… and, is it the same as a digital archive?

In our evaluation of digital archives and their role within the digital humanities, it is helpful to consider the digital archive through the lens of archival studies, which has a rich history of collection, curation, and preservation that long predates the advent of the internet and the digital archive. In her article “Archives in Context and as Context,” Kate Theimer argues that most “digital archives” do not followed the established norms of what constitutes “archive,” as defined by the formal field of archival studies.¹ She argues that the distinguishing feature of “archive,” as opposed to “collection,” is that an archive is not curated or cherry-picked, but rather aims to preserve an entire outside collection of materials, with full context, and as full context.² In other words, she argues that the organizational context of an archive, which is preserved in the original form that it arrived in when it came into the hands of the archivist, is crucial to the definition of “archive.”³ In this post, I take up an examination of the digital archive in order to evaluate what constitutes archive in the age of the internet, and ask what new media opportunities offer to the field of archival studies.

Approaching the concept of “archive” from a historical viewpoint, we immediately find faults in Theimer’s argument; archivists have always been curators, who must decide how and why they should preserve certain pieces of information in archival collections, while culling others. The curatorial power of archivists is incredibly important to acknowledge, as these choices shape archives and determine which and whose stories are preserved for posterity. To suggest that archives are simply received collections that are never curated, edited, or re-organized is a dangerous assertion. While Theimer seems to disdain any suggestions that an archivist might engage in curation—seemingly bristling at the idea that archives are anything but objective—archivists are ultimately storytellers, whose curatorial decisions serve to shape historical narratives.

On the contrary to Theimer’s assertion, I believe that archivists must embrace the powerful storytelling aspect of archival work in order to use archives in a socially productive manner. In her article “Why Archives?,” Kathleen D. Roe writes, “When people are asked to comment on or describe archives, the answers often involve words like ‘fascinating,’ ‘interesting,’ ‘fun,’ ‘treasures.’ Compare that to Bishop Desmond Tutu’s observation that ‘Archives are the bulwark of a free society.’ Which would you rather be: a fascinating treasure or a bulwark of freedom?”⁴ Here, Roe’s comment on the archive as “interesting” and “fascinating” recalls for me the image of the 19th and 20th century collector, often a European or American white man who collects based on personal interest. These sorts of collections are donated, constituting an not-insignificant amount of our current archives, and this is the type of archive that I believe Theimer’s argument really upholds as ideal. Archives that arise from donations from institutions or private citizens usually represent the interests of the most privileged strata of society. Thus, the insistence on preserving these specific organizational contexts also threatens to reify certain worldviews and organizational principles of the most powerful people. By contrast, as Roe points out, archives can also stand as “a bulwark of freedom,” allowing society to challenge existing power structures.

Case Study: Journal of the Plague Year

Let’s first look at the digital archive, A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 (JOTPY), which aims to document the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic.⁵ I have chosen to analyze this project because it specifically labels itself as an “archive,” which is useful in considering Theimer’s argument about what “archive” is. Moreover, the project has a clear social justice perspective, which I believe demonstrates how digital archives can facilitate social liberation.

The home page of the journal’s website invites users to submit their own stories, welcoming any forms of media from the classic text and image, to newer media forms, such as TikToks and memes.⁶ On the about page, the site lists a number or ethical concerns, such as accessibility of the archives, inclusivity of experience, and collaboration between users, curators, and content creators.⁷ This emphasis on diversifying COVID-19 narratives and increasing access to these narratives perfectly illustrates how archives can contribute to social change. These archives are not “received” as complete collections in the way Theimer argues archives must be; rather the contents of this archive are continuously collected based on a shared theme. This makes perfect sense in the context of COVID-19, which has been and continues to be a rapidly evolving life-altering event for individuals worldwide. It only makes sense that an archive of the pandemic would be ongoing, flexible, and ever-growing. Meanwhile, the curatorial focus on COVID-19 allows the archive to shape a narrative around the pandemic intentionally, rather than incidentally. This can be an extremely powerful resource for those interested in studying the pandemic and its various effects on different people. If we limit our definition of archives to exclude intentionally-curated collections of stories, we would lose the power of archives to drive very specific topic-oriented research.

My Take on (Digital) Archive

Jacques Derrida wrote, “[T]here is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.”⁸ I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly with this statement. The archive holds incredible political power in its ability to shape our collective memory—history itself. Any suggestion that archives are not inherently narrative projects is at best naive, and at worst blatantly ignoring how archives are implicated in (re)producing power structures. Meanwhile, there are archivists who choose to embrace the narrative power of the archive and approach their curatorial project with ethical standards of documentation. These projects are the type that open up new horizons for the future, highlighting stories that might be marginalized among existing narratives. In a world where the entire internet is an archive, these types of small, focused, and selectively curated projects offer us in-depth looks into specific issues and experiences, which may not be represented within the archives of mainstream media. In the future, people will need these highly curated projects to help sift through the immense data stream that is the internet. And thus, it is all the more important to approach our archival work and our curatorial decisions from a theoretical framework deeply rooted in ethics and social justice. In his open letter “Dear Students: Becoming an Archivist in a Time of Uncertainty and Unrest,” Ricardo Punzalan exhorts budding archivists to use their work for social good, saying, “you must commit yourselves to becoming agents of truth, accountability, and social justice—and to remembering that if these values do not lead to specific action, you are condemning archives to irrelevance, a mockery of truth, and worse, the very tools of oppression.”⁹ What is archive? Archive is power. We must wield the archive cautiously, ever-conscious of its potential for both good and bad, liberation and oppression.

References

1. Kate Theimer, “Archives in Context and as Context,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 2 (2012). https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-2/archives-in-context-and-as-context-by-kate-theimer/ ↩︎
2. Theimer, “Archives in Context and as Context.” ↩︎
3. Theimer, “Archives in Context and as Context.” ↩︎
4. Kathleen D. Roe, “Why Archives?,” The American Archivist 79, no. 1 (2016), 6. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26356697 ↩︎
5. “What We Do,” A Journal of the Plague Year, Arizona State University School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, accessed July 7, 2024. https://www.covid-19archive.org/s/archive/page/whatwedo ↩︎
6. “Share Your Story,” A Journal of the Plague Year, Arizona State University School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, accessed July 7, 2024. https://www.covid-19archive.org/s/archive/page/Share ↩︎
7. “What We Do,” A Journal of the Plague Year. ↩︎
8. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and
   London: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 4, quoted in Marlene Manoff, “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4, no. 1 (2004), 9. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/51302 ↩︎
9. Ricardo L. Punzalan, “Dear Students: Becoming an Archivist in a Time of Uncertainty and Unrest,” The Library Quarterly 87, no. 4 (2017), 304. https://rpunzalan.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Dear-Students.pdf ↩︎