I discussed Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy during my first-week blog post with the American Philosophical Society. Some themes I took from this book that I wanted to explore through my internship are representation in the archive or lack thereof, community and community building, and accessibility. There are a few articles I’ll be discussing in relation to this, and I’ll be connecting this with the experiences I’ve had during my time at APS. I’ll conclude this with some additional articles I read and the personal struggles and emotions I’ve experienced while doing this work.
During my first year at Temple University, I read Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa J. Fuentes. I’ve read this book twice and have talked about it on my blog before, but this book helped me frame my ideas on the violence the archive perpetrates in its inaction and the stories it represents and tells. The short article, “The Silence of the Archive” by David Thomas, Simon Fowler, and Valerie Johnson is a brief discussion of longer chapters they have written on the subjects relating to this. Fowler puts forward the sentiment, ‘’sources and archives are neither neutral nor natural”, and this is because the information collected, curated, preserved, and presented have all been through the decisions of the archivist. Something Fowler discusses later is “catalogues” or “finding aids” and how they obscure records and peoples ability to find the information they’re searching for. As someone who doesn’t fully understand all the headings used by archivists, I understand that finding some objects will be difficult. This ties into my later point about accessibility, but Fowler puts forth that this is in some way silencing records as people won’t be able to find certain things on their own. During my time with APS, I’ve been working on transcribing the Loyalist Ladies Letter Book. Through this, I’ve transcribed over 40 pages of letters from a woman in 1771 to her parents, which has been fascinating to me to understand more of the everyday experience. I’ve been enjoying reading these letters, and there is a lot to say about them, as I’m especially interested in non-male and non-white experiences of the time, but class is another factor. She discusses with her parents the balls she is going to or all the money she spent on silk and asks her parents for more money. She also openly states that she went to someone’s house that was so rich and owned 25 slaves, which isn’t the word she used. I hope this project uncovers stories from marginalized communities, especially women of color, but I don’t know if I personally will get to be the one to uncover those stories which is disheartening.
The second point I want to discuss is community and community building. Nancy Y. McGovern’s article and SAA Presidential Address in 2017, “Archives, History, and Technology: Prologue and Possibilities for SAA and the Archival Community” reminded me of the work being done at APS. This article goes over the history of the profession of archiving, and the terms associated with it such as the first use of “born digital”. McGovern has a section on community and discusses how this word can have many different meanings. In my first blog post, I highlighted the community aspects of the Revolutionary City Project and how I wish it would be used to say more. Or my hopes for Philadelphians to be part of the community, and be able to identify with the work, and I hope that still is something that can and will be done. The community being cultivated currently matches the one aspect of community outlined by McGovern, this being professionals in the field and other institutions with similar interests. APS has stakeholders that they’ve partnered with for this project from diverse backgrounds and fields. One of the experiments Sabrina did with them was to give them four historic documents and asked them to create metadata for the object, keeping in mind what people with certain interests might use to find the document. I think this was a fascinating exercise to see how people may respond differently to the same objects. APS has partnered with other institutions as well to try to create a one-stop shop for American Revolutionary history in Philadelphia. In doing this, they’ve created a community of stakeholders, and partnered organizations. Hopefully, as the project continues to grow and become more accessible to users (an update to the website is actively being made to help this) the community will expand. I’m optimistic because I have confidence in the people working on the project.
I discussed accessibility briefly above, and I personally am of the mind that moving archives and collections online is overall a good decision for accessibility I understand how others may feel about it. Caitlin Patterson’s article, “Perceptions and Understandings of Archives in the Digital Age” is an interesting article that seeks to understand what people inside and outside the profession think about archives. This article is a fun read that I recommend, including a short section on stereotypes of the archives such as dust and socially isolated people. Patterson discusses how the digital age has led to people searching for information online, but not typically from archives. Most of the people surveyed in this article expressed the notion that an archivist’s job was, “ways to organize this information so that it can be easily accessed by the public”. This article discusses how an archive isn’t a homogeneous idea, and is fluid in nature. Reading it though, it reinforced my idea that digitization and presenting and making information accessible is at the heart of the work that archivists are doing. Coincidently for me, I happen to love digitization and I’m a proponent of making information accessible (and free) for the public. I was hoping to discuss this here, but I didn’t have time to learn about this new way of processing and digitalizing a collection that APS is doing. I should hopefully learn about it tomorrow and include it in my week 5 notes!
When I started working with APS, I started suffering from a bit of imposter syndrome. There were terms, such as the Library of Congress terms, and all sorts of information that I feared because I didn’t know and it made me uncomfortable. I continued doubting myself for about two weeks and had a small crisis of faith. After a few weeks though, I started to get over it and feel more comfortable in the work I was doing and it’s honestly because of the people at APS and the opportunity. I’m thankful that Temple I’m doing this internship, as it’s helped me realize I truly love the work I’m doing. Going beyond the in-the-field learning I’m getting from my time at APS, the career talks have been insightful. I discussed in my week 3 blog how wonderful it was to hear from Mary Grace and her experiences, and it brought up another contention in me. Archives, collections, or exhibit work? Mary Grace does both collections and exhibit work, and I think that would be something I’d enjoy the most. I guess I need to find another internship in collections and see if that holds true! I read a couple of articles that helped me with this as well. Those will be linked below as articles four and five.
Referenced Work:
The Silence of the Archive, David Thomas, Simon Fowler, Valeria Johnson.
https://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article/81/2/558/12341/The-Silence-of-the-Archive
Archives, History, and Technology: Prologue and Possibilities for SAA and the Archival Community, Nancy Y. McGovern.
https://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article/81/1/9/21514/Archives-History-and-Technology-Prologue-and
Perceptions and Understanding of Archives in the Digital Age, Caitlin Patterson.
https://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article/79/2/339/24351/Perceptions-and-Understandings-of-Archives-in-the
Our Comeback Story: Imposed Syndrome in the Archival Profession, April K. Anderson-Zorn, Michael Andrew Davis, Danielle Nowak, and Allison Stankrauff.
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1143&context=fpml
“Let Me Tell You What I Learned”: Primary Source Literacy and Student Employment in Archives and Special Collections, Erin Passehl-Stoddart.