The SAA defines access as either the ability or permission to locate (and retrieve) information; accessioning is defined as either transferring or taking custody of that information. What does it mean to both act upon archival materials – to acquire, control, circulate, and interpret their content – and have those actions curbed. In what instances is this circumscription a means of empowerment? How do we negotiate taboos and the politics of (moralized) discomfort in the archival space with respect to atrocity, and the words and images that capture (and/or objectify) its violence? This week, these issues were apparent in three projects from which I consumed archival materials: (1) MIT’s Visualizing Cultures website, (2) HSP’s “One Manly Soul” display, and (3) Ava DuVernay’s 13TH documentary.

Violent imagery and rhetoric (past and present) pervade American society. In 2006, the MIT Visualizing Cultures controversy centered on Japanese war propaganda from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Many picture labels objectified the caricatured, mutilated bodies of Chinese men by alluding to the beautiful aesthetics of war and Japanese portraiture. Some protestors took issue with the existence and/or circulation of the imagery itself, but I find censoring one’s own history disempowering. Historical atrocity should not be viewed as evidence of humiliation or failure (i.e., internalized victim-blaming), but be woven into an identifiable history from which a one can derive meaning and the impetus for change and self-advocacy. Other protestors focused on the flippant textual engagement of the creators. Even images independent of text are not “unbiased;” they are decontextualized. In the archive, metadata itself is subjective. Decontextualized images of atrocity are evocative and we must be self-conscious of our own (objectifying) gazes.

Chinese student protestors were accused of bias (“militant nationalism”), but the site’s creators themselves were two male professors: one white and one Japanese. In Jing Wang and Winnie Won Yin Wong’s introduction to Positions‘ unpacking of this controversy, they ask “Who holds a privileged viewpoint over the images, texts, or even the history of a tribe or a nation—experts or natives?” (6). What absolutely irks me about this question is that it treats “the expert” and “the native” as mutually exclusive. What the question really does is normalize the white male historiographical gaze, its abstractions and armchair theories, and its seemingly omniscient outsider “objectivity.” What is ideal – what ought to be the “privileged” (read: prioritized) perspective in the construction of historical narratives – is the voices of Others. What is more beautiful than studying, engaging with, structuring, and circulating one’s own history? It is neither irrational upheaval, nor the clamoring of pathos-driven plebeians. Only Others know how to perform and demand historiographic restorations and reparations. Historians are also just the “middlemen;” these words and images pass through the hands of their original creators and archivists before they reach historians and the general public. While historians fancy themselves the retrievers and interpreters, archivists are the first (“professional”) filters through which materials pass – weeding and processing information before everyone else.

Meanwhile, HSP’s upcoming “One Manly Soul” display features pamphlets and political cartoons created by white men that feature racist imagery and rhetoric about the 1763 Conestoga Massacre (the brutal murder of 21 Susquehannock men, women, and children). Absolutely no American Indian (let alone Susquehannock) people were involved in the compilation and interpretation of these materials, and respected scholars within this field are white people (mostly men). Is my (lone) presence on this project as a person of color (albeit Asian, not American Indian) some sort of consolation, pseudo-validation, and/or tokenization? Conversely, the recently released documentary 13TH (which explores the Thirteenth Amendment, mass incarceration, and racism in the United States) was directed by Ava DuVernay, a Black woman, and its “talking heads” are majority Black scholars. In a moment of metanarrative, the film (which features images of racial violence and oppression, both past and present) discusses the role of visual culture in shaping liberation movements: “[We] are extensions of this kind of oppression, we don’t need to see pictures to understand what’s going on. [It’s really there to] speak to the masses who have been ignoring this…” Shock value became a powerful tool with the advent of photography; seminal images like the scarred back of Gordon (an enslaved man) and Emmett Till’s open casket are ingrained in the American historical imagination. Must we objectify ourselves, our histories and traumas, in order to validate our humanity? With the advent of social media – when Black people can live broadcast their own murders and only enact conversation, not justice – how will archivists access(ion) our atrocity?

On Off the Record, former SAA President Jackie Dooley published “Should a legal right to “archival privilege” be established?” – written by Frank Boles, another former SAA President and chair of SAA’s Government Affairs Working Group, back in 2013. In light of the recent Belfast Project controversy, wherein the subpoenaing of oral histories to use as evidence in a murder investigation roused the old “archival privilege” debate, Boles (in line with SAA’s official statement on the incident) opts not to commit to any particular stance. Rather, he affirms the professional and legal context surrounding the issue – intra-archival acrimony and the currently unrecognized right to confidentiality for scholars and archivists. Boles encourages discussion so we might someday arrive at a consensus.

Spouse, psychiatrist, lawyer, priest – under “privileged communication,” these are the protected relationships within which one may divulge anything. Comparatively, Randall Jimerson’s published SAA Presidential Address “Embracing the Power of Archives” (2006), discusses the archive as a site of power – a temple, a prison, a restaurant. I find the former two to be most relevant in the case of “archival privilege.” If archivists are to be counted among lawyers and priests as those who have the power to withhold (protect?) information, then the archive really does become a nexus for “authority,” “veneration,” and “control” of materials. But how can archives embody the contradiction of the temple and prison – open and closed, welcoming and impenetrable – when confidentiality risks superseding public well-being? Confidentiality of the (alleged) aggressor (e.g., a murderer) is not the same as confidentiality of the victim (e.g., someone who may be outed if their personal papers are circulated).

In the SAA blog post, Boles asks, “Is history always more important than justice?,” but I’ve always believed history and justice to be inextricably linked. Justice may be a subjective – worthy of debate and speculative outcome – but isn’t history, too? “The public’s right to every man’s evidence” is a contested ideal itself (for journalists and witnesses, as well as archivists). History and historiography rely on testimony, and while tenuous privacy/confidentiality rights discourage revelation, what use is information if it’s inaccessible, especially when lives are at stake? Perhaps, in the case of archives at least, Justice Felix Frankfurter’s dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court Case 1943 United States v. Monia applies: “Duty, not privilege, lies at the core of this problem – the duty to testify, and not the privilege that relieves of such duty” (316).

The pornography fixation returns! Roy Rosenzweig’s discussion of “the promiscuity and … persistence of digital materials” in “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era” got the wheels turning in the old noggin. Then again, suggestive language tends to do that. It’s interesting to note that pornographic websites get more visitors than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined, even though the majority of Americans believe pornography to be immoral – what a terribly sinful people we all are! But I’m both sincere and not alone in the observation that between “sexual liberation” and the rise of the Digital (Information) Age, pornography has proliferated – in production and public dialogue. In turn, archives and academia alike are being forced to (re)consider the value of incorporating taboo and controversial subjects and objects into their scopes and spaces – all this in tandem with what Rosenzweig is addressing: (1) the tenuousness of born-digital materials/data, our digital cultural heritage, and (2) the potential for a major historiographic paradigm shift given the abundance, or even “completion,” of our historical record(s). [Though I thoroughly enjoy and largely agree with Rosenzweig’s piece, I do have to take issue with his optimistic and fallacious vision of a “complete historical record,” because it is the very nature of history and historiography to never have the “full story.” Records themselves are limited – they are representations (not manifestations) of events and experiences. However, this issue may just be semantical on my part.]

So having established that accessibility and dissemination have all played a role in “de-invisiblizing” and promoting critical engagement with pornography, should we not also consider why the visibility of porn (or any other taboo, “subcultural” materials/institutions) is the determining factor for its study? In other words, pornographic materials, throughout time and place, have served to illustrate both the public and private, the celebrated and persecuted, desires and drives of people. Porn is one of the most valuable (and undervalued) primary source “genres” for the study of sexuality. To that end, when Rosenzweig questions whether we should be trying to save everything and how we find/define our materials, implicit in his musings are how we go about prioritizing one document or byte over another and, thus, prioritizing one historical narrative over another. When does weeding become censorship? Just as the Victorians secreted away the erotica of Pompeii, we must now avoid destroying the “seedy,” sexually explicit “underbelly” of our modern society.

“[A]lthough an archivist must have agreed to accept and preserve the papers, their being in an archives was a form of burial, not of discovery.” – “‘Preoccupied with our own gardens’: Outreach and Archivists,” Timothy L. Ericson

Historians often operate under the arrogant assumption that they can/have/will “discover” something strange, old, and wonderful in the “dusty” and “forgotten” recesses of the archives. Like all wayward explorers (see “columbusing”), they are hampered by their own eagerness and positionality. Ericson, however, finds his fellow archivists to be at fault for this common misconception, proclaiming: “the archival profession has fallen short of the mark in promoting the use of archival materials” (114).

The Society of American Archivists defines outreach as “the process of identifying and providing services to constituencies with needs relevant to the repository’s mission, especially underserved groups, and tailoring services to meet those needs.” One issue with which Ericson contends is how archivists ought to conceptualize these constituencies – “one of the great myths of our profession, and one of our most debilitating misconceptions, is that archives exist simply to serve scholars” (118). In this acknowledgment, he touches on larger issues of accessibility.

We must recognize the necessity of sharing archival materials (the histories they contain) and of making them accessible for everyone. Academia’s archival “columbusing” is rooted in the fact that scholars tend to only talk to other scholars – passing “new” knowledge and ideas among themselves. Effective archival outreach initiatives have the potential to empower everyone (especially Others), via real and relevant connections to the past that emphasize the role of archivists in processing and maintaining them.

“Archives are political … keeping those records that support the dominant position, the metanarrative, or the status quo.” – “Records Management and Archives: Finding Common Ground,” Sue Myburgh

In sociology, one of our major traditions is called Conflict Theory. It discusses the usual Marxist/Weberian tenants of class, status and party; labor, capital, and property; stratification and revolution. It also describes concepts like materialism, wherein the material conditions of a society’s mode of production (its way of producing the means of human existence) determine its organization and development. We can carry this notion into our studies of material culture and archival science – what we left behind, what we are leaving behind, and what we will leave behind in these processes of human production and consumption all comprise a collective historical record. How we decide to handle these materials is dictated by ideologies (political ideas held by the dominant classes to support their interests by promoting a belief framework). These very materials constitute the basis, the evidence, for these belief frameworks – the falsehoods that infect (and are perpetuated by) colonized and commodified historiographies.

Thus, the rationalization of archival institutions means the development of abstract, means-end calculations that shape models for preservation and determine the ruling processes of archival administration and records management. In turn, what Myburgh describes as the “institution behind archives – [a] government or business organization –” (25) comprises the organizational elite, able to get its way because it is better mobilized (it controls the material means of administration). Archival bureaucracy, then, obfuscates the moral complexities and historical bases of things like copyright law and repatriation.

From the Dead Sea Scrolls to “Monkey Jesus,” popular culture and historiography have built up a kind of mythos around historic materials and their preservation. The sacredness of knowledge and culture – its physical manifestations – is subject to cautious (sometimes circumspect) handling and accessibility policies. For good reason, we bar food and drink from archival spaces. To varying degrees, we close off public access to archival collections because each time these materials are passed to an “outsider,” we risk damage to or theft of our cultural heritage. The potential for loss is enough to frighten some archivists into hiding away collections behind the walls of their institutions – conjuring an inner sanctum of memory to which only the privileged are privy. But what constitutes an “outsider?” Most obviously, someone who is ill-equipped to handle the physical fragility – the tenuousness – of these objects. Implicitly, then, an “insider” is the archivist – someone with specialized knowledge who is capable of managing and organizing the vastness of our material legacies.

Be it botched frescos, the paving of the Great Wall, or “fixed” tombs-turned-picnic tables, we often have good reason to anxiously anticipate restoration and conservation efforts. Outdoors or indoors, antique or ancient, the salvageability of these things is treated warily and with perverse fascination. We mourn the deevolution of the Ecce Homo, all the while creating memes and traveling great distances just to take selfies with it. Why?

We are reminded of the role that archives play in safeguarding certain materials. Indeed, archives represent a societal mechanism – a checks-and-balances system – for the (safe, sane, and professional) maintenance of our cultural heritage. Archives hold the power, making historic objects and documents sacrosanct – they can both liberate and blockade the physical, the intellectual, and the ideological elements of our materials and the histories they hold.

“The generations of ‘wearing a mask’ and having to pass as heterosexual, of invisibility and enforced silencing of our own voices, and of oppressive distortions about our lives in the mainstream media have all made collecting and preserving our historical records an act of liberation.” – “In the Archives,” John D’Emilio

This week, John D’Emilio published a blog post on OutHistory about archives and I was (am) thrilled. D’Emilio reflects on the role of archives in queer historiography – how early research in this nascent field was very rarely conducted in physical institutions that housed and cared for materials. This grass-roots historiography necessitated community engagement – speaking with individual activists and wading through piles of documents at their organizations of origin. Indeed, D’Emilio reflects on his visit to the New York Mattachine Society, being told that they would be closing at the end of the month and having any/all of the office files offered to him! He kept two four-drawer file cabinets in an apartment closet for several years. The sheer absurdity (and “cringewothiness”) of the situation acts as a solemn reminder of “how precarious the survival of our historical records has been.”

Community-based archives, as D’Emilio calls them, are important because they are accessible to the communities they serve – “Creating and sustaining them are themselves acts of community building.” Communal/subcultural archives (as I called them in my last post) can also act as a counterpoint to our evolving ideas of permanence. In “On the Idea of Permanence,” James O’Toole envisions the freedom to (re)define the scope, purpose, and management of our collections (24). Perhaps this possibility is rooted in both new preservation technologies and community-based archival self-sufficiency.

Finding aids can act as the means through which we familiarize ourselves with an archive and/or orient ourselves within an archival space. The Society of American Archivists Glossary describes a finding aid as “a single document that places materials in context by consolidating information about the collection.” But what does it really mean to “contextualize” materials?

Leora Farber’s article, “Archival Addresses: Photographies, Practices, Positionalities,” employs a sociological concept (of which I’m particularly fond), in order to examine the role of archivists in shaping their collections and making them “suitable” for public consumption: “Positionality is situated in relation to the construction of the identities and subjectivities of practitioners, those subjectivities present within the archive itself, and ways in which these subject positions are activated” (2). Locating the relationships between the positionalities of archivists and archive users, as well as the archives’, archivists’, and archive users’ “historical, political, geographic, social and cultural” contexts, allows us to determine and outline appropriate “processes of exchange” (2).

Similarly, in her article “In Secret Kept, in Silence Sealed: Privacy in the Papers of Authors and Celebrities,” Sara Hodson argues that “archivists should become as knowledgeable as possible about the moral and social milieu of the individuals represented in [a] collection” (200). While Hodson is discussing the moral quandaries presented by personal papers, I believe her argument can be replicated and expanded upon for the purpose of dealing with communal or subcultural archives (and public history). What happens when archives and other institutions are run by the very same (or similar) people whose histories are being preserved, maintained, and shared within them – belying the idea of having to “educate” or radically “re-position” oneself in order to accommodate the experiences of the Other? Archival practice can become not just an act of communal/subcultural self-sufficiency, but self-love, and an assertion of agency.

“Our collective creativity – and innate human propensity for community – will undoubtedly stimulate as-yet-unimagined ways to harness knowledge bytes into remarkable resources” – “Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage: ‘Citizen Archivists’ for the Future,” Jan Zastrow

This past summer, the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center started sharing unidentified stills on their blog. After accumulating stacks of mysterious photos (mostly promotional shots from old movies) in their office, the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division (MBRS) staff started to solicit the general public for information – asking for it to be posted in the “comments” section of each of their posts.  Such informality, as well as the “game-like” nature of identifying these materials, is nothing new.

A significant amount of research has already been done to evaluate the effectiveness of crowdsourcing in the archive (e.g., tracing the origins and rationales, reviews of methods). Sites and platforms like CitizenScience.gov and Metadata Games utilize public participation, interest, and (in some cases) competitiveness to gather information, descriptions, and transcriptions for the collections of archives, libraries, and museums. These institutions can use the Internet and social media to “outsource” archival work to individuals – amateurs and experts alike. Does this process equalize or democratize our information-gathering, our research orientations? Does it help expedite processing, improve access, and perhaps even encourage some form of “archival civic engagement” – wherein citizens-cum-archivists are engaged with their communities’ histories?

On the flip side, might not some flummoxed volunteer (either from inside the archive itself or across the world, seated in front of their interface) mislabel or misidentify materials – obscuring them from interested researchers in perpetuity?  As a legitimate concern, we might be reassured by the pseudo-checks-and-balances system that emerges from crowdsourcing – always having someone else “checking up on” or confirming the quality of your work. Then again, a herd mindset might serve to perpetuate errors. Ultimately, professional archivists must take the lead on these projects.

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)?