After last week’s post, I decided to further explore the “rabbit hole” of porn in the archives. In “Digital Archives and the History of Pornography,” Sarah Bull argues that porn historians must “become archival magpies” to glean information on “authorship, material production, and consumption” (402). Mixed animal metaphors aside, Bull casts digital technologies as a tool through which historians can – in a sense – accession, process, trace the provenance of, and publicize their materials. Historians can act as historiographers and amateur archivists.

These symbiotic roles beg the question – why/how are historians of taboo/obscure topics (e.g., pornography) forced to chase down either seemingly nonexistent materials or riffle through unidentified primary sources? Why/how have our social stigmas, cultural norms, and political regulations (e.g., homophobia, Puritan ethics, censorship) shaped the way we compile and organize our archives?

Bull examines the way online databases and physical archives resolve issues of research overlap. As we discussed in class – academics tend to poorly cite their archives; Bull observes that they also “rarely describe the full body of materials examined, or how to locate them” (403). Historians must engage in a free exchange of bibliographies to fill gaps and, arguably, build an informal “archival community.” Comparable to what Greene suggests in “The Power of Archives” (fortifying an archivist identity), historians must discover a greater sense of collectivity – “the labor involved in researching pornography’s past could be significantly reduced if scholars pooled information about where and how to find extant primary sources” (404). Social media, sharing sites, and databases allow for more expediency and communication.

However, archivists would no longer be obliged to mediate exchanges between scholars – competitiveness notwithstanding (as we also discussed). Besides “digital spaces,” what else can archives and archivists do to bring scholars of a particularly under-recognized field and their work into “closer conversation with one another” (404)?

In Radical History Review‘s “Queering Archives” issue, Caitlin McKinney explores the digitization and classification of unprocessed pornographic photography in her article “Body, Sex, Interface.” From Miller v. California to Reno v. ACLU, both the production/distribution of “obscene” materials and our conceptions/definitions of “obscenity” are regulated. How have these precedents intersected with archival work? How have non-queer Anglo-American male archivists – their positionalities, their biases – shaped the “archival canon?” How does porn (and other nontraditional material) get processed in archives?

The Leather Archives would not exist were it not for a massive shift in public narratives about sex and sexualities. Yet the Lesbian Herstory Archives (the world’s largest collection of lesbian-related materials) finds itself packing away boxes of unprocessed pornographic photography. McKinney argues that the amateurism, banality, “indecency” and ambiguity of materials like (pornographic) “vernacular photography” make it difficult to label/categorize. “Photographs are not yet mediated by a database form that attempts to pin down the stories they capture” (115).

McKinney concludes that digitization must be “improvisational, open to revision and critique, and willfully imperfect in its management of considerations such as metadata” (117). Searching for “sexuality” might yield no results; searching for “porn” might produce images of sex wars protests; searching for “erotica” might generate images of sex with a “specious aura of antiquity” (125). Archival classification and the definition of “what is pornographic and what is fit for public consumption” goes beyond issues of presentism (125-6). Archives determine access, draw connections, and define borders. The act of processing – naming and arranging – shapes censorship policies, and will shape the ubiquity of sexual imagery.

And what about the ethics of processing with respect to pornography? Issues of provenance, consent, publicity/privacy, access restrictions, and confidentiality must be negotiated.

What does it mean to “archive” the Internet? “Archiving” is usually reserved for the act of backing up digital information, not the work of preservation in a physical repository. “Digital preservation” is itself an oxymoron depending on how you interpret it. Preservation ensures material is available in the long-term, but digital formats are finite. Digital preservationists are charged with maintaining both reformatted and “born-digital” content. As Helen Willa Samuels observes in our reading, “Who Controls the Past,” “changing technologies and communication patterns” continually alter the nature of our records and force us to fathom and gather material in a variety of formats (111). Thus, “archiving” the Internet – preserving it in its digital format – would include backing up digital information.

In her article “Raiders of the Lost Web,” Adrienne LaFrance discusses the significance of the Internet Archive and the necessity of re-conceptualizing the seeming perpetuity of digital information. As we discussed in class, archivists must be mindful of their resources. The cost of digital storage (maintaining servers and databases) is much greater than the “passive” storage of materials in, for instance, a warehouse. “There are now no passive means of preserving digital information,” LaFrance quotes writer and digital historian Abby Rumsey. Web content is inherently ephemeral; the Internet was founded as a communications system, not as a place to store information.

Yet the Internet has become a place where information is stored without physicality (e.g., “the Cloud”) even while no concrete means exist for digital collections to be acquired and preserved. LaFrance points out that “in the print world, it took centuries to figure out what ought to be saved, how, and by whom.” What was lost in that time? The contents of the early web, our web, will likely disappear and be forgotten in the same manner.

Our first class discussion touched on issues of representation in archives – whose materials (whose perspectives) are available, represented, retained and maintained? This question reminded me of one of my favorite articles – “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman

Hartman studies the pervasive symbolism of the Black Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery. In doing so, she reflects on the failure of the archive – the retrospective disempowerment of a people through a lack of resources. Black women in the Atlantic world are cast as voiceless historical actors who are objectified by a white male gaze because the archive is almost singularly composed of the contextual perspectives of slavers.

In turn, Hartman asks if it is “possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive” (11). One may note the way Hartman discusses “The Archive” as a seemingly monolithic entity, a composite of all relevant and available historical materials. She explores the place of the archive in historiography — its ‘violence, silence, scandal, excess, boundaries, discrepancies, and promiscuity’ — by bringing it to life through vivid descriptions of her dilemma.  She characterizes the archive as alive, a continually evolving entity that both shapes and is shaped by the oppressive power dynamics that characterize our history.

The agency of historical actors to participate in a collective narrative is revealed through the limited contextual evidence produced by the archive (primary sources) and, in turn, informs the ability of historians to re-construct events.  “The violence of the archive” is, in essence, the reduction of history into a simplified, quantified, and seemingly “objective” account.  The erasure of a people’s history is rooted in the inherently biased (as well as in the nonexistent) contents of the archive and in the interpretations layered upon them by academia.

Archives don’t just safeguard primary sources for future generations – they preserve institutional memory. So often we preoccupy ourselves with issues of “worthiness” when trying to compile and weed our resources. But who has a say in what is and is not needed or necessary to both history and historiography?

Such is the case of Different From the Others (Anders als die Andern), a 1919 German film denouncing Paragraph 175 (which criminalized homosexuality). Banned, burned, and then considered lost for over half a century, the film was recently restored by archivists. When the film was “lost,” had it also been forgotten? If the histories of marginalized communities are suppressed and hidden away, whose job is it to resurrect them?

This year marks the 85th anniversary of German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s visit to San Francisco, and the announcement cropped up in my newsfeed this past week. Hirschfeld co-wrote Different From the Others and had himself pioneered queer, cross-cultural archival work in the early twentieth century. Who knew that one hundred years later, the GLBT History Museum – home to one of the country’s largest repositories of queer archival materials – would be throwing an event in his honor? How have we gone from a society that would destroy these works to one that would revere them?

My conservationist peers tell me that they only enjoy saving books that are “worth something” (monetarily or ideologically). Anything that has hateful implications or acts as superfluous ornamentation isn’t worth keeping for posterity. They would want to re-bind Mein Kampf just as much as they would a coffee-table book. Do we have a moral obligation to save everything? Should the ugly or the mundane be destroyed or maintained? Is erasure of history (its artifacts) ever acceptable? What we save, what we enshrine, can’t be separated from what we value.