The Meanings and Methods of the Construction of People’s Everyday Life Histories Archives

Abstract

This paper aims to describe the meanings and methods of the construction of archives concerning people’s everyday life histories with the case of Group for the People without history. It seems to be necessary to have a common ground for the researchers who are interested in so-called microhistoric approaches in order to do interdisciplinary studies, and it would be archives preserving various kinds of data from various research sites. The construction of archives in Group for the People without History will be a good example for such a project even though the archives are still being under construction.<BR> Group for the People without History has been working for about three years to collect raw data on people’s life histories, and constructing archives to preserve those data. However, the archives are different from conventional archives in pursuing open archives, which means that the archives are open to informants as well as researchers. It is the main characteristics of the archives, which means that the principle of the archives is toward a process-oriented activity.<BR> Each datum is classified according to its own class number and stored in boxes classified on the basis of media. Each datum has also metadata for the construction of future digital archives. The class numbers are made by the archival committee of the Group. and the metadata format is adapted from the Doublin Core.<BR> However. there are some problems to be solved in the construction of the archives. First. how can we define the role of archivists in this kind of archives? Traditionally. archivists are regarded as archival managers. But in the archives of the Group requires archivists to be record managers as well as researchers. The best solution of the problem at this moment is to educate archival techniques to researchers. Secondly, we have to define archival units of data which have the formats of texts and moving pictures. To preserve the vividness and the richness of the data. each datum should be divided into smaller units called paragraphs or sequences. It may be time-consuming and costly task, but it will be solved if we move to digital archives. The third problem is how to produce a classification system on the basis of indigenous knowledge in order to make the archives more accessible. We need to adopt the method developed by cognitive anthropologists, folk taxonomy. Though it is not easy to apply the method to such a big domain called people’s everyday life histories, it would not be impossible if we subcategorize it into smaller domains.<BR> From the review of the archives of the Group for the People without History, it goes without saying that a construction of archives will provide the researcher of microhistory with a good common ground to communicate one another. Furthermore, the archives will be a source of culture contents, and stimulate the development of culture industries and fulfill popular desires.