While reading the article, “ No One Owes Their Trauma to Archivists, or, the Commodification of Contemporaneous Collecting” by Eira Tansey I continued to reflect on my own work and question if I am practicing what is argued in this article. Tansey challenges archivists collecting trauma, and one specific point I’d like to reflect on is Jason Scott from the Internet Archive tweeted asking for protest footage. I recently worked on a project on the South Korean feminist movement and did a case study on a memorial site of trauma that was also a site of protest. As I continued to work on this, I found myself looking for photos from other protests and events. One notable feature was the blurring of people’s faces or wearing masks to protect the protestor’s identities, which Tansey shows that Jason Scott’s tweets did not do, though in one he does warn that they do not blur images and just retain information.
A question posed by Tansey is, “If you’re feeling compelled to rush in and document things, ask yourself why you’re doing it. Are you fully prepared to follow all the best practices for documenting in times of crisis?” Tansey asks the reader to reflect on the relationships they built, and why they haven’t built those relationships yet. Tansey ends her article or blog post by making it clear that more permanent and well-compensated archivists should be hired to do the work to ensure a better future, which I agree with on multiple levels. Reading works like this makes me excited about the field, and seeing how archivists are fighting for the bettering of the profession, ethical decision-making, and progress in the field for more community engagement. The humanities in general are struggling, and one of the ways to help them would be for us to do what I believe we should always be doing, serving the community. We have to break down barriers in academia and in the profession and connect with our community or else we are doomed.
Eira Tansey, “No one Owes Their Trauma to Archivists, or, the Commidification of Contermporaneous Collecting”, Archival Ethics > Making Adminstrators Look Good, EiraTansey.com, June 5, 2020. https://eiratansey.com/2020/06/05/no-one-owes-their-trauma-to-archivists-or-the-commodification-of-contemporaneous-collecting/