Critical Archives Reading Group

1 Sep 2021–31 Aug 2022

Monthly, last Thursday of the month, 12.30 - 14:00 GMT

Join this monthly meeting on Teams to discuss papers, blogs, podcasts, films, or material in other media, related to archival studies, and offering a critical engagement with archives, particularly drawing on feminist, queer, and anti-racist perspectives, as well as the contributions of community archives, independent and other radical archives.

Participants may join regularly for every discussion or drop in to specific meetings. Academics, students, archivists and all those interested in archival practices broadly defined are welcome!

If you would like join the Reading Group, or make a suggestion for a reading or discussion topic, please email cdcs@ed.ac.uk requesting to be added to the group.

Next meeting:

31 March

Past meetings:

24 February

'The Virtual and the Vegetal: Creating a ‘Living’ Biocultural Heritage Archive through Digital Storytelling Approaches' by John Charles Ryan
Edith Cowan University, Australia. Global Media Journal: Australian Edition, 15.1 2021

27 January 2022

G Thomas Tanselle, 'The World as Archive' Common Knowledge (2002) 8 (2)

25 November 2021

This meeting will explore a couple of essays by Gregory Sholette about the status of the archive / ephemera in relation to 'the artwork' / institution.

Readings:

‘Not cool enough to catalogue’: http://www.gregorysholette.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/PEACEPRESS_FINAL_080511-copy.pdf

and/or ‘The grin of the archive’ Chapter 2: www.darkmatterarchives.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/g_sholette_dark_matter-ALL.

27 October 2021

Joined by colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who have been directly involved in preserving the film and bringing it back into the spotlight.

Reading: Archives and emotions, part two: Another look at the "Housing Discriminations and Hidden Cameras" podcast produced by Carrie Ann Welsh (see links below for 24 June 2021).

26 August 2021

Discussing appraisal, the process of deciding what material to keep in archives.

Reading: “We Are What We Keep; We Keep What We Are”: Archival Appraisal Past, Present, and Future, by Terry Cook.

29 July 2021

Archives and Technology

Reading:

“Lessons from Archives: Strategies for Collecting Sociocultural Data in Machine Learning” - Eun Seo Jo and Timnit Gebru

Video (8 minutes):

“How I'm fighting bias in algorithms” - TED Talk by Joy Buolamwini

Note: Though the video isn’t about archives, it is included as an example of the negative impacts of current data collection practices in machine learning (including natural language processing and artificial intelligence) work and research. If the topic is of interest, a documentary on Netflix called Coded Bias goes into greater detail about the work.

24 June 2021

'Archives and emotions' materials:

Desire Lines Podcast. A two-part series produced by Carrie Ann Welsh, Director of the Centre for Ethics and Education, UW.

Spotify links:

Part one: Station Wagons and Suppression (Part One of Housing Discriminations and Hidden Cameras)

Part two: Archives as Reparations (Part Two of Housing Discrimination and Hidden Cameras)

Or, Google radio link:

Part one: Station Wagons and Suppression (Part One of Housing Discrimination and Hidden Cameras),

Part two: Archives as Reparations (Part Two of Housing Discrimination and Hidden Cameras)

Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor’s paper

“From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives”, offers another important intervention into archival ethics: Caswell, M., & Cifor, M. (2016). From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives. Archivaria 81, 23-43. 

Project MUSE - From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives (jhu.edu)

27 May 2021

For this meeting, we will reflect on archival ethics – particularly the challenges posed by archiving social media activism. We will draw on the inspirational and careful work of Document the Now, who emerged in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson in the US – and have worked through the demands of archiving social media content – and summarised this work in their white paper on ethics and archiving social media: https://www.docnow.io/docs/docnow-whitepaper-2018.pdf.

Sara Thomson, digital archivist with the Centre for Research Collections, at University of Edinburgh Library, will lead the discussion.

For those who would like to read further on archival ethics, Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor’s paper, From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives, offers another important intervention into archival ethics: Caswell, M., & Cifor, M. (2016). From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives. Archivaria 81, 23-43. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/687705.

29 April 2021 (first meeting)

We propose reflecting on Michelle Caswell’s (academic and archivist at UCLA) searing critique of humanities scholars tendency to treat ‘the archive’ as a metaphor and to remain oblivious of the work of archivists and long histories of archival theory and practice. We pair this with Arike Oke (managing director of the Black Cultural Archives), and her reflective account of the role of the ‘civic archivist’.

Caswell, M. (2016). "The archive" is not an archives: acknowledging the intellectual contributions of archival studies. Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 16(1). Available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bn4v1fk

Oke, Arike (2020) ‘The Civic Archivist’, LSE, 12 November 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouf7Fmp9LRg