The archive invokes oppositional questions. Is it about power, control of narrative, history, access, memory? All entail the question of “who” – whose power, whose control, whose absence from the record. Yet, isn’t it also “under siege” (Manoff, 13)? Should we protect it from fetishization or from quiet elimination? Derrida shows us that the apparent psychological drive to record also involves its own kind of production. Technological advances and corporate interests vie with the material demands of archive-keeping. The Peel Archive pages remind us of archivists’ work to render less obscure even the workings of the archive. We see the physical space required, the impossibility of digitizing everything, that choices have to be made by. Should those choices be automated or remain subject to human biases and error? Even those who wouldn’t describe themselves as post-modernists recognize the lack of certain objectivity of historical record. No wonder the archive is a subject of contention.
The pervasiveness of data in digital age obscures how easily it can be obliterated from record, information obsolescence is as much a problem as information saturation. It is fitting we are investigating this concept in an interdisciplinary class, these questions invoke the meaning of the boundaries between them.
Thanks for highlighting the archive’s struggle to grapple with seemingly competing demands, politics, etc. I particularly appreciate your question about how we might responsibly *automate* some archival processes.