Collaboration in the Archive: Finding, Shaping, and Disseminating Stories from a Missionary Writer's Network

Abstract

Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Ann Ellis Pullen's Nellie Arnott Writings on Angola, 19051913: Missionary Narratives Linking Africa and America recently earned Honorable Mention for SSAWW Edition Award, which was established to honor excellence recovery of American women writers. A familiar portrait of archival research depicts a lonely task performed quiet, musty spaces, as solitary researcher seeks to commune with past while interpreting materials cataloged long ago by some unnamed, unseen collector. For instance, Jill Lepore's romantic and compelling account of Historians Who Love Too Much, an opening image positions scholar-author sitting alone in crisply air-conditioned Special Collections reading room at Amherst College Library, stroking Noah Webster's hair, with sole relationship highlighted that between a single scholar and her long-dead subject (129). In fact, however, as our own shared experiences attest, most archival scholarship is actually quite collaborative. Accordingly, this essay we revisit multiple dimensions of collaboration involved our critical edition of Nellie Arnott's Writings on Angola, 1905-1913 and still supporting our ongoing work on Arnott's authorship within context of larger cultural movements. Undergirding this analysis are contributions from a growing chorus of voices describing social nature of archival studies, including several essay collections and earlier accounts published Legacy. (1) By joining such reports, we hope to encourage others who are beginning archival projects to embrace collaboration as a powerful strategy for recovering women writers of past. Taking a self-consciously feminist collaborative approach has been particularly appropriate for studying Arnott, since she was herself embedded a highly gendered cooperative enterprise through service as a Congregational missionary Angola (then Portuguese West Africa) for American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (AscFm). Arnott was part of a network of women, at home and abroad, participating a worldwide movement. Thus, her personal archive, scattered across disparate spaces and contained a variety of textual forms, tells both a personal and a social story. Like research subjects recommended Legacy's 2002 Archive Survival Guide, Arnott would not be classified today as a famous figure, even though she was well known to niche readership of Congregational mission magazines. In line with pattern described by Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman and her coauthors Elizabeth Engelhardt, Frances Smith Foster, and Laura Micham, Arnott's story is more of interrelations and than of pioneering (232, 231), so recovering her writing affirms their premise that feminist scholars should resist research's traditional emphasis on the 'only' or 'first' their fields as too often reinscribing women's exclusion (231). Arnott's experiences follow that pattern, for to extent they are retrievable they offer a window into larger trends associated with whole groups of women. She was, a word, typical. Yet, ironically, very features that make Arnott an ideal representative writer, operating a broader social network, sometimes made it difficult for us to move forward with our first publishing project about her. Fortunately, we were able to counter those occasionally discouraging forces through collaboration, as has recently been urged by archival researchers such as Lisa Mas-trangelo and Barbara L'Eplattenier. (2) Our collaboration took different forms at progressive stages our research. Initially, finding our subject linked our own long-standing research partnership to a more serendipitous yet crucial connection with an experienced archival librarian. Then, digging deeper into our subject's personal past and its connections with institutional histories involved us as collaborators with other scholars, students, and members of Arnott's family. …