FIELD TRIP: New York City Municipal Archives, w/ Marcia Kirk, Archives and Research Associate, NYC Department of Records and Information Services
- Meet at 4:00 at 31 Chambers @ Centre St. Take 4/5/6 to Brooklyn Bridge. Please bring picture ID.
READINGS
To provide some context for our field trip:
Some canonical archival theory, and some insight into how archives work:
- Jacques Derrida, “Note” + “Exergue” in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (University of Chicago 1996): 1-23.
- Marlene Manoff, “Theories of the Archives from Across the Disciplines,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4:1 (2004): 9-25 [stop at “Additional Formulations…” on p. 18].
- Trevor Owens, “What Do You Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers,” The Signal (February 27, 2014).
- Jessa Lingel, “This Is Not an Archive,” Jessa Lingel (November 5, 2013).
- Part 3 of The Hairpin’s “Ask an Archivist” series (September 4, 2012) [focus on first and third Q&A; you can skip the pirate genealogy section in the middle 🙂 ].
- “How Do Archivists Describe Collections? (Or, How to Read a Finding Aid)” Archives @ Peel Art Gallery (February 29, 2016) [there are lots of great posts on the PAMA Archives blog].
- On processing a few unorthodox collections: Jennifer Ulrich, “Transmissions from the Timothy Leary Papers: Applying Archival Processing,” NYPL Archives Blog (March 26, 2012); Jennifer Ulrich, “Transmissions from the Timothy Leary Papers: MPLP, the New Standard?” NYPL Archives Blog (December 10, 2012); “Networked Q&A with Marvin Taylor,” NYU Workshop in Archival Practice Blog (April 20, 2012) ☛ and the Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base Taylor and his team launched five years later.
Housekeeping:
SUPPLEMENTAL RESOURCES
Ariella Azoulay, “Archive,” trans. Tal Haran, in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 1 (2012); Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005): 1-24; Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997): 17-63; Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, Ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2012); Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad” (1925) In General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology (New York: Collier, 1925); Geert Lovink, Interview with German Media Archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst, Nettime (26 February 2003); Tim Maly, “Dark Archives” Contents 5 (March 2013); *D. T. Max, “Final Destination” New Yorker (June 2007) [on the Ransom Humanities Research Center]; Jussi Parikka, “Archive Dynamics: Software Culture and Digital Heritage” In What Is Media Archaeology? (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012): 113-122; Sven Spieker, “Freud’s Files” In The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2009): 34-49; Carolyn Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust” The American Historical Review 106:4 (October 2001): 1159-1180; Kate Theimer, “A Distinction Worth Exploring: ‘Archives’ and ‘Digital Historical Representations,’” American Historical Association Conference, Washington, DC, January 3, 2014.
ON ARCHIVAL LABOR: Hillel Arnold, “Critical Work: Archivists as Maintainers,” Hillel Arnold (August 2, 2016); Michelle Caswell, “’The Archive is not an Archives’: Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies,” Reconstruction 16:1 (2016); Eira Tansey, “Archives Without Archivists,” Reconstruction 16:1 (2016) [on archival labor + processing].