Archival appraisal in the digital age

 Towards the end of his life archivist scholar Terry Cook published a paper called "We are what we keep; we keep what we are" which highlighted the problem of appraisal in archival society. Appraisal can be understood as the process in which archivists decides what is worth to keep, and what to discard. Therefore, appraisal is the issue of life and death of both records and which history we are making possible for future generations to write. 

In Cooks article it is highlighted that appraisal is not a neutral process, but rather the result of the archivists own position in society. Despite the best of efforts by leading archival theorists such as Schellenberg, archivists can namely not to a objective valuation of records. Instead, they make assumptions about what will be relevant for the future and what might not. This is closely linked to Donna Haraways critique of situated knowledge, were the subject position of the individual researcher drives what questions they ask.  This is a problem which science according to Haraway have tried to solve by creating an ideal subject of the neutral researcher, a position which however is closely linked to a white, middle-age and middle-aged man thus not being a universal position at all. Cook draws a similar conclusion, where he claims that the archivist profession have undergone little transformation with regard to social backgrounds during his almost forty years in the business. 

The issue of the archivists own position have since Cooks publication been more and more discussed, resulting on some archives aiming to work with their local context to preserve parts of history that is not yet heard. But to some extent, this approach becomes particularly problematic with digitization. In a digitized world there exists a digital divide, were many groups does not have digital literacy even though they are part of digitized collections. This creates two ethical dilemmas with relation to digitization.

Starting from the notion of representativity in the archive, it becomes clear that archivists play an important role in the selection of which material to digitize. In this regard, archivists need to create a digital collection which contains what Mindel labels as equity in which not only the majority groups are represented, since this would lead to a wrongful conclusion that past societies were homogenous. Therefore, archivists need to go beyond their own social context to create a wider inclusive digital collection. This can roughly be said to be the first challenge with regard to appraisal.  The second ethical challenge do however arise when the collection have gone live. Let's say that we digitize a large colonial archive which portray the natives of this colonial area in a negative way. Without digital literacy, the groups living in this area can not protest against it and even with digital literacy they might not be able to actually find the collection. Therefore, the power relations between colonial masters and servants might risk to live on online. 

In the contemporary research literature these challenges are somewhat discussed, but there exists no clear solution. By this example Cooks theoretical approach to archives have however not only created problems for the old way of working with conventional archives, but also created new problems that need to be adressed by research. Let's just hope that a solution will manifest sooner rather than later. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The use of history and why historians should mind the gap

Image
 Around two decades ago we can to some extent see how a paradigm hit Swedish history science in full force. This paradigm consisted of studies on how history was used in society and often came with a theoretical luggage from the German and English tradition. After having supervised student theseses on this area I still remain somewhat doubtful as too how students, and historians, often uses these theories. Perhaps this is also due to my PhD-thesis containing a similar approach when it comes to putting the past into neat little boxes. My criticism towards this paradigm is that it have come to be utilised as a way to only package uses of history, rather than what these packages contains. Let us for instance take the form of studying uses of history as narratives or if one so wishes, tropes. The idea here is to study how certain forms are expressed as stories of trauma, grief or “from darkness to light”. What this actually is about in the more theoretical work is to study how history ...
Read more

Contemporary Sexual Politics: Efforts to Silence Sexuality in Politics

Image
Following up on last week’s post, we can ask ourselves where questions of sexuality are being challenged in politics. From a contemporary perspective, I would argue that we are currently witnessing global attempts—particularly from conservative actors—to banish issues of sexuality from public discourse. In Foucauldian theory, we can speak of several forms of the exercise of power. Foucault uses the concept of biopower to analyze social views on sex, capitalism, and power. One of the central aspects of biopower is that it often operates through the individual, who is expected to internalize social norms rather than be externally forced to accept them. Yet, in the case of sexuality, we have over the past decades witnessed rather forceful attempts to silence it, thereby making people unaware of important aspects of their own sexuality. In such cases, the effort seems to lie in banishing "unwanted" expressions from public discourse, thereby limiting the individual’s scope for a...
Read more

Contemporary Sexual Politics: a Background

Image
This is the first part in a series of three posts in which I aim to discuss contemporary sexual politics from a more theoretical and research-based perspective than in my other posts. It forms part of a broader discussion on how sexuality can—and perhaps should—be understood as constituted by a multitude of actors. Therefore, we might not be able to speak of a single contemporary politics of sexuality, but rather of a range of political positions. During the 20th century, numerous philosophers and researchers attempted to write “the history of sexuality,” but the one who has influenced me the most is the French philosopher Michel Foucault. I have actually read all three of his original works on sexuality, but I believe the first book covers the essential foundations for discussing and understanding sexuality. Broadly, this can be said to consist of two levels of particular interest to this series of posts: a) the repressive hypothesis b) the discussion on power/knowledge and the multi...
Read more