Reading Commentary

Diana K. Wakimoto, Christine Bruce, and Helen Partridge, “Archivist as activist: lessons from three queer community archives in California”

This paper by Wakimoto et. al. explores the idea of activism in archives and examines how activism is used in three queer community archives. It details the expansion of the role of the archivist, which connects to the Kreps article on the expansion of the curatorial role. It is maintained that the role of the archivist is to preserve accountability and evidence as an impartial record-keeper. Instead of being passive, the archivist should challenge discrimination and be involved in social justice. One form of activism that community archivists should engage in is to be mindful of appropriate language use and descriptive practices by continuing to connect with community members and community archivists.

Community archives are distinguished from other archives by their emphasis on representing marginalized groups. They also depend on donations, so they reflect specific community interests. The queer community archives are vital in creating and sustaining community memories. Curation in these archives is a conscious political statement in itself, as it serves to rectify the historic exclusion of queer narratives. These queer community archives illustrate the importance of personal collecting to preserving queer community history. They offer public programming in order to increase audience accessibility and visibility, and they maintain ongoing community involvement to ensure that diverse voices are heard.

The paper also challenges the neutral status of archivists. This argument reminded me of an article that contained a plea for and a caution against scientists running for political positions. The concern was that having more scientists in politics would change the perspective of scientists from being neutral, impartial keepers of evidence. However, Wakimoto et. al. offers a contrasting position to this argument, stating that: “…archivists who are concerned with preserving the diversity of voices in the archives… must be activists in creating and collecting records.” There is a call for the archivist’s role to involve a greater focus on “outreach, communities, and activism”.

Christina Kreps, “Curatorship as Social Practice”

Christina Kreps begins by providing a brief overview of the expansion of roles that curators must assume. This change is described to be part of a larger set of transformations occurring in museums. Kreps describes the shift to a socially-oriented approach to curation, arguing that curation itself is a social practice and cultural artifact that exists as part of a larger sociocultural context. She details the new museology movement, which approaches museums and curating practices with goals of social change, democratization of museums, and serving people. In terms of active archives, it intends to involve community members as participants in museum work. These approaches also take into account people’s varied positioning with respect to objects.

Kreps does a cross-cultural examination of curatorship and museum practices, comparing indigenous methods of curatorship with Western museum culture. Objects are decontextualized in Western museum practices. This decontextualization and recontextualization within museum culture has created barriers between objects and people, as well as a disregard for the social dimensions of museums and curatorship. This discussion called to mind my own experience learning about the brick lions lining the Processional Way from the Ishtar Gate in Babylon. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston owns one of the lions on display in their Ancient Near East Gallery. The benefit of exhibiting brick lions in a museum context is that a wider audience is able to experience the aesthetic qualities and three-dimensional nature of the lions in person. Additionally, placing them in a museum protects these sculptural remnants from being destroyed. However, displaying them in a museum context erases the significance of their location on the Processional Way, as well as their symbolic power as protectors of people going into Babylon. Curators and other people in the museum can work to create experiences where visitors can be provided with more historical context and be engaged to learn about the historical significance of these objects.

“The Future of Museums and Libraries: A Discussion Guide”

This discussion guide explores questions regarding different ways museum and libraries are changing and can adapt to best serve the general public. It examines several ideas, including the best ways for museums and libraries to collaborate, adapt to new ways of learning, and plan for relevancy and sustainability. It also calls into question the metrics in which we evaluate these institutions’ community value and impact.

Discussion theme 5 is about the abilities of libraries and museums to adapt to contemporary learning and information use. I visited a sound museum in Vienna called the Haus der Musik. One of the exhibits allows visitors to conduct a virtual Vienna Philharmonic on the screen, encouraging users to engage with the museum’s materials with body movements and gestures. The entrance to the main exhibit is a staircase with piano keys, which emits piano notes when stepped on. The museum places more of a focus on interactivity rather than objects, which connects with the new museology movement of allowing for more varied opportunities for learning. Multimedia modes of interaction show an adaptation to modern ways of learning. The museum has also made efforts to allow people more access to museum resources by collaborating with austrian schools.

Ellen Lupton, “Design is Storytelling”

Ellen Lupton describes that effective storytellers should bring personality and emotions to their experiences. Storytelling brings objects and characters to life. She emphasizes that we experience these products and artifacts as temporal rather than static, as stories unfold over time. The Jewish Life in Berlin project should bring figures and music spaces in Berlin’s music scene to life by creating interactions between people and places. My project should create connections between the material in my archive. By integrating social issues and placing materials within their historical context, the experience will create emotional connections with the material.

Carles Sora, talk on Digital Storytelling

Carles Sora discusses the procedural, participatory, spatial, encyclopedic, and atemporal aspects of digital narratives. One of the principles of digital storytelling that Sora highlights is the use of spatial metaphors to visually represent data. The Soldier Brother archive uses objects as a metaphor of representation for connections between the material. Just as how they use the metaphor of objects to go through the material, I can use the metaphor of different music spaces or musical instruments to go through the archive. The cabaret setting provides a metaphor of representing connections in the music network.

Sora also talks about different discourse layers, and the importance of having transitions and connections between the story layer and informational layer. I enjoyed the experience and visual transitions of the Monet2010 archive. While the user is on the journey of traversing Monet’s career, an option is provided to “See the pictures you have viewed”. My project concept can similarly include something like “See the music you have heard” that allows the user to browse the metadata of the music that they have listened to so far.

Dario Rodighiero, Frédéric Kaplan, and Boris Beaude, “Mapping Affinities in Academic Organizations”

This article by Rodighiero, Kaplan and Beaude addresses the visualization approach of mapping affinities for academic collectives. Affinities represent a similarity and closeness among figures. They are divided into the actual, which are ongoing collaborations, and the potential, which represent possible collaborations and synergies. Actual and potential affinities are mixed in the same space. In order to illustrate affinities, there is a process of transforming academic practices to digital traces and then to visual geometry. The paper addresses the challenges of illustrating the multi-dimensionality and multi-scale nature of affinities.

I found this paper to be relevant to our discussions of active archives. The consideration of the user’s perspectives and interactions connects to our previous discussion of reaching out to the general public. The article considers different target audiences and users of this visualization. It discusses representing the coexisting individuals and the collective, and that visualization gives importance to the individual. Interviews with these groups are conducted to gain qualitative insights on the effectiveness of the map. Additionally, different material representations of the affinity map offer different affordances for user interactions. Scholars are able to recognize themselves in the visualization and consider the merits of that representation. The affinity map also acts as a way to provide transparency and communicate the interactions in academic organizations to the external public.

Peter McMurray, “Archival Excess: Sensational Histories Beyond the Audiovisual”

Peter McMurray’s article explores the sensory experiences and objects that do not fit the typical narrative or categorization of an archive. McMurray’s idea of archival excess connects to Liang’s discussion of the residual with his idea of the marginal, or boundary object. He gives an example of a gusle instrument. The instrument is pushed aside in the collection, but it acts as a symbol of nationalism and heroism, and it represents an archive within an archive. The article raises the question of what material forms and should form the identity of an archive.

McMurray also argues that sensory experiences beyond the audiovisual change the way materiality in archives should be written about. The sense of smell is discussed as a form of connection that links personal experience over time. For the sense of taste, McMurray uses the same quote from Michelet as Liang does to discuss the inhalation of archival dust. However, he extends this to describe an aspect of consumption, in which a visitor to the archive unintentionally tastes living beings and objects in that archive. McMurray also extends the idea of an archive as an active force as the archive producing humanness. Interactions between humans and archives are discussed with regard to object existence and permanence. He talks about how humans are ephemeral compared to things, but objects also face time as an agent of decay. The article also explores whether objects exist if they are not being engaged in a sensory experience with a person.

The Jewish Life in Berlin project is web-based, which limits some of the sensory experiences that may come with a physical space. However, the website could include some features to mimic the experiences of a physical archive. For example, documents can be obscured with some form of visual representation of “dust” that the user has to sift through in order to access its materials. One can also place figures on the website in place of the users. Users can watch these figures navigate through physical materials in the archive, experiencing the materiality of these objects through a proxy.

Taylor de Klerk, “Ethics in Archives. Conscientious Collection Curation”

Taylor de Klerk’s article highlights the complex process of curating material for archives. The focus is on collecting material that holds scholarly and historical value. The assessment of the value of archival material by curators, donors, and university employees determines the materials that are acquired in an archive. In terms of active archives, this article explores more of the other side of what makes an archive participatory: the donors involved in this conscientious curation. The article emphasized the large impact donors have on selecting what materials go into the archives. To me, the article raises the question of whether user participation is considered in this process. What I liked about this approach is that the institution avoids discarding historically valuable material that is not suitable for a certain collection. Instead, they attempt to find another collection that they believe will fit the object better.

Lawrence Liang, “The Dominant, The Residual, and the Emergent in Archival Imagination”, and Robert Rapoport, “The Contingent and the Predictive - A Response to Lawrence Liang”

In “The Dominant, The Residual, and the Emergent in Archival Imagination”, Liang begins by discussing contemporary archival impulses, where the rate of information growth exceeds categorization and order. His mention of the modern archive as a palimpsest of the dominant, residual, and emergent forms connects to our conversation in class about the blending and layering of historical moments and timelines. The digital archive, according to Liang, has reconstructed our perception of the archive to become a virtual place that allows for immediate data transfer and access. The idea of the active archive in a digital realm is a move away from the emphasis on the archive’s role as a preservation of records to its ability to disseminate information to a wider audience.

As an extension to our conversation last week about the value of an archive to national memory, Liang also discusses the value and residue of archival material. It raises the question of what materials in an archive are worth giving a space or exhibition to. Regarding images, he expresses that ordinary images gain value as information that is part of a database rather than by virtue of their own existence. Liang states, “…there can be no higher aspiration for archives than to facilitate meaning produced through the discarded.” In this way, archive material awaits activation. We create value and decipher meanings behind discarded images and found footage. Liang maintains that the archivist’s breath is a restorative process that gives life to “deserted” archive material. Here, dust and residue are central to the vision of the archive, and his idea of an active archive shifts the agency back to the archivist rather than the archive itself. However, he also argues that archives themselves are an active, creative force that generate new ways of thinking and challenge preexisting ideas. Additionally, they serve to engage our experience of ephemerality and time.

Liang states that the contingent is another way we should think about contemporary archives. Rapoport’s argument applies Liang’s discussion of contingency to examples of archival video. In contrast to Liang’s view of archival filmmaking playing off the contingent, Rapoport provides examples where contingency is dubious in our digital era, and states that the archive must reclaim contingency. Software has changed our relationship to contingency in the archive. Rapoport also extends Liang’s discussion of the archivist’s breath and parallels it to describing the archival impulse. Assigning value to the residual is described to be a compulsive and automatic process.

Johanna Drucker, Graphesis

The first section of the Drucker reading discusses the way meaning is communicated through graphic language. The introduction explores the idea of graphic languages as a tool to serve the humanities, which are based on interpretation and qualitative judgement. Drucker argues that because data does not have an inherent visual form, information visualizations act as arguments in graphical form.

In “Visualizing uncertainty and interpretative cartography”, Drucker explores how graphical expressions of information are dependent on interpretation. I found the use of a “Trojan horse” analogy to describe graphical tools to be interesting, because it suggests that there is a deception involved in presenting information visualizations as data. The difference between observation and phenomena is emphasized, as there is inherent bias in the way information is presented visually. Because information visualizations are engaging to viewers, I believe they are powerful tools to informing and influencing public opinion. For example, US election maps use color to demonstrate voter results in different regions. If a map lacks nuance, it can convey misleading information and influence the partisan interpretation of viewers.

More information on US election maps here

Evaluating Archives - IUCN Red List

The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN Red List) is an archive containing information about the global conservation status of various natural organisms. It provides information about the ecology, habitat, and conservation actions for animal, plant, and fungi species. The inventory is updated constantly with assessments of new organisms, as well as re-assessments for organisms already existing on the site. The website encourages the audience to engage with the material, with options to take action by donating to the archive, contacting the organization, and following the archive on various social media platforms.

The archive is highly regarded as a source of reliable scientific information. According to its website, it is regularly cited in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and the intended audience appears to be government agencies, students, and other people or organizations interested in conservation. The IUCN Red List can also serve people who have an interest in the conservation and ecological information regarding a particular organism.

The design of the archive invites exploration. A large search bar is centered on the front page, asking the user to enter names of species or regions. The user also has the option of clicking on an “advanced search” button, which allows them to select criteria options to find organisms. Below the search bar lies several images of featured “amazing species”, inviting the user to click on species icons to learn more about them.

The archive is very large, but the website allows for options to help the user find the exact species they are looking for. Once the user enters a search query, search results can be sorted and filtered by several categories. The data on individual species is informative and descriptive and contains large graphics and summaries to assist the user in their search. The summaries contain hyperlinks that lead to more detailed information. I believe the hyperlinks are a good feature, because they invite the user to examine information at their own pace. Presenting a large amount of information upfront may alienate audiences who may not have as much background with ecological data.