OHD_BLG_0074 Archival Discoveries and Discussions – 25/02/21

People mentioned the Wallace Collections recent archival antics

I zoomed into a “workshop” with PGR and professional archiving people. I say “workshop” with speech marks because people are becoming very liberal with this word. Workshops produce outcomes and involve interactions, presentations and panels do not do this. Stop using this word. Anyway it was very interesting and helpful because I could actually talk to people using archives and archivist. So with further ado lets get reviewing…

One of the big issues currently is that people cannot get into archives, this happens at different levels. Some researchers have access to digital archives, but then they can’t read the photos, some only have access to the catalogue and some have zero access. This is due to the fact that all archives work in different ways and many are at different levels of digitisation. This can be due to money but also different laws and regulations of the country the archive is situated in. This limited or complete lack of access is very annoying if you are doing a PhD that only has a certain amount of funding. Over the various Zooms I have part taken in I see that it causes a lot of frustration but I have also observed that people are getting more creative in the ways they get hold of documents. For example one person mentioned that eBay is a great source of archival images. Another person mentioned that they had started to use their network to gain access to artefacts. They were doing a project that involved using German archives, which turns out are not good when it comes to digitising, so they got people they know to send them photographs. This was not the first someone had told me about this. It seems that in some cases it is better to rely on humans to find stuff in the archives than computers. Which brings me to my point:

STOP REPLACING PEOPLE WITH ROBOTS

I asked a question to the PGR panel about what they thought about digital archives verses the physical archive (aka Brick and Mortar Archives). They gave some great answers around missing the materiality of documents, how you lose the serendipity of archiving in digital archives and how online catalogues do help setting up before going into a brick and mortar archive. They also mentioned the common problem of tags and keyword searches not being good enough. One of the archivists that works in the University of Nottingham archives responded to this by saying that people should always ask the archivists what they are looking because they know the archive. This in combination with the people using their networks in order to access archives got me thinking that our drive to digitisation in archives is having the same effect as it is having in different places. It is replacing people with computers that definitely cannot do the job in the same way. For example I have a dislike for the self check outs because it clearly does not work as well as a human cashier, which is evident by the staff member who has to stand next to the machine.

Do not get me wrong I am not against digitisation nor do I believe that archivists’ current job outline does not need updating. But I believe that relying heavily on digitisation will not solve our archive problem nor will employing more of the same archivists. We need something in between. Something that has the similar flavour to people using their international network to send archives across borders, which would not be possible without both technology and humans.

OK second note…

As I am currently exploring a lot right now the existence of an archive also creates the ‘existence’ of histories lost. What was interesting about this panel is that the majority were doing work with minority histories BAME and LGBTQ+ etc. Because of this many of them talked extensively about how they managed and handled the gaps that are found in archives that represent the neglected histories. One person talked about counter-reading which is the method on examining the gaps in an archive, the reasons these gaps might exist and then combining this with the contextual knowledge in order to create a history.

One of the speakers was using social media as an alternative archive and I asked her how she felt about the ethics of having an archive on a social media:

We continued the conversation and started to talk about the principle of counter archives; archives that are created by those not represented in brick and mortar archives, often using a more DIY attitude. By DIY attitude I mean only using the resources you have access to, so in many contemporary cases this means they do end up only.

I believe that further investigation into these counter archives and methods like counter reading could hold some interesting ideas on how we might approach the SDH archive.

OHD_BLG_0075 Texts, Images and Sounds Seminars Summary

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What follows is a summary of the various seminars that I took presented by Ian Biddle from Newcastle University. Overall I enjoyed these seminars mostly because I had covered many of the topics during my time at Goldsmiths but now I understand it better.

Thinking Texts

Seminar

You can read many things as texts: buildings, art, music etc. The word text comes from the word to weave. A text therefore represents a complicated set of ideas woven together to create one idea.

There is a lot of snobbery and hierarchical thinking around text and the author. Author come from the word authority. However to say that the author has complete authority over a text is a very outdated idea. Everyone interprets and experiences texts in a different way. This is often due to the various elements that make up their background: gender, race, work, economical background etc. In addition to this snobbery around interpretation there is also the also now outdated belief that cultures that have no text, have not published, have no history. Which is a bit racist.

Visual Culture and the Cinema Mode of Production

Reading and Seminar

I wrote a summary in a blog post

Map

Noise Cultures Base/Bass Materialism

Seminar

Sound is married and dependant on technology. They way we experience sounds has developed in correlation with tech look at the invention of noise canceling headphones but also the noise of industry and cars that infiltrates our everyday surroundings. Because of advancements in speakers listening has become a contact sense. We can now feel the beat of the music move our bones to the rhythm.

There is a spectrum of sound where music is on one end and noise is on the other. Where sounds fall on this spectrum changes with time and whoever is listening.

How we perceive sound and our experience of it has changed dramatically over time. We now live in a world of lo-fi sound, a constant blurry noise where we cannot make out the specific sources. Before we live in hi-fi sound. Everything could be heard crystal clear because we did not have the rumble of the machines.

Our relationship with silence is also very strange. Sound proof housing in a city centre is extremely expensive. To have access to silence is a privilege. Yet we are also afraid of silence. We are constantly turning on music and TV. Most people cannot walk from A to B without having headphones in. I think we have a need to control our sound.

Slavonic Languages have different words for listening but I haven’t been able to find any examples.

‘Acousmatic Sound’ listening to a sound without know the source. Basically Greek philosophers would stand behind a curtain and speak in an effort to get the audience to concentrate better on what they were saying.

Map

The Affective Turn or the New Scholarship of the Senses

Seminar

Affect (psychology) = mood

Affect (philosophy) = the grammar of emotions

Affect labour = labour that is conducted in the service industry often considered feminine work

Affective computing = instead of the old input output model this type of computing is focused on interface

Feeling works on a very different logic. It’s the body of knowledge outside of the rational that controls emotions. It is in a sense a different world that we live in.

Affect. Complicated political thinking without attracting too much attention or a specific type of attention from a suppressive state. Think Provo and their ludike actions.

Art organises your feelings. It’s that ah! moment when you see a work of art that perfectly communicates a complex feelings.

Affect theory kills boundaries. Biddle’s tip if you are stuck throw some affect theory at it. It’s not political and it unpicks the logic of other theories.

Map

Memory and the Archive

Reading

This is an easier version of Derrida.

To make an archive is to repeat. It is a deeply nostalgic act with questionable productivity. “I just want to relive it”

The archive represents the now of whatever kind of power is being exercised anywhere at any place or time.

There is a feverish desire – a kind of sickness unto death – that Derrida indicated, for the archive: the fever not so much to enter it and use it, as to have it, or just for it to be there, in the first place.
Stedman, Dust

We have to have all the data.

And currently those who are in power (big tech) are also mining all the data for reasons no one is completely sure about less of all them.

Seminar

Archives are full of metaphors. From the architecture of the buildings that store them to the icons we use to store data on our laptop. This is common theme in new technologies. The first cars looks like carriages and the save button is a floppy disc. However some of these metaphors are more tailored to the elite, as in the elite are more likely to recognise this metaphor or the metaphor represents an elite version. Just look at the representation of the Jedi library in Star Wars it is nearly exactly the same as the library at Trinity College in Dublin. Why would Jedis need books?

The putting something in an archive is called archivisation. By archiving something you move it from the private into the public but not from the secret to the non-secret. That is because archives promise access but do not always give it. An archive can be compared to house arrest, the documents are not in prison but they are also not free.

Archives are particular anxious places. They worry a lot about the longevity of their collections and general rot. There is also the added anxiety that new forms of preservation leads to new forms of loss. When we were able to record sound we had to learn how to archive it. I cannot imagine the amount of loss that is created by the internet.

Quick warning here to not fetishise the archive please.

Map

OHD_BLG_0076 ʇǝɹɔǝs ʞɹɐp ǝɥʇ

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In Frisch’s ‘Three dimensions and more’ he discusses the idea of the deep dark secret of oral history being like the unopened shoe box of homemade videos – unwatched. After digesting this idea for the last two years I suddenly realised something. Oral history as a field exists because of technological advancements. The field is completely intertwine with technology: the recording devices used to make the first recordings, the internet now allowing for international zoom interviews, it all depends on technology. This made me think that maybe the deep dark secret is not an oral history problem but in fact a technology problem. It’s not oral history’s fault that much of technology is not particularly focused on sustainable storage. There is focus on speedy communication; phones, text messages, social media and trading; online shopping and targeted advertising. Even accessing knowledge (aka googling) is not based on accuracy but more speed and attention.

Digital storage is a minefield from ‘things that exist on the internet forever’ to link rot and from the now unreadable mini-disc to hard drives that can store two terabytes of data. It is so extreme that it is clear that no has really thought about beyond uploading it. Technology, like many things in capitalist society live solely in the present, so the way it views time extremely 2-dimensional. There is no thought about how this attitude towards storage affects the past or the future. The amount of time and money that is required to keep archives up to date with their digitisation is not covered by the amount of money and time archives actually have. Beyond the archive our day to day interaction and documentation has an unknown future. What are your next of kin going to do with your Facebook page when you die? Or your instagram? Your Snapchat? Your emails? Your iCloud? Your laptop, smart phone, hard drivers and tablets? Currently it is likely that it will either disappear or be inaccessible.

The way we store our data in this blasé way has the potential to create a black hole of information in the timeline of human history. This attitude is completely inefficient when it comes to accessing and reusing. Unless of course you are Facebook, Google or Apple. These mega gods of information are able to mine astronomical amounts of data and use it. But in order to use it they strip every single bit of humanity from the process. The only way to use the truly insane amounts of data is by reducing the human producer so much that literally become zeros and ones. No feelings, no aura, just nothing. Oral history cannot do this because oral history is fundamentally human. Just like home videos that are filled with nostalgia and memory, they take time to watch or listen to because there is so much emotion and memory that needs to be digested while viewing. But the data that is used by big tech is void of this emotion.

In conclusion, due to oral history’s long term yet slightly abusive relationship with technology it has got this deep dark secret of unused archives. But in truth technology does not support what archives are trying to do. The creators of this technology just do not give a shit because that’s the nature of the capitalistic beast. I suggest therefore that we take a reverse attitude towards this relationship. Oral history needs to inform tech what they need in order to make archives work better because clearly tech has no idea what it is doing.

OHD_BLG_0077 RE-MIX (reading group – 16/02/21)

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Readings:

M. Frisch – “Three Dimensions and More: Oral History Beyond the Paradoxes of Method” in Handbook of Emergent Methods

J. Bornat et al. – “Don’t mix race with specialty”: Interviewing South Asian Overseas-Trained Geriatricians (this was the wrong piece but we went with it)

Bornat piece

The Bornat might have been the wrong piece but it definitely showed how complex oral histories are. The amount of layers that can be found in the interviews that were conducted with the South Asian Geriatricians would make one hell of a cake. It can be said that all of these layers symbolise a different part of someone’s identity and are all viewed through the lens of memory which makes things extra complicated. The way we remember things lives in the present which is often a very different world to the past. This can be especially seen in the language. The language that we used to describe our identity is constantly changing just look at the ‘new’ identities found in LGBTQ+ or the language that movements like the metoo movement or blacklivesmatter have all given us to talk about life and experience.

When we remember things we take this new vocabulary with us, which sometimes clashes with the feelings that we initially had during the event that is being remember. For example, a woman post-metoo might look back a certain incident that she now understands as being sexual harassment but at the time she just put up with it. These two interpretations of the event, the initial one and the post-metoo one can cause all sorts of reactions.

e.g.

It couldn’t have been that bad because you are only talking about it now
It was bad but you did not know why because you did not have the words to describe it
It didn’t matter at the time and you don’t really care about it now but because of all this language you feel you should

Memory is messy especially when dealing with identity because it changes constantly.

Frisch

I am very familiar with the Frisch piece but many in the reading group hadn’t read it before. What was funny to see was how many had the same reaction I did when I first read it: that it was both obvious, innovative and fundamentally frustrating because he does not give any answers.

Because I had already read the Frisch piece some of the things that had been mention were not completely new to me. The ethical difficulties of oral history archives (Graham wondered whether me might be making too much of a fuss.) Digital silver bullets that will rid us of all access problems?

However, the talk around one theme did intrigue me and that was reuse. This theme was triggered by someone asking whether oral histories even get reused now. Turns out oral historians do not really reuse but oral histories are reused in popular culture, especially for World War novels. All this led me to dig up some old thoughts I had on remixing, which I have already written on after one of the NYU lectures I attended. And at the top of the post is the trailer for the exhibition that planted this idea of remixing in my head way back when.

There are strange power dynamics that are interlocked with reuse and remixing. The decision to store something is an incredibly powerful move, mostly because it involves money. The move to store also automatically highlights documents that are not deemed important enough to store. So now you have items that have been declared important and those that are not, all done by a single person or body of power. However, power shifts over time so eventually someone might want to tell a different story, but they can’t rely on what is stored because that does not represent them, so they remix and create a ‘new’ history. This ‘new’ history might be true or it might be completely fabricated but either way it is necessary. Remixing is a power move that in my eyes should not be hindered by power structures, because the previous power structures already declared what was allowed to be kept.

You can also look at this through the academia vs pop culture lens. Andy pointed out that one of the main reasons people go into oral history is because they like talking to people and not necessarily because they like digging through archives. Now one could easily declare that we therefore should not really bother storing oral histories, but people do use them it’s just that oral historians don’t. In many industries you have those who make and those who can’t afford to make so they adapt and modify often paying tribute to the original. It is exactly this that I am building an archive for; not for oral historians but those who want to remix to reuse.

OHD_BLG_0078 it’s SFG

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At Goldsmiths nothing ever went unnoticed during crits. If you had put your work on one of the studio desks because you hadn’t had the time to build a plinth then people would talk about the table. If you had wedged your laptop behind the tv screen and a wire was dangling from it, people would talk about the wire. (They would also very much discuss why you decided to show your work on a tv instead of the overhead projector.) And you should never put tape down on the floor, that was a guaranteed death sentenced.

I do not deny that these discussions were exercises in pretentiousness of the highest order, but they do highlight one very important aspect of all information – context. Ever since Duchamp and his urinal stunt a lot of art has to be interpreted in a web of context in order for it to a certain extend ‘work’. The move from the men’s toilets to the gallery was a choice and needed to be recognised. This had the knock on effect that now everything has to be recognised.

But here is something I would like people to borrow from Goldsmiths crits. For art students it becomes a competition to see who can decipher the web of context best. This is incredibly annoying if you just want to show the object you have been working on, but it also does highlight the importance of context and the need for it to be recognised. This approach could be useful when working with oral histories. The amount of meta data is huge and it is essential to recognise it. However there is an additional view that I would like oral historians to borrow from the art students and that is the focus on materiality. How things are recorded. The quality of the tape. Whether it is accessible. All these factor into the materiality of the oral history. To view the oral history within its status as an object could deliver some much needed relief to oral historians. You don’t need to have access to a certain interview recording because that fact that the interviewee does not allow access already tells you enough. The crackerly noise on the tape or the chore of having to find the right machine to play the oral history is all part of the oral history. It’s the studio desk. Sometimes it is annoying and you just want to look at the art but sometimes it’s necessary to consider the desk and the wide web of context.

OHD_BLG_0080 The Virtual Rooms

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I have just found out about the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Actually that is incorrect I have just googled the “phenomenon where you hear something for the first time and then again” and found out that it is referred to as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (for no particular reason in case you were wondering). The reason I was googling this idea was not just because I was wondering if someone had named this occurrence but because I today I heard about the Clubhouse for the first time and then listened to a podcast where they repeatedly mentioned it. Clubhouse is an exclusive audio social platform app, which you need to be invited to in order to part take in it. It’s basically an app where you can do call in radio sessions and then it deletes everything afterwards. I found it because of a Guardian article about its sudden popularity in China, but it has been around for a while and has already become quite problematic (Elon Musk is a fan).

I started connecting some dots in my head after reading this, because it was only last week that someone I was zooming with mentioned that they sometimes hung out in “online libraries”. These online libraries are literally just people studying in a zoom call together. These online libraries, Clubhouse and my sister’s latest obsessions of minecraft streamers and late night discord games all take place in virtual spaces, but live ones. Not like Reddit or Twitter, even though these can be consumed at some speed you still need to scroll and read to get through everything. But these new(-ish) spaces use audio and video. It seems less filtered and also less monitored.

So I did some googling and sure enough I found a MIT press article that talks exactly about how we might be moving back to using our phones for audio purposes. This is great news for me as this means only more technological advancements in audio text recording. Now to only makes sure my serves don’t fill up with White supremacists and/or very annoying misogynistic Elon Musk types.

OHD_BLG_0081 The History of Ideas:

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An Introduction to the United Nations Intellectual History Project

by Louis Emmerij

First published in 2005 this article briefly explains the United Nations Intellectual History Project which involved documenting the history of ideas at the UN through archival work and oral history.

The project took a broad approach to ideas looking to “explain the origins of ideas; trace their trajectories within the institutions, scholarship, or discourse; and, in some cases, certainly in ours, evaluate the impact of ideas on policy and action.” I find this great because what they have done is explore the process of ideas instead of just the final idea. In this project they put value on process because as they say “ideas are rarely totally new. They do not come out of the blue.”

Absolutely 10 out of out 10 on the project front however this project, like many, stumbles over the archive. The UN archives sound like a total mess which is not surprising but simultaneously terrifying. And considering they claimed this project to be about “forward-looking history” their outputs were a series of books and 75 oral history testimonies which are meant to be found at www.unhistory.org (which as you might have guessed does not work).

OHD_BLG_0087 Design Thinking Sprint report – 03/02/21

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I did a mini design sprint today. It was really fun to do something design-y after such a long time. It was about data and data collection. At the beginning the workshop lead showed us different data collection tools, including ‘My Activity’ page on my Google account. On this page I could see what they had been tracking but I also saw how I could turn them off or at least ‘pause’ them. This makes me think that they can unpause them at some point like how your bluetooth automatically switches on all the time.

During this mini design sprint we were challenged to design the app for Newcastle University, which is something I had already done for the university across the road during MDI. The end product my team came up with was a personalised data set report.

The main aim of the personalised data set report was to make the data less passive. We found that the way the data was presented in an example version of the app was flat and not very informative, so we wanted the information to be more personalised. The idea of having the data set report was because I asked the others if they would actually look at this information every day if they had access to it? The answer was no, they won’t look at it every day, but they might if one, it wasn’t constant and two, if it was personalised. So we made the personalised data set report.

This way the information can be condensed and the user can get a better overview of their data over a certain period of time, instead of being bombarded with information constantly. The second thing we did was make the data less passive by getting the user to respond to it. For example, the user could put in targets in response to the data set or they could tweak their recommendations to get the app to push for a different genre of event.

The lead was very happy with our idea.

My big problem with data collection is that one, it’s sneaky, two, it’s too much and three, I don’t have easy access to it. Basically you can boiling these three points down to one – data collection is not user friendly. Firstly, the user is often unaware of it because it is hidden in long ass terms and conditions. Secondly, the shear quantity of data mined off one person makes it impossible for that same person to look through it and digest it. And lastly, the user does not have access to it or at least the access is hidden and complicated. I need to read up on the freedom of information act…

I just realised this is the exact point that guy tried to make to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook in the Great Hack and real life obviously.

BTW did you know that there is an online library which you can log onto and sit in a virtual library? I need to know where to find it.

OHD_BLG_0089 Reading Group – 19/01/2021

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TOPIC: Oral history training and teaching

Papers read:

“National Education Meets Critical Pedagogy: Teaching Oral History in Turkey” by Leyla Neyzi

“Is Half a Loaf Better than None? Reflections on Oral History Workshops” by Lu Ann Jones

“Embracing the Mess: Reflections on Untidy Oral History Pedagogy” by Anna Sheftel

Interesting talk about reflection and critical thinking about the process of teaching and training oral history.

Teaching .v. Training

The central debate was about training and teaching oral history. The ‘half a loaf’ paper wondered if we distilled oral history too much and whether squishing oral history into a couple hours doesn’t allow for the participants to get into the nitty gritty of it all. Where teaching oral history involves papers, philosophy and critical thinking, training is far more practical. Someone compared training to learning to drive. You learn the basics, then you pass your test and then you only really learn how to drive properly afterwards. How you learn the basics can also be questioned as the majority of training happens in groups and so people often don’t get the chance for any one-to-one work, which can be extremely valuable.

I love a good tool box

Is it ethically OK to ‘train’ people for a couple of hours and then declare them ready to interview or design?

The big thing I took from it all was this parallel between oral history training and the various ‘tools’ and ‘systems’ the design industry offers. These mass produced ideas that are often not tailored to the needs of the situation. This tailoring is offer better through teaching and more time. As Natascha Jen says design is not just a step by step process its a mindset. You cannot teach people a mind set in two days.

But can you give them the tools to create a mindset for oral historys?

Are we too practically focused?

The conclusion was that there was a lack of reflection on the processes used to train people in oral history.

I wrote this many many days later because I have been surprisingly busy, which is why this is rather uninspiring.

OHD_BLG_0093 Oral History ➡️ Design

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My masters in Multidisciplinary Innovation (MDI) taught me how design and its practices can be used in any field in order to create innovative solutions to complex problems. I believe that during this PhD I will use these techniques to help create a solution to the problem of unused oral history archives. This particular flow of knowledge I am completely aware of, however now I would like to discuss the reverse. How can oral history, its practices and its archives influence the world of design?

Let’s start with the reason oral history as a field exists. Oral history interviews are there to capture the history that is not contained within historical documents or objects. These histories often come from those whose voices have been deemed ‘unimportant’ by those more powerful in our society. It could be said that the work oral historians do is an attempt to equalise our history. However, oral histories, unlike more static historical objects and documents, are created in complex networks of politics, cultures, societies, power dynamics and are heavily influenced by time: past, present and future. Some oral histories take on mythological or legendary forms and are not necessarily sources of truth, but they do capture fundamentally human experiences that cannot be distilled into an object.

But how can this help the design world I hear you ask? Well, currently the design world is going through a bit of an ethical crisis. Ventures that started out as positive ways to help the world have brought us housing crises (AirBnB), blocked highways (Uber), crumbling democracy (social media etc.), higher suicide rates (social media), and even genocide (look at Facebook’s influence in Myanmar.) It’s all a big oopsie and demands A LOT of reflection. Why did this go wrong? How did this go wrong? What happened? Have we seen this before? How can we stop this from happening again?

We did a lot of reflection during MDI, but we also didn’t do enough. One, at the time we never shared any of our own reflections with the group and two, we now cannot revisit any of these reflections or the outcomes of our real life projects because they weren’t archived. The only documents I can access is my own reflective essays and a handful of files related to the projects, most of which solely document the final outcomes. This results in me only being able to see my own point of view and no process. Post it notes in the bin, hard drives no longer shared and more silence than when we were working in the same room. So what do we do if one of our old clients came to us asking how we got to the final report? Or after having implemented one of our designs are now experiencing a problem which they feel we should solve? Did we foresee it ? What are we going to do about it? I don’t know ask the others. It’s not my problem.

Now imagine this but on a global scale in a trillion dollar industry with millions of people (a relatively small proportion of the world) and very little regulation. And I am not just talking about Silicone Valley for once, but every global institution in the world. My supervisor told me that the World Trade Organisation once came to him asking for his help in setting up an oral history archive. The reason they needed this oral history archive was because they had all these trade agreements but everyone that had worked on them had retired and taken their work with them. They had the final outcome but not the process. Zero documentation of how they got there. Post it notes in the bin. They eventually did complete the oral history project but then did not have the documents to back these oral histories up because post it notes GO IN THE BIN. Whoops.

So, how did we get here?

In order to answer this question you need to be able to look back and see a fuller picture than your own point of view. We do this by not doing what the World Trade Organisation and MDI 2018/19 did. We create a collateral archive made of our post-it notes, digital files, emails etc. and we talk. We then put the collateral archive and the recordings of us talking together in one place. The reason we cannot rely solely on the collateral archive is because, as I said previously the documents cannot encompass the human experience to the extend that oral histories can. Also, not everything is written down some things will be exclusively agreed on verbally so the oral interview should (hopefully) fill in some of the blanks.

Once all this documentation has come together it needs to be made accessible to EVERYONE (with probably some exceptions.) This has two outcomes, firstly, it answers the question how we got here. People can analyse and reflect on the process in complete transparency. When something goes wrong we can look back and work out why. And secondly, in the case of design we now have a fantastic bank of ideas, a back catalogue of loose ends and unpursued trails of thought. Setting such a bank is already being examined in the field of design. Kees Dorst collaborated with the Law department at his university (I think) because he wanted to see how the Law department was able to access previous cases to help the present cases.

“Design […] seems to have no systematic way of dealing with memory at all” – Dorst, Frame Creation and Design in the Expanded Field p.24

In conclusion, people are increasingly aware that they need to capture their process in a constructive and archivable manner. Which is something I highly encourage for ethical reasons but also because archives are cool and you can find cool stuff in them. I am going to integrate this trail of thought into my PhD by being active in the creation of my collateral archive and also suggesting oral history interviews to be taken from all those involved.

(There is another reason why I would like to take oral history interviews of those involved, which hopefully is made clear in the ethics section of the site)

I hope that by integrating oral history into the design process it will push design into a more ethical space.

OHD_BLG_0094 The Abstract Archive and the Material Archive

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Archives Nationales, Paris 2004, photographer: Patrick Tourneboeuf

Look at this picture. [you can no longer look at this picture. I tried to link the picture in but then the image came up. I found this funny, so I am keeping]

Look at this archive with all its documents carefully organised and safe. It looks untouched and tidy. Perfect preservation. This images embodies what Ariella Azoulay calls ‘the abstract archive’ in her piece Archive. ‘The abstract archive’ refers to a place devoid of time, politics and humans and embodies the Hegelian concept of ‘Aufhebung’ – simultaneously preserving and canceling. This archive is perfect, but it also does not exist. Instead we have what Azoulay calls ‘material archives’. Archives full of politics and complex systems of power. Who can access the archive? What can be archive? What should not be archive? Who categorises the archive?

I like either of these archives. One of them is super boring and the other can be used as a tool for oppression. I want a fluid archive. An archive that is constantly changing and always questions authority. But isn’t complete chaos, like the internet where everyone can upload anything and also access everything (except in China and North Korea). And where the chaos has to be navigated by algorithms created by unelected power hunger figures (mostly white men) that push certain things to front depending on how much the pay. No not that. Something nicer.

Quick note: I actually wanted to write about back at the beginning of October when I zoomed into the first NYU talk but I kept putting it off because I wanted to write ‘properly’ about it. I think that I need to get into the habit of writing things straight away in order for this website to work as a journey of my work.

OHD_BLG_0096 The little tiny matter of ethics

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Back during my MDI times I read a Buzzfeed that led me to the website Ruined By Design. It is the website for the book ruined by design by Mike Monteiro, which at the time I did not buy because the sample chapter was enough for whatever essay I was writing at the time. However as the start of my PhD draws ever closer I decided that it probably would be a good idea to read the whole thing. So I order the rather expensive zine and paid for it to be shipped all the way from America.

The hilariously designed anti-design book is on the whole very angry. Not too surprising as currently there are so many ex-silicone valley people speaking out against the designing happening in the valley (see the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.) But this one is a particularly feisty.

However, I like it. I like it a lot.

It starts with Monteiro discussing how designers need something like the Hippocratic oath because their work has such a huge impact on society. Fabulously, he comes up with his own code of ethics for designers. He, like any good designer, happily invites and encourages people to edit, improve and update.

So I think I am going to do it. I am going to put the code of ethics up on here and work out what I need to do in order to meet the code. I am not going to do it now though because it’s dinner time!

OHD_BLG_0098 Workshop: Oral History and COVID 19

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A zoom workshop on 27/10/20.

The oral historians are practiced in interviewing. They have methods and set ups that THEY prefer when they are in the interviewing space. But those being interviewed are often completely new to this world. The interviewing space belongs to both parties equally. Or at least it should. Would then not be more beneficial to build the interviewing space together? Factors like environment and technology can be plan and decided on together, which hopefully will result in an interviewing space that is safe and comfortable for both parties to share openly (with minimal technological hiccups). This idea of building the interview space before the interview works together with another idea that was touched on – follow up chats. The de-assembling of the interview space is just as important as the assembling of the space. It helps develop the since of ownership over personal histories that oral history holds in such high regard.

The majority of the conversation was about how to conduct interviews at distance and the pros and cons of technologies necessary for this venture. One of the things I have concluded from this particular topic is that we talk about technology and people’s literacy in technology in very simplified terms. It’s things like “Older people cannot use Zoom” “I think people are less comfortable with screens” “I think people talk better over the phone” etc. What ‘people’ want differs a lot, however there was one thing people did agree on, that they (the interviewers and oral historians) preferred to do face-to-face interviews because it was more – fun. So, the ‘people’ have a diverse sets of needs but interviewers know exactly what they want, which is not really surprising as one person pointed out because the interviewers have done this many times where as the ‘people’ aka the interviewees probably have never been in a situation like this before.

The building of interview spaces allows the interviewer to explore different methods of interviewing, like walking interviews where the interviewee is able to immerse themselves into the historically relevant environment. Or using alternative recording methods like cassettes simply because the interviewee knows how these work. It does require viewing recording as not something that solely holds content but as an artefact/object with a physical history, that reveals the context of its creation. After all oral history is history created in the present

Oral history as a post-COVID tool

The idea of using oral history for political reasons is something I have talked about a lot. Unsurprisingly it the idea that it could be used as a tool for rebuilding relations after COVID came up several times. I think the key thing oral history can offer a rebuilding world is the principle of listening. People just need to listen. (But as oral history archives prove its REALLY hard to do that sometimes.)

OHD_BLG_0101 Reading Group – 20/10/20

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TOPIC: Oral history and the environment

Papers read:

“Drought, Endurance and ‘The Way Things Were’: The Lived Experience of Climate and Climate Change in the Mallee” by Deb Anderson

“Bringing a Hidden Pond to Public Attention: Increasing Impact through Digital Tools” by Anne Valk and Holly Ewald

Overall good, fun papers that everyone agreed with.

Oral history for legislation

Because the topic was environment, the oral history projects outlined in the papers were great examples of how oral history could feed into legislation. The paper by Anderson illustrated how the human experience of climate change makes the issue more tangible for people. Instead of the climate change just being stats and numbers. Valk and Ewald’s project re-engages people with nature but the sustainability and legacy of the project will show its true power.

The future is always better

The writers of the papers and the oral historians in the group seemed to suggest that it is often the case that people talk about the future in a positive sense. It is as if the nostalgia of the past gives people hope for a better future. Which in the case of climate change is remarkable but human’s are strangely optimistic.

Who don’t we interview

I keep finding cases where people wonder about why we do not interview certain people. Oral history is meant to “represent the voice of the people” yet there are still many voices left out. For example in Anderson’s paper she only interviews people who are still in the Mallee and not those who left the Mallee because of the trouble climate change was causes. Similarly I wondered during the reading group on #BLM why people hadn’t interviewed the people who would have been affected by the activism of those who had been interviewed.

It was brought up during the session that there is a lack of oral history projects based on our relationship with nature. We seem very obsessed and busy with industry but less so with nature. Both the papers have projects that are based in the countries where there were indigenous people before the europeans came. These indigenous must have had a relationship with the land before the people being interview and in some cases stories about the nature and land might have been passed down over generations. Why aren’t we recording those.

And finally America is doing something better than us…?

No, not messing up their democracy. But grass roots community oral history projects are more common in America than here. Let’s change that!

OHD_BLG_0102 DIGITAL FORAYS: ARCHIVES & ACTIVATION // ARTISTS AND ACCESS

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with Asunción Molinos Gordo (Artist), Mohammad Shawky Hassan (Artist), Diana Allan (McGill University), & Discussant Helga Tawil-Souri (NYU).
In partnership with ArteEast & the Arab American National Museum) 15/10/20

At the start of the talk someone mentioned that they missed the mingling after a talks. Like the coffee houses Steven Johnson talks about.

Then I thought about whether it would be interesting to map these post talk chats by mic-ing people up and tracking their movements and interactions. \

Re-mixing

Just like the previous talk this was mainly about archival work concerning the middle east. Because of this everything (understandably) is coated in this layer of reclaiming ones history. This in combination with artists leads to a re-mixing of archives, putting a new lens on it. In some circumstances this means creating a whole new story. Using bits from the archive and remixing them to such a degree that a (maybe not completely factual) story is created. However the factual accuracy of the story does not really matter. These works are made in the freedom of the artistic space and their main aim is to become some thing that stands against the state archive and tell the story of a minority.

In one particular case during the talk the person was using archive footage from the British Library that had such strict copyright laws that she had to do extensive manipulation in order to even be able to make a film. This brought a lot of frustration since the footage is British colonial propaganda.

This re-mixing and manipulating of state archives in order to create something for a minority reminded me of the streetwear exhibition that I went to in Rotterdam. I see parallels between the practice of mixing and matching clothing the belonged to an elite with tracksuits and sportswear (among other things) order to create this own culture and what these artists create using archival footage. (Especially when you look at issues of copyright.)

In addition to streetwear the discussant Helga Tawil-Souri brought up Dada and how they used collage in order to make sense of a world increasingly filled with information. What the Dada-ist would have made of this age I do not know.

The “dead” .v. “alive”

There was a lot of discussion around resolute-ness of archiving something. By archiving something are you saying that it’s over? Then when do you start archiving a revolution? And when you archive something are you then also “creating” things to not be archived? Is it dead when you archive something? Should it be dead? Do we kill it when we archive it? Does an archive work best when it is alive? When the stories live in the people? Does an archive need a community? Even if they are subject to legend and myth? Why do consider an object truth when some one still has to label the object?

Decentralised Archives

The questions asked in “dead” .v. “alive” are nearly all subject to power structures. Whoever is in charge of the archive can allow new stories to be created or they can kill it, keeping it in its hibernated state. Like copyright. After all “history is written by the winners”.

But how do we break down these power structures?

A lot of people are using social media and other digital platforms but as we slowly realising now that just moves the power over the archive from the state to unelected billionaires (not ideal).

Diana Allan mentioned the idea of exiled archives. Archives created by refugees and those that move around the globe. This might allow the creation of archives that aren’t chained to any state. However this then brings up the issue with copyright and privacy.

Obviously the artists taking part in this talk also challenge the power structures by remixing. But the archives need to be open to this happening. Maybe having regular artist in residence.

OHD_BLG_0107 DIGITAL FORAYS: ARCHIVES & ACTIVATION // PLATFORMS AND PUBLICS

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With Kristine Khouri (Arab Image Foundation), Yazan Kopty (Imagining the Holy), Sana Yazigi (Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution) & Discussant Laila Shereen Sakr (UCSB). 08/10/20

This talk was recommend to me by Joe because he is on the mailing list for talks at NYU. He joined me for the zoom (obviously it had to be a zoom).

The talk was interesting and generally it was nice to attend a talk again even though it was in my living room. Many different topics were discussed but there was less discussion around digital archives and the consequences of digitising. This was a little disappointing although not surprising, because as you often get with talks the speakers will always bring the conversation to their research. And who can blame them, we all suffer from ‘the researcher’s lens’ where you view the world completely through what you are thinking about. However, during this talk it meant less talking about the digital and more talking about post colonialism and decolonising archives, which is still very interesting. And not surprising as the talk was organised by middle eastern studies at NYU.

Anyway what follows is some of the things I picked up on during the talk.

Archive as collateral

Something that was briefly brought up in the talk was the idea of a collateral archive. In other words, an archive that exist because at the end of a project you realised that you had enough stuff to make an archive. If you take this term in its broadest sense everyone has a collateral archive: diaries, planners, notes, shopping lists etc. All of these can make up an archive of your life. The same can be said for any project. If we take the Hand Of school summer project, NTSW then you could very easily create an archive from the kids sketchbooks to the notes of the planning meetings. Every thing can be archived.

But there are some questions to be asked, one: should it archive in the first place, and two, if so how should it be archived? Now the first question is a big one and one I will probably revisit several times. The second question was triggered because in the talk one of the speakers had set up a completely new archive because they looked at all the stuff they had collected for their project and decided that they might as well make a archive, hence collateral archive. So should they have made a completely new archive? Or should they have added to an existing one? Or should have created it but then have it live in a network of other collateral archives?

Another big question is whether people should think about their collateral archive before they start a project or after? Should there be a software that allows for easy archiving as a project progresses? I guess it is often the case that you don’t know what you are going to collect until it has been collected. But then again the internet has led to an increase in document production, so maybe we need to start preparing more for an influx of stuff in order to avoid a desktop soup of documents.

The ‘home’ of History

As I previously said the talk was arranged by the school of middle eastern studies, hence the steering of the conversation towards decolonisation. Unsurprisingly the topic of where documents should be stored came up. This was mostly concerning Yazan Kopfy work on Palestine. He is working on gaining more information on photos of Palestine that are stored in the national geographic archive (one hell of a collateral archive by the way, as they were not initially stored there for archiving proposes but as leftover stuff from articles. Which they were thinking of throwing away somewhere in the 1980s as a clearing out exercise.) Many of these photos only state who took the photo and not who is in the picture or any wider cultural information. So he has started to flesh out this information. What was interesting was his comment that people outside of Palestine view it as the holy land when in Palestine it is first and foremost viewed as home. So where do you store photographs taken through the (literal) lens of a coloniser? And how does this work in the digital context? Because even if there is a digital copy there is also a physical copy somewhere.

EXTRA NOTE: this is also where Joe mentioned ‘Nice White Parents’ and how this might be another case where diversity and decolonising is in fact benefiting the white-western academic world more than the people of Palestine.

The Scale of the Digital

There were three main speakers Kristine Khouri, Yazan Kopfy and Sana Yazigi. All three had a very different approach to digital archiving.

On side of the scale I am going to put Khouri, whose project was ‘Past Disquiet’, which she described to be like a website in an exhibition space. She seemed to be slightly fearful of algorithms and digital space. On the other end of the scale Kopfy, who used instagram to collect information on his pictures. Interestingly he struggled to get information on images from the 1920s and 30s, but got lots on photos from the 1970s. I feel this really shows the age of instagram users. And in the middle of the scale I will place Yazigi, who created the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, a rather epic website, which is kept update. The only thing I worry about is the actual user friendliness of it.

To me this wide range of approaches to the digital is typical of our time. There are those who embrace it and those who are fearful of it. Either way there are questions to be asked around big data, data rot and the environment. Because all these digital things are stored on servers which use a lot of energy. Sadly this was not fully disgusted which I do wish they had done.

Hauntings

Nearer to the end of the talk Kristine Khouri started talking about hauntings in the archive. An idea that Joe could get behind if it was art but not necessarily if it was academic. But the idea of ghost and hauntings I do not think is too much of a far fetch idea since going through an archive can be like going through someone’s knicker drawer. I think this is especially true with oral histories because you are listening to the person’s voice. There is a responsibility attached to going through people’s archives. Maybe an increased awareness of people’s presence when researching will deliver a more ethical research or an awareness of their intentions or maybe even warnings about the future.

OHD_BLG_0109 Reading Group 22/09/2020

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The topic of this reading group was trauma and oral history. The two pieces read were: “Oral History and Trauma: Experiences of sexualised violence under National Socialist persecution” by Helga Amesberger (Austrain) and “Oral history – ‘More dangerous than therapy’ ?: Interviewers’ reflections on recording traumatic or taboo issues” by Wendy Rickhard (who did Creature Comforts).

Event .v. People

A big issue in interviewing people about traumatising events is that you have this tension between the interviewee’s whole life and that key event. Both parties involved come together because of this event but the life of the interviewee is bigger than the single event. Their opinion of the event might have changed over the years and might still change even after the interviews, making the interviews also a single event in that person’s life.

There is also the issue between the traumatising event and the trauma that the person lives with because of the event. On top of that the trauma that these people live with might change and be manipulated by other things in their life and wider society. In the examples in the texts the traumatic events are layered between the taboo of sexual harassment. Which brings me on to the second point.

TABOO!

Taboo topics can become a bit of an obstacle for oral historians, as was discussed during the reading group. When talking about uncomfortable topics you could walking into the situation where you could reenforce the taboo further. By interviewing a person about a taboo subject you are also highlighting it, which is often considered positive however it has the possibility of backfiring. In addition when the interviews are done and the contents is released into the world no longer have control over how people react to the taboo subject.

The Transcribing Problem

This was a fascinating thing that came up in the discussion. It seemed that nearly everyone had experience of having the heaviness of the conversations hit them when they were transcribing the interviews. In fact Graham even said that he gives his transcribers a heads up that they do not have to finish it if they are not comfortable with it. Clearly the re-listening of the interviews opens up this space of realisation of the heaviness of the topic. I just found this to be a very interesting problem everyone was experiencing.

Access

Now this is the part most relevant to my work: what do we do with the tapes? The tapes can offer a whole bunch of problems. Lets say the tapes are available in an archive which can be accessed by anyone and some random person listens to them, what could happen? Well the recording could be taken completely out of context (like an old tweet) and manipulated into something else. The people were experts in their topic and knew exactly what they were talking about but if anyone can access it the recording they might not actually understand what is being said. Having the recordings open to complete interpretation could have extremely damaging consequences.

This only becomes a bigger problem when you make access to these tapes easier like what I want to do. This mostly happens through the use of technology which currently does not have a good reputation in protecting the users.

To end this access issue the group pondered on whether the tapes should be archived at all, only leaving behind the research done by the expert. This protects those who took part in the interview but also leaves a slight emptiness. (but that might mean because then my whole PhD would be pointless.) Maybe the question is not how should we archive but what we should archive.

And finally…

My favourite quote had to be from Rickhard’s text:

“You need to have money to be ethical”

That truly sums up everything. Because if there is anything that I have worked out about oral history is that it is in a constant battle between capturing an ongoing saga and permanent nature of capturing itself.

OHD_BLG_0110 Reading group – 21/07/2020

Articles read:

Mobilising memory: The case of Iraqi Christian diaspora in England by Niveen Kassen and Beyond Individual/ Collective Memory: Women’s Transactive Memories of Food, Family and Conflict by Graham Smith

Kassen’s work was read in order to give feedback to her and Smith’s work was an appropriate partner for the work.

Kassen like me is not from an oral history background and it was clear that because of this some people struggled seeing the work as an oral history paper. It had very little oral history references and Kassen had only conducted group interviews, which is not the clubs favourite. To her, her study was a good opportunity for an oral history project. But it did not stick to the rules. However it started the conversation around one of my favourite oral history topics – Group .v. Individual interviewing.

Kassem’s work, I found illustrated the power of group interviews. The project was based around the collective trauma that the Iraqi Chirstians had experienced and how they, through memory and storytelling were using this to create an identity. These stories and memories are used to write the narrative of remembrance. The group decides how these stories need to remember, which is why oral historians do not always agree with this group method. The group interviews are heavily influenced by performance and group pressure and therefore the stories told are not always true. But the stories are still important because it is what the group wants to tell. It’s their identity.

However, there are pitfalls here. As Graham pointed out a group can start to create a mono-memory. He used the example of the war in Britain being viewed as a moment of British excellence, due to the fact that those still alive were probably young at the time and therefore had more fun than the older generation (especially in the case of women.) We, therefore, need to keep this collective memory in check, keep it updated, and also be reminded of the stories told at the beginning of the memory by those who were closer to the reality.

This however has to happen in all cases of oral history interviews as both a single person or a group cannot represent a whole people.

P.S.

It is important to note that the experience of group interviews is probably more fun and community building than individual interviews. It might be slow but it is more fun.

OHD_BLG_0111 #BLM

There is a lot say about this topic but mostly there is a lot to ask. For some #BLM is a time to fight and for others, it is time to reflect and review.

This reflection can been seen in the removing of statues and renaming of streets or in the case of my dad the renaming of inappropriate climbing routes. If I look at this from the point of view of someone who is interested in archives and the preservation of history, I feel this moment in history proves how history is not static. And it shows that how we tell history needs to be constantly updated. This includes archives. I remembering hearing somewhere that people struggle to find black history in archives after the mid 20th century because the words used to catatorgise the documents are not words we use today.

What I am hopefully am going to explore during this PhD is to how do we set up archives that allow this reviewing of history to happen easily and inclusively. Rather than making history a battle ground of identity it becomes the educational resource that it should be.

On the 16th June I joined the oral history reading group. We had been given two papers to read that were written in the 1980s and only one was written by a black person.

The first paper was by Kim Lacy Rogers called ‘Memory, Struggle, and Power: On Interviewing Political Activists” published 1987. In the paper Rogers reviews her work on interviewing activists, both black and white, who were involved in civil rights in New Orleans in the 1960s.

The second paper was by Donald Hinds called “The ‘Island’ of Brixton”. It was a portrait of Brixton in the 1960s.

The discussion was mainly about how you interview activists when they are people who are aware of their position in history. What seemed odd to me was that people were not interviewing the people who were affected by the activism. If we are looking a text about activism in the 1960s written in the 1980s, yet the world it talks about could easily be the current one, then why aren’t we asking why things haven’t changed? What is their legacy? Do we need more revisiting of movements and more reviewing?

The other main topic was co-analysis, co-creation and other co-activities that should occur in order to create a more equal representation of the situation when it comes to race. The biggest issue being that there are not many people of colour in oral history yet there are plenty oral history recordings on the topics. Which as always are stuck in the archives.

I found it tragic that we were a group of white people who could only dig up two papers on the black oral history from the 1980s. This situation proves that a review of how we take oral histories and how we set up the archives is desperately needed.