Archival Objects Research Articles

Controlled Rummage Approaches for Bummock: Tennyson Research Centre

'Bummock: Tennyson Research Centre' is an artistic research project involving three artistic researchers: Andrew Bracey, Danica Maier and Sarah Bennett. A bummock is the unseen — submerged — part of an iceberg, and comprises the largest volume of ice, compared with the tip — which is visible above the surface of the water. Likewise, archives hold more items than are commonly viewed or accessed. In Bummock, we choose to bypass the catalogue to engage with materials directly, establishing a 'controlled rummage' method as an alternative approach to standard archive access practice. This iteration of the Bummock project explores, examines, and creates new artistic research from five years of working with the Tennyson Research Centre (TRC), Lincoln, UK. This exposition has been collaboratively authored by the three artistic researchers and is structured into two sections. The first, labelled the 'controlled section', serves to introduce the project and its core concerns. The second, referred to as the 'rummage section', provides visitors with the opportunity to navigate their own path through the archival objects from the TRC and the artworks created. Within this section, individual reflections and critical discussions on three themes are presented: our past experiences working with archives, the research journey of the project, and potential future directions stemming from our research. The exposition concludes with a collective summary of findings and a film documenting the project. The contribution of this exposition is twofold: first, to unveil and disseminate the artistic research associated with the project, and second, to identify the key benefits that artists can bring to the archive by employing the 'controlled rummage' approach. The intention is to establish a framework that facilitates future use by other archive users. <style> /* rules to make button only show up in META */ .download-accessible { display:none; } .meta-right-col .download-accessible { display: inline-block; padding: 9px; margin-bottom:25px; border: 1px solid black; background-color:white; } </style> <a class="download-accessible" href="/profile/download-media?work=2936353&file=2936358" title="This accessible PDF is a derivative of the original which it is meant to support and not replace.">Download Accessible PDF</a>

Unsettling Borders of Archives: Activating the Audiovisual Heritage of the Turkish Community in the Netherlands

This article explores issues with archival preservation and access in the case of the audiovisual heritage of migrant communities, which defies hegemonic categories of nation, race, ethnicity, language. As such, although these communities are somewhat present in archives, they are marginalised and remain absent, silent, and dormant. Through two case studies of audiovisual representations of Turkish migrants from Dutch public archives, the article tackles possible ways to unravel such hegemonic categories, thereby reflecting the multiplicities and instabilities of migrant archival objects. It explores the pivotal role of community engagement for more inclusive archival practices that undermine its constitutive limits –– to work with archives against the archives.

Pandemic reflections on the Care and Control exhibition: refusals, contracts and publics

This article presents reflections on our pre-Covid-19 exhibition Care and Control, and our interdisciplinary collaboration between artist Alice Tatton Brown and social scientists Maud Perrier and Junko Yamashita. The reflections expand current feminist debates about self-care and collective care by centring the importance of public space, refusals and contracts. Care and Control was designed as both an exhibition and a meeting place, created through our ongoing collaboration. It took place in a shopping centre in Bristol (UK) in June 2019. The exhibition was a collage of feminist archival objects and print, contemporary installation and community engagement. Care and Control began broadly as an experiment to seek out alternatives to an individualist approach to self-care, by researching how Women's Liberation Activists practised self-care and collective care beyond the household, and within protest, friendship and public space. In this article, we make a methodological contribution to feminist discussions of collective care by showing how our strategy of a) making a public exhibition and b) writing a Contract of Care is a significant technique for enacting some of the promise of Audre Lorde’s ‘self-care as warfare’. We show how Care and Control, drawing from the legacy of the Women's Liberation Movement, generated resources for countering definitions of self-care that predominate. Reflecting on how the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated classed, racialised and gendered divisions in reproductive labour, our article suggests that self-care and collective care need to be conceptualised drawing on social reproduction.

Metadata as imaginary demands: Exploring metadata markets in digital heritage with speculative design

AbstractCultural heritage practices is formed by different socio‐technical regimes. Today, it is increasingly formed by the regime of commodification, expressed in terms like interoperability and reuse. This signifies a shift from a regime of the authentic object where the value is in the unique object positioned in a particular institutional context. To be able to exploit cultural heritage items on digital markets detached from their position in their original context, large resources are needed to furnish the items with metadata. In this metadata production, the regime of the institution as guarantor for the objects' authenticity, clash with the regime of aggregated trust, where authenticity is confirmed by aggregating data from multiple producers. This article argue that such rich contextual information is what creates long‐term value for digital archival objects. In this speculative design project focusing humanities research needs, I therefore turn the attention to the metadata producers. Taking the idea of metadata as a commodity to its peak, I show how we can interpret metadata as a supply to meet imaginary demands. By looking at metadata as imaginary demands we can begin to see the contours of the diverse conceptual models the archives carry.

Performing Fat Liberation: Pretty Porky and Pissed Off’s Affective Politics and Archive

This article uses collaborative auto/ethnography to explore the circulation and potentiality of affect in the live performances and archive of Pretty Porky and Pissed Off (PPPOd), a Toronto-based queer fat activist performance art collective active during the late 1990s and mid-2000s. Drawing on video and audio recordings of five PPPOd performances alongside other performance ephemera and a series of conversations relating to these archival objects among the article’s three authors, we identify and theorize our affective responses to and situated recollections of these performances, both in their current form as archival objects and as historical live events. We argue that PPPOd’s archival objects/live performances disrupt the constellation of affects that constitute fat hate (e.g., fear, loathing, shame) and set in motion more affirmative affects (e.g., playfulness, pride, desire, love) that contribute to micro-worldings and prefigurative fat politics, as ephemeral as these might be. In capturing these fleeting moments of radical possibility, PPPOd’s activism and archive offer opportunities for touching and feeling a future where fat lives are more livable.

Anna Magdelana Bach’s Missing Thimble: Reflections on creative poetic process

Three artefacts thought to belong to Anna Magdalena Bach, soprano singer, harpsichordist (and second wife to Johann Sebastian)—ring, thimble and buckle—are mentioned in the Bach archive in Leipzig. Much uncertainty surrounds them; perhaps they have been ‘lost’, or were destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War, or perhaps they didn’t even actually belong to her. The uncertain status of the objects is emblematic of how poorly the knowledge about this ‘creative woman of accomplishment’ has been treated over the centuries, overshadowed by interest in, and information about, her eminent spouse. This has allowed authors to project their own views onto Anna Magdalena, in some instances leading to misrepresentations (Talle 2020), and even misappropriation by the Nazis (Yearsley 2019). However, as poetic biographer, it has also given me rich opportunity to imagine into her life. Anna Magdalena is one of the research subjects about whom I am writing poetic biographies, a project of restitution seeking to redress the omission of creative women of accomplishment from the historical record. This paper looks at the composition process I employed in writing about her thimble (one poem in a sequence), taking a quote from Susan Howe as its starting point which suggests that archival objects are ‘pre-articulate theatres’ (1985), positioning the archival object, even if missing, as a site for unfolding drama.

Undergraduate Learning and Research with Provenance Information

Objects in multiple formats can comprise both the subjects and the approach making up “material culture”: a mode of investigating and understanding culture. Some colleges and universities steward millions of objects in academic galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM institutions). Convergence among such information professionals has led to recent offerings of an undergraduate honors seminar around campus material culture which is the focus of analysis in this paper. Students in that setting interrogated and applied the concept of provenance in reflecting on their object-based interactions. We analyze three categories of provenance lessons from the students to inform future teaching: (1) an object’s origins and pathways, (2) what provenance is and helps people do, and (3) new storytelling contributions.

Connecting Repositories to one Integrated Domain

Connecting Repositories to one Integrated Domain

Present Pasts


 Viewing and contemplating archival objects and images provokes me—a female Australian settler artist—to imaginatively engage with and re-present stories of the past; pasts that resonate in the contemporary present. My focus over the last ten years has been to imagine and think within the historical records of the French Enlightenment voyages of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as led by the colonial governor, Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux and cartographer and naturalist, Nicolas Baudin. These voyages to Australia and the Pacific are situated within a dismembering discourse of Empire, exploration, ‘discovery’ and exoticism (Chevallier). A major impetus for their undertaking was given by the emerging discipline of the natural sciences, and accompanying shifts in European conceptions of humankind’s relation to the natural world; a prime objective was the gathering/taking/making of knowledge by observation, measurement and material collection. In 2020, following the 2019–20 summer of ferocious bushfires, and during a COVID-19 lockdown in Canberra amidst a global pandemic, my focus in practice turned to the endemic birds around me: local, heard, seen, treasured. What emerged was a renewed close-to-home response to the Baudin collecting raid of ‘exotic’ Australian species.

From Green Deal to Cultural Heritage: FAIR Digital Objects and European Common Data Spaces

From Green Deal to Cultural Heritage: FAIR Digital Objects and European Common Data Spaces

Exhibition curation as practice-as-research performance historiography: an incomplete story of audience experience

ABSTRACT Taking an interdisciplinary approach to information-led exhibitions focused on performance can be considered practice-as-research historiography if curation is engaged with as praxis. Approaching exhibition curation as research praxis is a knowledge-making process, reconfiguring exhibitions as far more than a ‘pathway to impact’ designed at securing a grant. In the curation of two linked exhibitions on nineteenth-century popular entertainments at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum and University of Bristol Theatre Collection, which were stunted due to COVID-19, I developed an argument for the shared ground of exhibitions and performance. If archival objects can perform, the exhibition space itself is a stage through which they communicate embodied meanings to audiences. I explore how exhibition curation generates different epistemologies to written research by putting museum studies, performance history, audience studies and performance practice-as-research in conversation. I demonstrate how museum studies could benefit from performance in developing epistemological arguments, and how performance studies can more significantly privilege the audience in the knowledge production process. I conclude my findings by discussing how planned activities and lessons learnt from these exhibitions could provide a blueprint for practitioners interested in using the exhibition form and format to conduct historically relational practice-research inquiries in conversation with audiences.

Lesbian Bars, Archival Media Bricolage and Research-Creation

This article reflects on the author’s research-creation project entitled After Hours Chez Madame Arthur as a speculative practice of archival media bricolage. After Hours was a multimedia installation returning to the 1970s lesbian bar Chez Madame Arthur mounted at the Centre Never Apart in summer 2019. Made possible by the support of co-researchers, community groups, technicians, research assistants and artists who share my fascination with local queer women’s history, After Hours restaged this storied bar deploying diverse archival media traces and period objects. This essay discusses some of the possibilities of research-creation and non-representational theory for lesbian, feminist, and queer historical projects. I explore the affordances of archival media traces for forging affective and erotic relationships between past and present, with a particular emphasis on presence, metonymy, storytelling, and space.

More Than a Memory: Introducing Undergraduate Students to Research and Writing Through Archival Objects

More Than a Memory: Introducing Undergraduate Students to Research and Writing Through Archival Objects

Preservation of Physical Objects in Video Game Archives

Preservation of Physical Objects in Video Game Archives

The Notion of "Research Data": Types and Kinds of Research Data in the Context of Data Management Practice

With the rapid development of the concept of Open Science, the quantitative growth of data obtained during the research, scientific attention to the practice of research data management (research data management) increases, which actualizes the definition of “research data” and identifying types of research data within the practice of their management, justification and coverage of the specifics of such data. The methodological tools of the study are based on the terminological method, the use of which was due to the need to identify relevant interpretations of the concept of “research data”, as well as analysis of repositories for data from various fields of science, indexed by re3data.org., in the general areas presented in the register, namely: descriptions of repositories, including information on the types of data deposited by scientists and data curators. The analysis made it possible to define research data as materials obtained and collected to substantiate the scientific results of research in any field and in any form: numerical, textual, computer code, etc., as well as to identify types of data specific to different branches of science, which, in turn, allowed us to conclude the existing data formats, the most common among both natural and human sciences: text, numerical and graphic formats. As a result of the analysis, it was found that research data can be considered textual, numerical, software, archival, graphic and other objects (files) that serve as the basis of the study and the factual basis for scientific conclusions in a particular field of science. It was found that the type of data directly depends on the nature of the study and the characteristics of the discipline or field of research.

Appraisal of documentary heritage objects value in scientific library, archives, museum: topical problems of theory and practice

The article is devoted to the topical problems of theory and practice of appraisal of documentary heritage objects value in scientific libraries, archives, museums taking into consideration functional and stock specifics of these institutions. Its goals and tasks, principles and axiological criteria are described. It is shown that the main goal of such appraisal is determining the place of documentary heritage objects as the objects of the appraisal in the system of cultural values of modern society, establishing the belonging of these objects to cultural heritage objects of world, national, regional, local significance. Appraisal of documentary heritage objects is analyzed as one of important areas of scientific and administrative activities which to a large extent ensures the functioning, improvement of information potential and accordingly the image of the library, archives, museum. The Ukrainian experience of the recent decades is highlighted in many aspects, namely: regulation, organization and appraising documentary heritage objects at the state, interdepartmental and departmental levels, at the level of the profile institution fund-holder. The features of the appraisal, the objects of which are archival heritage objects and book heritage objects, are revealed. It is emphasized that the appraisal of value of the existing funds and collections of documentary heritage objects is the basis for the development and implementation of modern individual concepts and integrative projects for libraries, archives and museums, which provides for the coexistence and interrelation of material expositions and various forms of virtual information.

Unboxed: Transgender in a Gay Museum?

<i>Unboxed: Transgender in a Gay Museum?</i>

Scriptural Relations: Colonial Formations of Anishinaabemowin Bibles in Nineteenth-Century Canada

In 1829 Anishinaabe chief and Methodist minister Kahkewaquonaby, or Peter Jones, published his first translation of the Christian bible into Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), an edition of the first seven chapters of the Gospel of Matthew printed in Toronto by the colonial government in Canada. This publication was soon followed by Anishinaabemowin translations of other Christian scriptures including the Gospel of John published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in London, England (1831) and Genesis published by the Toronto Auxiliary Bible Society in Toronto (1835). Despite deep imbrications in Indigenous, religious, political, and print histories of the country—and by contrast to vibrant scholarship produced on Indigenous-language bibles published in the United States—scholars have paid relatively little critical attention to Indigenous-language bible translation in colonial Canada. This article examines the materiality of Jones’s bible translations to argue that Indigenous-language bible translations mediated a range of relations between and among Indigenous peoples, missionaries, and colonial agents. In so doing, this paper shows how books can serve as useful archival objects to construct histories of religion and colonialism in North America, and how Indigenous-language bibles can reveal Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.

City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. By Abram C. Van Engen

City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. By Abram C. Van Engen

MUSIC RADIO RECORDINGS AS OBJECTS OF THE ARCHIVAL STORAGE

The purpose of the article is to characterize the peculiarities of organizing the storage of musical audio recordings in the repositories of radio stations. The methodology is based on the use of general scientific and special methods. The universal nature of music as a special language determines the internationality of music art. From the moment of birth and during the past years verbal report of the unwritten conditions, that are connected to music sound record accumulation in different cultural institutions, has changed not once. The transformations of this relationship were caused by different reasons – social, political, technical, and technological nature. In current high-technology conditions integration properties inherent in the holistic process of creation, circulation, and spread of information, accumulated in music compositions for radio. Today the formation of the new qualitative communication area with the rapid growth of the sound messages streams level occurs. The article is dedicated to the scientific problem of the preservation and use of music audio recordings of radio companies as objects of archival storage. Archived musical radio records are defined as a special cluster of the communication area. The socio-communicative approach is the methodological basis of the publication. The scientific novelty. The main directions of ensuring the preservation, restoration, and restoration of music audio recordings of archival audio recordings are substantiated, as well as the peculiarities of digitization and use of sound documents of this type, are revealed. The specifics of the formation of the respective collections are considered on the example of the BBC Archive Center and The British Library Sound Archive as leading foreign institutions where music records are stored. It is concluded that digital technologies have led to a change in the culture of music consumption and, accordingly, have transformed the processes of storing music archival recordings in the repositories of radio companies, which have acquired specific properties. Examining music radio recordings as archival objects have shown that in the age of the digital revolution, the music industry around the world has undergone significant changes. Both the revenue structure and the cost structure of record labels and music radio companies have fundamentally changed. Conclusions. Digital technologies have led to a change in the culture of music consumption (there has been a change in the ideology of authorship for music products) and the emergence of digital recording technologies that use artificial intelligence, digital workstations, etc. In this regard, the specifics of the organization of storage of music archival recordings were transformed, in particular in the phono repositories of radio companies that have acquired specific properties of the service grade (reprint of archival music recordings that were previously specially recorded for radio stations).