06 May 2008

Everything is open to interpretation

I attended a seminar a few weeks ago on The Ontology of the Archive, one of a series held as part of a workshop looking at Archiving and Reusing Qualitative Data organised by the ESRC Centre for Research and Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester.

Louise Craven of The National Archives began the day with a very stimulating and challenging talk on ‘What is Archive Where is the Archive?’. This gave quite a philosophical perspective on the broad concept of the archive, and made my brain shoot off in many and various directions as I thought about what an archive is and the attitudes and beliefs that underpin our work as archivists. I can only capture a small part of her talk here, as it contained so much and asked so many questions about the postmodern perspective on archives.

Archives are different things to different people – the perspective of the individual is part of the experience of the archive. New interpretations of archives are now coming to the fore as people think about the widening interest in archives and their relevance in increasingly broader contexts. In the post Second World War context the common perception was that the archivist gave access to archives through a range of finding aids and often via terminology that could be very specific to the archival community. In recent years we have see the rise of community archives, the concept of individuals having their own archives and the enormous impact of technology which brings archives so much closer to people in so many different ways. More recently there is a greater understanding that record keeping and archives are integral to the development of society, and philosophical writings have reflected this, notably Derrida and Foucault.

Archives may be seen as a source of power and control, and the archivist as central to this, providing context and order to the records. Archivists themselves are now more aware of addressing the ‘why’ and not just the ‘how’ in terms of their role and approach to archives. It may be that our traditional ideas about provenance, original order and uniqueness need to be reassessed, especially in the light of digital records. Indeed, context and provenance may be important to many users of archives, but not all – some are only concerned with an individual document and its relevance to them – the context they are concerned with is really their own life and experiences. Furthermore, it could be said (controversially) that there are multiple creators of an archival document, including the archivist who looks after it and catalogues it. The archive is not passive but actually has an active existence.

The relationship between the reader and the text is at the heart of the experience of an archive. The ‘structure of feeling’ depends upon what the reader brings to the text as well as the text itself. The understanding equates to some extent with the use, so the meaning is bound up with the identify of the reader. Texts can be deconstructed and reconstructed, emphasising that they have many readings and many interpretations.

I took away from Louise’s talk the idea that it is dubious to think about 'the meaning' of an archive, or even to limit the number of meanings at all, because there can really be a limitless number of interpretations – the meaning of an archive for one individual is really their own interpretation of it, which is based not only on the text but also on their cultural identity, history and knowledge. Following some of the many bibliographic references that Louise gave I found a most interesting article by Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz in Archival Science (2) 2002 which sums up this postmodern perspective quite nicely:

Postmodernism requires a new openness, a new visibility, a willingness to question and be questioned, a commitment to self-reflection and accountability. Postmodernism requires archivists to accept their own historicity, to recognize their own role in the process of creating archives, and to reveal their own biases. Postmodernism sees value in stories more than structures, the margins as much as the centres, the diverse and ambiguous as much as the certain and universal. Above all, it asserts that no actor or observer, historian or archivist, is ever neutral or disinterested in any documentary process, nor is any “text” they consult (including archival documents) or preserve (i.e., appraise, acquire, describe, make available) a transparent window to some past reality. All human actions occur (even if subconsciously or unconsciously) within a context of contemporary societal metanarratives where everything is filtered, mediated, or influenced by considerations of language, personal (or organizational) psychology, and power.”

Image: disCONSTRUCTS WHAT IS re-constructed on Flickr (Creative Commons licence) http://www.flickr.com/photos/jef_safi/2094499635/

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2 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Very interesting, thank you! I quote your post on my blog "archivagando".
Paola

18 May, 2008 17:24  
Anonymous Amrita said...

Hey ! This is really very interesting post.

05 December, 2009 12:14  

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