexandra Juhasz and Mel Hogan. Of particular interest methodologically is Pamela Ingleton’s, “‘Mechanisms for non-elite voices’: Mass-Observation and Twitter’.
Radical History Review 2014.120 (2014) published a special issue entitled Queering Archives: Historical Unravelings. It features sections on Queer Archival Pasts, Archiving Disorder, Exhibiting Archives/Archiving Exhibits and the Classifications and the Limits of the Archive.
The Journal of Visual Culture 12.3 (2013) has a special issue entitled ‘The Archives Issue’. It features essays by Sas Mays and Nina Lager Vestberg among others.
NoMorePotlucks No. 25 Archive (jan/feb 2013). Co-edited by Mél Hogan and M-C MacPhee. It’s beautiful and the contents include a new essay by Ann Cvetkovich. Paper lovers should remember that NMP is also available in a print-on-demand format.
The South African Historical Journal has published an Archive Special Issue 65.1 (2013).
E-Misferica Summer 2012 issue focused On the Subject of Archives from the varying perspectives of contributors from across the Americas. Of particular note is a section Archival Acts focussing on forms of archival activism and including #JEZ3PREZ & ATCHU’S ‘On the question of the anarchives of Occupy Wall Street’ and Ann Cvetkovich on ‘Queer Archival Futures: Case Study Los Angeles. See also Diana Taylor’s ‘Save As’.
The International Journal of Social Research Methodology had a special issue 15.4 (2012) on perspectives on working with archived textual and visual material in social research. It contains an article by Louise Corti, an associate director of the UK Data Archive, ‘Recent developments in archiving social research’, in which she discusses four challenges facing social science data archives: methods for archiving qualitative data; providing safe access to disclosive data; institutional data archiving initiatives; dealing with the emergence of ‘new’ data types.
The journal RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage had a special issue 13.2 (2012) on assessment in special collections and archives.
The journal Comparative Critical Studies had a special issue 8. 2-3 (2011) all about archives based on the 2010 British Comparative Literature society conference on the same theme.
The Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) published issue 11.1 (2011) on the theme of ‘Archive Madness’.
The journal Photographies had a special issue 3.2 (2010) on the theme of Photography, Archive, Memory with essays by Geoffrey Batchen and others.
The journal The Communication Review had a special issue 13.1 (2010) on the theme of ‘Writing From the Archive: Thinking About Media History‘. This was republished in book form as Media History and the Archive (Routledge 2011) edited by Craig Robertson. Articles include Susan Douglas on Writing From the Archive: Creating Your Own and (in the book version) John Durham Peters on ‘Why we use pencils and other thoughts on the archive’.
archivefutures 