Archival Word of the Week: Ephemera
Generic name for published documents which are designed to perform a specific task at a specific time, and expected to be forgotten or thrown away after use - although they might be retained for a striking design or as a souvenir of an event. Ephemera include posters, tickets, and leaflets. Does this blog count as ephemera? I don't know.
These temporary documents tend to be littered with 'linguistic shifters' - relative terms such as 'tonight' or 'here' - which always require contextual information to make any sense at all.
Link: ephemera
Link: Carried away
posted by Paddy at 8:04 am
1 Comments:
Cheers Marty! I hope the post wasn't too condensed. Ephemera should indeed be valued as a resource for research, and this kind of material certainly requires serious work on interpretation. I bet we've all looked at one of our own photo albums at one time or another and thought "Where was that?" or "Who on earth is that?"
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