Tag Archives: COVID-19

OHD_BLG_0074 Archival Discoveries and Discussions – 25/02/21

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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_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_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.