INSTG099 MA Dissertation
Phoebe Mitchell-Innes
Supervisor Andrew Flinn
2016/2017
Archiving Social Memory in the Age of Social Media:
Exploring the opportunities and challenges of archival collections
on social media
This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the MA in Archives and Records Management, UCL.
Word Count:
Approximately
11,500
1
Declaration
I have read and understood the College and Departmental statements
and guidelines concerning plagiarism. I declare that:
· This submission is entirely my own original work.
· Wherever published, unpublished, printed, electronic or other
information sources have been used as a contribution or component of
this work, these are explicitly, clearly and individually acknowledged by
appropriate use of quotation marks, citations, references and/or
statements in the text. It is approximately 11,500 words in length.
2
Abstract
In the age of social media the nature of records and social memory is
fundamentally changed. The archive is a tool used in the process of
transforming social experience, memories and history into collective
remembering. The increased prevalence of cultural archives and collections
generated on social media present challenges to traditional concepts of what
constitutes an archival record and disrupt standard archival protocols and
procedures set by international guidelines. Contending that archival appraisal
frameworks and protocols codify what is kept and what is left out of the
archives and thus societal memory, this thesis will be a diagnostic exploration
looking at the opportunities and challenges these types of archival collections
present to contemporary professional practice. Exploring specifically the
Instagram based community archive veteranas_and_rucas, it will argue for an
expanded professional approach to appraisal and preservation to integrate
the affective, epistemological, ontological and social valences of such an
archival project. Borrowing from arts and archaeological conservation
practices it draws upon real life examples to speculatively reconcile these
challenges and provide examples to attend to the preservation requirements
demanded by these projects.
3
Table of Contents
Introduction
0.1 Social Memory and Archivists
p.5
Chapter 1
1.1 The Archive as Technology of Inscription
p.8
1.2 Social Memory
p.10
1.3 Social Memory in the digital era
p.15
1.4 False Binary
p.17
2.1 Archives on Social Media
p.25
2.2 #veteranas_and_rucas
p.29
2.3 Subjectifying Dimensions
p.33
2.4 #map_pointz
p.35
2.5 Affective Dimensions
p.40
2.6 Inclusion in Institutions
p.45
3.1 Preservation of Participation
p.48
3.2 Ecology of Archives on Social Media
p.49
3.3 Authenticity and Integrity Adapted
p.50
3.4 Participatory Conservation
p.54
3.5 Participatory Metadata and Folksonomy
p.59
4.0 Conclusion
p.62
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Conclusion
Appendix
p.65
List of Figures
p.66
Bibliography and references
p.67
4
Introduction
0.1 Social Memory and Archivists
In ‘Remembering the Future’ archives scholar Terry Cook examines the
deeply enmeshed relationship between archival appraisal and the active
production of social memory. He writes ‘Appraisal occurs primarily today on
the records of yesterday to create a past for tomorrow. What kind of past
should the future have?’. 1 His reflection situates archivists as active coproducers of the past, setting an agenda for the future. The archive then is not
merely a reflective or expressive space, but instead is formative in the
constitution of history and subsequently the social and political imaginary. In
light of Cook’s observation, longstanding traditional ontologies of archives and
recordkeeping are destabilised.2 Following his postmodern stance, this thesis
will seek to situate archives as a crucial tool that aid in the co-production,
preservation and mediation of cultural history and collective memory.
As archivist and scholar Laura Millar writes, ‘[r]ecords and archives are
devices used in the process of transforming individual memories into
collective remembering’. 3 Reflecting on the dynamics of social memory in
cultural heritage institutions and archives, this thesis contends that the
endurance of social memory is a salient mechanism in the constitution of an
1
Cook, T., ‘Remembering the Future’ in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory:
essays from the Sawyer Seminar, The University of Michigan Press, 2007, edited by Francis X. Blouin,
William G. Rosenberg, p.169.
2
On this shift see Achille Mbembe’s essay ‘The Power of the Archive and its Limits’ in Refiguring the
Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Michèle Pickover, Graeme Reid, Razia Saleh, Jane
Taylor, New Africa Books, 2002, pp. 19-27.
3
Millar, L. quoted in Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory, by Richard Rinehart and Jon
Ippolito, MIT Press, 2014, p.16.
5
individual’s subjectification and identity.4 By characterising the archive as a
mnemonic mediator, it suggests that the archive carries two valences of
subjectification: the first being a governing technique over an individual, and
the second being the possibility of self-articulation through adequate and
enduring cultural references. It is this second possibility that informs this
thesis’ focus on the increased prevalence of cultural and community archives
on social media.5 Emerging on the margins these archives enrol social media
to appraise, represent and provide access to collections that are often absent
from mainstream cultural heritage institutions.
The reader should consider the following as a diagnostic exploration,
illustrating the opportunities and challenges that community archives on social
media present to the archival profession. As the topic of community archives
on social media is still in relative infancy; this exploration lends itself well to a
theoretical methodology. Through exploring conceptual frameworks and real
life examples from a variety of disciplines, this thesis aims is to offer insights
that may inform the generating dialogue on how to attend to community and
cultural archives on social media.6 It hopes to illustrate the need to adapt and
rethink predominant archival approaches creatively in order to attend to the
4
By subjectification (French: subjectivation) I am referring to Micheal Foucaults concept of
subjectification which sees the construction of an individual into a subject by discursive frameworks in
society as opposed to classical notions of the subject as a self-contained term., See The Foucault
Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Panethon Books, New York, 1984.
5
Examples of online cultural archive of Black Contemporary Art curated by Kimberly Drew, available
at http://blackcontemporaryart.tumblr.com, accessed 13/08/17, or the Turntablist Transcription
Methodology Academy which utilizes Twitter, YouTube to archive and make their cultural productions
accessible, available at https://twitter.com/TTMacademy, accessed 13/08/17, amongst others.
6
Efforts to archive dynamic social media seen in the DocNow research initiative, which self describes
as ‘a tool and a community developed around supporting the ethical collection, use, and preservation
of social media content’ see http://www.docnow.io, accessed 04/08/17 and Rhizome’s Webrecorder,
see https://webrecorder.io, accessed 04/08/17.
6
diverse histories and culture available in community archives facilitated by
social media. It does so with a mind to encourage the archival profession to
pursue the amelioration of gaps, omissions and exclusions of groups,
communities and identities in cultural and national heritage.
7
Chapter 1
1.1 The archive as technology of inscription
Since the advent of Michel Foucault’s provocative interpretation of the archive
as a constellation of the discursive formations existent in society, the archive
is no longer the neutral and trusted authority it was once considered to be. 7
For Foucault the archive is not a preservative institution, but rather
accommodates the ‘rules of practice’, which structures the ‘specific
regularities of what can and cannot be said’.8 Writing after Foucault, Jacques
Derrida reminds us not only of the violence of the archive, but that control of
the archive is fundamental to state power.9 Derrida in his oft-cited Archive
Fever traces the role of the archive as a technology of rule and an apparatus
of inscription.10 For Derrida, archival ‘inscriptions’ are the processes by which
traces of the past are archived by societies, through classification, codification
and consignation to the archive.11
Derrida’s interpretation reads the archive as a space of uncovering in which
the past and present co-exist. 12 The act of uncovering is as much about
subjective interpretation, laden with nuances of contemporary understanding,
as it is about the creation of historical narratives. Through this lens the
archival record is not a positivist reflection of some event, but is in a continual
7
Foucault, M., The Archaeology of Knowledge, London, Routledge, 1972.
Foucault, p.15, cited in Stoler, L.A., ‘Colonial Archives and The Arts of Governance’ in Hamilton et al.
9
Derrida, J., Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.4.
10
Derrida, p.4.
11
Derrida’s concept of archival inscription is closely tied to the corporeal body and he links it subject
formation and subjectification, using the example of circumcision, Derrida, p.20.
12
See ‘Introduction’ to Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: essays from the
Sawyer Seminar, The University of Michigan Press, 2007, edited by Francis X. Blouin, William G.
Rosenberg,
8
8
state of becoming: actively shaped by archival processes of appraisal,
description, preservation and interpretation. Moreover through a Foucauldian
lens, Derrida illustrates that archival appraisal systems are imbued with
broader contemporary social configurations and epistemologies, and play a
vital role in perpetuating such configurations. 13 Through this constructivist
prism, archivists are able to see how archives play a vital role in articulating
and preserving individual and societal memory and experience. To
acknowledge this does not undermine the profession, but rather requires
archivists to self-reflexively evaluate and acknowledge the limitations and
implications of predominant archival approaches.
If according to cultural theorist Stuart Hall ideology can be defined as ‘those
images, concepts and premises which provide the frameworks through which
we represent, interpret, understand and “make sense” of some aspect of
social existence’, then the archive can be considered inherently ideological.14
Written through acts of appraisal, description and preservation, the archive is
a tool which integrates select phenomena into a historical lexicon, from which
individuals are able to cite and reference in order to make sense of their own
existence or experience. 15 The archives’ role in ensuring the visibility and
intelligibility of select historical narratives is a weighty task and one that
requires continual self-reflection and introspection by the profession.
13
This equally pertains the potential to subvert them.
Hall, S., ‘Racist Ideologies and the Media’ in Media Studies: A Reader. Edited by P. Marris and S.
Thornham. New York, New York University Press, 2000, p.271.
15
On citation see Butler, J., Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "sex", Routledge, New
York, 1993.
14
9
However there is an uneasiness in the archival profession in recognising its
close relationship with social memory, not solely because archival processes
of appraisal directly influence what is remembered and forgotten, but because
social memory so directly undermines established notions of a positivist “truth”
and “neutrality” which have long influenced archivists professional identity.16
Furthermore to recognise archives as a technology of inscription illustrates
their highly politicised nature with relation to the social body. Thereby refuting
traditional archival notions of neutrality, objectivity and custodialism that have
historically characterised the profession and continue to influence the archival
imaginary today.17
1.2 Social Memory
Social memory functions and exists in a myriad of ways, but put simply it is
what and how a society or a group remembers. 18 Anthropologist Paul
Connerton suggests in How Societies Remember that social memory is
embodied in us all.19 He posits that it depends as much on embodied medial
processes such as rituals, actions, behaviours or speech, as it does on
institutional sites of memory such as museums and archives. Critically
Connerton illustrates social memory is dependent on its long-term continuity
16
Blouin and Rosenberg, 2006, p.165
Cook, T., 'We are what we keep; We keep what we are: Archival appraisal past, present and future'
in Journal of the Society of Archivists, 32, 2, 2011, pp.173-189
18
I acknowledge that term ‘social’; society, community and group are all highly contested terms and
choose to draw upon Benedict Andersons notion of modern communities as social constructed
through the material-cultural practices. See Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, Verso, 1983. It also considered through the lens of Andrew Flinn who defines
community as ‘a group who define themselves on the basis of locality, culture, faith, background, or
other shared identity or interest’. See Flinn, A., ‘Community histories, community archives: some
opportunities and challenges’. Journal of the Society of Archivists 28, 2, 2007, pp.151-176. Therefore
throughout this paper ‘community’ will be used in the most flexible and capacious sense.
19
Connerton, P., How Societies Remember, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
17
10
via mediation and re-mediation.20 In this sense the archive can be understood
as a medial process in the service of social memory. Generally social memory
can be broken into two broad categories: ‘formal’ and ‘informal’. 21 Formal
social memory is often considered as operating in what has been termed
‘canonical’ sites of memory. In the contemporary era of cultural heritage
institutions canonical sites of memory tend to fall within three forms: libraries,
museums and archives.22 They see their responsibility as the transmission of
social and cultural memory, yet are burdened with a legacy of historic values,
professional culture and entrenched institutional practices when preserving
and transmitting culture.
For example, Carol Duncan in ‘The Art Museum as Ritual’ eloquently traces
the inception of the modern museum and its role as politically charged
repository of the values of elitist high culture.23 Critically her study situates the
contemporary cultural heritage sector as continuing to be entrenched by the
social forces that framed its production. It is long acknowledged that the
inception of the museum and cultural heritage sector served the social
agenda of imperialism and bourgeois capitalism in the 19th century. 24
Throughout the period critics avowed the social significance and redemptive
aspects of art and culture, extolling its role in ‘the perfection of the human
character’.25 Subsequently cultural heritage became a measure by which the
20
See Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, edited by Astrid Erll and Ann
Rigney, DeGruyter, 2009.
21
Rinehart, p. 15.
22
Rinehart, p. 15..
23
Duncan, C., ‘The Art Museum as Ritual’ in Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, Routledge,
1995, pp.1-20.
24
See Duncan, ibid.
25
E.C., ‘The Fine Arts, versus the Spirit of the Age’, American Monthly Magazine, 4 January, 1835.
11
middle and upper classes could self-consciously position themselves via an
identification of mutually shared spectatorial behaviour in the cultural arena. 26
It additionally sought to inculcate the lower classes with moral allegories and
pedagogical visual language in arts. Thereby utilising cultural heritage to
naturalise social difference. 27 Cultural heritage institutions such as the
museum pertained an authority fuelled by the quasi-spiritual performativity of
the museum space, the symbolic power of its architecture and didactic
premise. Crucially Duncan’s analysising the political origins of the cultural
heritage sector demystifies these institutions as not neutral but are rather a
field where state, public and private interests compete.
Duncan’s observations resonate with the operations of archives in cultural
heritage and likewise archival scholarship has flagged the archive as not
neutral, but rather a highly contested space of governance. Scholars have
illustrated the archive as an active agent in the production of societal
configurations, complicit in reproducing state power and upholding ‘specific
social formations’ at the expense and oppression of individuals and
communities. 28 Indeed, many archival buildings throughout time have had
architectural features that suggest ‘solidity, impenetrability, durability and
26
This is also known as cultural capital as conceptualised by Pierre Bourdieu, who saw cultural capital
as materializing in ‘the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods … and in the institutionalized
state’, Bourdieu, P. ‘The Forms of Capital’, 1986, in Cultural Theory: An Anthology, eds. Imre Szeman
and Timothy Kaposy, Sussex, Blackwell, 2011.
27
On this see Miller, A., The Empire of the Eye, New York, Cornell University Press, 1993. She writes,
‘spectatorship – visual consumption of a refined and leisurely art is the key here to class difference’,
p.346.
28
Povinelli, E.A., ‘The woman on the other side of the wall: Archiving the otherwise in postcolonial
digital archives’ in differences, 22.1, 2011, pp. 146-171, p.152, see also Hamilton et al.
12
authority’. 29 Additionally, the principles that underlie contemporary archival
policies and international standards too bear a legacy of their nineteenth
century inception.30 Principles such as ‘respect des fonds’, provenance and
original order as outlined by Dutch archivists S. Muller, J.Feith and R.Fruin
continue to be the central organising unit in most archival repositories. 31
There is now wide acknowledgement that provenance functions first and
foremost with ‘the presence of a clear creator or ownership of records and
with a hierarchical relationship between entities, both of which reflect the
bureaucratic and corporate needs of Western, colonial, capitalist, and
imperialist regimes’.32
Furthermore archives guidelines continued focus on the ‘transactional’ and
‘evidential’ qualities of a record remain firmly rooted in Theodore
Shellenberg’s and Hilary Jenkinson’s twentieth century concepts of an
evidentiary text.33 This has been dubbed the ‘recordkeeping paradigm’ and
such an archival approach thrives on corporate and business records,
historically an exclusive domain of society representative of a small elite.34
This systematic exclusion of diverse historical narratives has been termed by
29
Cunningham, A., ‘Postcustodial Archive’ in Archives in the Information Age, ed. Richard J Cox, ALA
Neal-Schuman, 2005 p.177.
30
On the relationship between archives and nineteenth century imperialism see Stoler, L.A., Along
the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton University Press, 2009.
31
Ketelaar, E., ‘Archival theory and the Dutch manual’ in Archivaria, 41, 1996.
32
Drake, J.M, ‘RadTech Meets RadArch: Towards A New Principle for Archives and Archival
Description’ in On Archivy, available online at
https://medium.com/on-archivy/radtech-meets-radarch-towards-a-new-principle-for-archives-andarchival-description-568f133e4325, last accessed 03/08/17.
33
International Standards Organisation, ISO 15489-1:2016. Equally the International Council on
Archives, General International Standard of Archival Description [ISAD (G)], 2nd edition, 1999 follows
hierarchical standards of description that can be limiting to the appraisal of non-business papers, also
see Jenkinson, H., Manual of Archive Administration, London, 1965 and Shellenberg, T., Modern
archives: principles and techniques, Melbourne, 1956.
34
See Cook, T., ‘Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: four shifting archival paradigms’ in
Archival Science, June 2013, Volume 13, Issue 2–3, pp. 95–120.
13
cultural theorist Raymond Williams as the ‘selective tradition’.35 The ‘selective
tradition’ describes a systematic operation which privileges, prioritises and
upholds the identity, culture and historical narratives of a select group in
society.36 It is apparent then that historically archives are conceived in and
servile to particular social regimes, and subsequently their methodologies are
imbued with a similar logic.37 The question that remains is how can archivists
disentangle archival appraisal and management systems from such
hegemony, and re-figure their potential to support a more diverse, expanded
and inclusive history?
Informal social memory on the other hand has been characterised as ‘folklore
and distributed, popular forms of remembering’.38 Informal social memory is
often mediated through devices such as speech, dance and performance, and
today the Internet provides a platform for the mediation of informal social
memory practices. Where formal institutions fail to make efforts to preserve
systemically excluded collections and non-formal cultural artefacts, the groups
marginalised by the ‘selective tradition’ informally collaborate to counter
omissions from the formal memory site by establishing independent archives.
This can be seen in the longstanding presence of community archives, as well
as the increased prevalence amateur archivists online who work to keep alive
the ‘shared sensibilities, experiences, thoughts, ideas, and expressions’ of
35
See Williams, R., ‘The Analysis of Culture’ in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture A Reader edited by
John Storey, Pearson Education, 2006, pp. 32-40, p.37.
36
See Williams, R., ‘On High and Popular Culture’ in New Republic, November 22, 1974, available at
https://newrepublic.com/article/79269/high-and-popular-culture, last accessed 03/08/17.
37
See Peterson, B., ‘The Archive and the Political Imaginary’ in Refiguring the Archive, pp.29-35.
38
Rinehart, p.15.
14
communities and groups poorly represented in traditional mainstream cultural
heritage and memory institutions.39
These grassroots endeavours are often incongruous with the components of
the ‘recordkeeping paradigm’ and require what has been termed a
‘postcustodial’ approach to archiving.40 Postcustodialism responds to the fact
that legacies of appraisal, descriptive and preservation frameworks are no
longer the clear-cut authorities they might have previously considered to be.
To attend to electronic records, postcustodialism advocates a shift from the
traditional professional approach of assuming the physical responsibility of
records, to instead supporting records creators by offering expert guidance on
how to care for their materials. Moreover conceptual frameworks that
integrate a postcustodial approach consider a record’s use for not only its
transactional and evidentiary purposes, but also stress its mnemonic and
social value. 41 It utilises the foundations of archival theory as a springboard,
rather than gospel, advocating for an expanded and interdisciplinary
approach.
39
DeKosnik, A., Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, MIT Press, 2016, p.99.
One such example is communal endeavour of games fans connected on the Internet who informally
collaborate to preserve vintage video games non-professionally.
40
On postcustodialism see Ham, F. ‘Archival strategies for the post-custodial era’ The American
Archivist 44, no. 3, 1981, pp.207-216, on the ‘recordkeeping paradigm’ see Cook, 2013.
41
One such conceptual model that illustrates postcustodialism is the Records Continuum Model
developed in response to the evolving records landscape and challenges in managing digital records,
it argues for a more expansive approach, incorporating multiple dimensions of what can be
considered a record. McKemmish, S.; Upward, F. H.; Reed, B. ,2010, ‘Records Continuum Model’ in
Encyclopaedia of Library and Information Sciences: third edition, pp. 4447–8
15
1.2 Social memory in the digital era
The increased affordability and accessibility to broadband, computers and
current generation of smartphones, offer new opportunities for the
transmission of social memory. The Internet as a platform for collaboration
and sharing marks an significant shift in how social memory and
contemporary cultural production is sourced, distributed and purposed. Points
of transfer have multiplied and screens are ubiquitous, marking an irrevocable
shift in the dynamics of social memory from a traditionally print oriented to a
transmission-oriented, screen based experience. Furthermore the usergenerated and participatory logic of contemporary digital communication
technologies can be seen as having further enabled the ‘democratisation of
knowledge production’.42
Yet despite this changed cultural landscape the legacy of early archival theory
continues to determine most formal memory institutions acquisition and
appraisal policies. 43 Traditional archival theory and the guidelines they spawn
directly affect the kinds of records that are integrated in mainstream memory
institutions collections. The understanding that theory shapes practice
accounts for the overarching focus within the cultural heritage sector on
appraisal and preservation strategies premised on the fixity of discrete
physical artefacts. Like a ship kept in an impossible bottle, formal memory
42
See Flinn, A., ‘An Attack on Professionalism and Scholarship? Democratising Archives and the
Production of Knowledge’ in Ariadne, Web Magazine for Information Professionals, Issue 62, 30January-2010, available at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/flinn, last accessed 03/08/17.
43
On this see Greene, M., ‘The Power of Meaning: The Archival Mission in the Postmodern Age’,
American Archivist 65, 2002, see also Hobbs, C., ‘Re-envisioning the Personal: Reframing Traces of
Individual Life’ in Currents of Archival Thinking, California, 2010.
16
archives, repositories and museums have a ‘fixation with fixity’.
44
Conservationist Richard Rhinehart characterises museum repositories as a
cabinet of curiosities, wherein objects are extracted from ‘mundane worldly
time’, and ‘objects hang like stars in suspended eternity.’45 The institutionally
entrenched ‘fixation with fixity’ means more complex and multifarious cultural
objects, such as the oral record, performance, complex digital objects, are too
often avoided due to their complexity and thus absent from collections.46
However formal memory sites act as ‘the terminus ad quem of repeated acts
of remembrance’ because people continue to use and reinvest in them.47
Acknowledging the contiguous relationship of institutional policies on what
cultural and national heritage keeps as social memory, archivists can trace
the dialogic relationship between records and society’. This illuminates how
society’s continued reinvestment in certain types records subsequently
shapes the archive, and thus history. If social memory is premised on the
concept that memory can only become established as collective/cultural
provided it is persistently remediated and endures through space and time,
the legacy of formal preservation strategies becomes an agenda setter in
determining what does or does not become endure as collective social
memory.
44
Rinehart, p.95.
Rinehart, p.95. Alternatively when attending to discrete physical artifacts the wunderkammer or
cabinet of curiousities analogy has the potential to serve the support of multiple societal narratives
well as archival objects can be continually re-contextualized and categorical boundaries are fluid. On
this see Convery, N., ‘Place of Archives in the Digital Age’ in The Future of Archives and
Recordkeeping: A Reader, edited by Jennie Hill, Facet, 2011.
46
On this see Flinn, A., ‘Other Ways of Thinking, Other Ways of Being. Documenting the Margins and
the Transitory: What to Preserve, How to Collect’ in Craven,L ed. What are Archives? Cultural and
Theoretical Perspectives. 2008, pp.109-128.
47
See ‘Introduction: Cultural Memory and its Dynamics’ in Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, DeGruyter,
pp.1-12.
45
17
1.3 False binary
In observing the dynamics of social memory in heritage institutions, one need
be wary of asserting an essentialising binary between ‘formal’ versus
‘informal’. There is a tendency in scholarship to refine an essentialising criteria
as to what “counts” as legitimately canonical or legitimately grassroots
collective social memory. For example David Lowenthal argues for archives
‘canonical function’.48 He suggests there are elements of heritage essential to
national identity and collective social memory and sees the shift toward
hetereogeneity
and
postcustodialism
heralded
by
digital
culture
as
contributing to the erosion of historical consciousness and communal
references.49 He writes, ‘the most sombre effect of the new “post-custodial”
archive is the attrition of historical awareness…[the] benefits if such they be,
come at the heavy cost: the loss of an enduring social framework grounded in
an abundance of shared cultural references’.50 Framing social memory in a
typically modernist and universalising way, Lowenthal argues for a more
formal collective social memory based on a ‘historical science devoted…to
commonly acceptable truths’.51
Lowenthal’s anxious response is dismissive of informal cultural productions in
the digital era, particularly those mediated on the Internet. Citing art historian
Ernst Gombrich, Lowenthal writes, ‘Google’s reservoir of six billion documents
48
Blouin and Rosenberg, p.165.
Lowenthal, D., 'Archives, Heritage and History' in Bluin and Rosenberg, p.202.
50
Lowenthal, p.201.
51
Blouin and Rosenberg, p.166.
49
18
seems “the shallowest ocean on earth, overloaded with sex, sports,
conspiracy theories and pop stars” and short on all but the most recent
history.’52 He continues to lament that, ‘Pop culture does not compensate for
“the loss of the historical frame of reference, the amputation of the time
dimension from our culture.’ 53 As such, Lowenthal indiscreetly delegitimises
much cultural production online. Further to this, when referring to the
circulation of cultural content in the digital era, he argues, ‘to be ‘in the
swim’…is not the equivalent to ‘being in the culture’, contending that the
present postmodern and digital era makes ‘cultural memory redundant’.54
Underlying his statement appears the insinuation that there is some essential
criterion or ostensible worthiness to being or not being in formal culture, and
by proxy collective social memory. In doing so, Lowenthal relegates informal
digital cultural production as outside of his concept of culture and affirms a
high/low dichotomy of cultural productions. Whilst it is acceptable to
acknowledge the cultural dynamics of memory and recognise that some
mnemonic activity is produced from the bottom up and others hierarchically
top down. To insinuate there are some essential criteria to ‘being the culture’
or merely ‘in the swim’, runs the risk of naturalising cultural hegemony by
relegating informal memory artefacts to the margins. Lowenthal is not alone in
his dismissive attitude towards digital social memory. For example, a 2007
Guardian article responding to the Museum of Online Museums, harangues
that nowhere has the internet ‘been more successful than in the field of
52
Lowenthal, p.202.
Lowenthal, p.202.
54
Lowenthal, p.202.
53
19
meaningless rubbish. Here, vast swathes of tat are housed in one handy
place for easy navigation’. 55 This view, coupled with a lack of adequate
institutional policy relegates much digital cultural production out of sight within
‘canonical’ or formal memory sites. Such attitudes reinforce an exclusory and
hegemonic cultural logic, and prevent digital cultural productions from gaining
a historical frame of reference in cultural heritage.
Yet, equally counterhegemonic memory practitioners and theorists need to be
wary of unwittingly reinforcing the binary. In Rogue Archives Abigail De
Kosnik makes a compelling case for the emergence of grassroots and
counterhegemonic digital archives online. 56 According to De Kosnik rogue
archivists and archives create a number of exciting political possibilities. One
such possibility is the potential to subvert the ‘selective tradition’ as described
by Williams, via the creation and maintenance of independent archives. This
has the potential to democratise cultural heritage production and invert the
traditional hierarchy of the culture industry that traditionally sees mass
audiences at the bottom. It enables communities to have agency of selfrepresentation, rather than the traditional approach of lobbying formal memory
institutions to integrate their collections and materials. DeKosnik sees these
kinds of archival operations as also destabilising many traditional and often
limiting tenets in cultural heritage such as ownership and copyright.
55
cited in DeKosnik, p.27. Reactionary responses to mnemonic practices that are both democratisng
and sit outside formal mainstream institutions are historic. For example A. J. P. Taylors notorious
remark that oral history was nothing more than “old men drooling about their youth”. Taylor cited in
Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts eds Katharine Hodgkin, Susannah Radstone, Routledge,
2006, p.4, example given by Dr.A.Flinn (personal communication, August 17, 2017).
56
DeKosnik, 2016.
20
However her study categorises rogue archives as specifically not operating on
social media platforms due to their proprietary nature, copyright barriers, and
the negligible attitude of said corporations in preserving users cultural
productions in the longer term.57 Yet social media platforms can facilitate the
creation of cultural archives that are both diverse, participatory, experimental,
appropriative and grassroots. By relegating proprietary social media archives
outside of rogue status DeKonsik unwittingly marginalises the digital social
memory archives apparent on this medium as not rogue. The implication then
is that these archives may be unable to facilitate the possibilities warranted by
archives of rogue status. Her study is an eloquent and commendable effort in
recognising the cultural significance and potential of fandom archives, but her
essential criteria to rogue status perhaps misses the rich opportunities
afforded by archival projects rolled out on social media platforms.
Eventually binaries based on an essentialing criterion of being in ‘the culture’
or out ‘in the swim’ will cease to exist. The era of web 2.0 sees us exist in
contemporary networked environments in which human landscapes are
enmeshed with nonhuman materiality, including but not limited to digital
communications.58 The impact of digital communications technologies have
led some cultural theorists to describe the current era of Internet enabled
neoliberal capitalism as a ‘network culture’ or as ‘post-internet’.59 In Network
Culture: Politics for the Information Age Tiziana Terranova describes our
57
DeKosnik, p.18.
Web 2.0 denotes a shift in world-wide-web sites which involve both production and consumption
on the part of the user, see Ritzer, G. ‘Production, Consumption, Prosumption’ in Journal of Consumer
Culture March 2010, 10:1, 13-36, pp. 13-36.
59
See Connor, M., ‘What's Postinternet Got to do with Net Art?’ Nov 01, 2013, last accessed
03/08/17.
58
21
digital networked environment as the ‘informational milieu’. 60 Through a
reading of philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s ‘Concept of Individuation’
Terranova characterises the informational quality to contemporary digital
culture by destabilising the traditional Shannon-Weiner models of information
communication theory, which sees the content of information as a discrete
packet transmitted from a source to a receiver.
Instead Simondon proposed the communication of information does not
simply rest between the sender and receiver, rather it is immersed within a
expanded arena of interactions, ‘that packs within itself a constitutive
potential’.61 Using the example of artificial crystallization, Simondon described
how a crystal can only emerge on the condition that its seed (the amorphous
introduced matter) must resonate with the milieu (the catalytic solution), in
order to produce disparation.62 In other words, form is never abstract from
matter, and therefore information can never be proper to any one component
within a system. Simondon’s processual dynamic thus illuminates the
insufficiency of traditional Shannon-Weaver models of information-theory
which neglect the contingency of communication’s informational dimension
upon its points contact, tactility, and architecture of its ‘metastable milieu’,
including the social and material energies that constitute it.63
Through this lens, Terranova proposes that in the contemporary digital era
information is increasingly comprehended on its ‘informational dynamics’, that
60
Terranova, T., Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, Pluto Press, London, 2004, p.18.
Terranova, 2004, p.18.
62
Sauvagnargues, A., ‘Crystals and Membranes: Individuation and Temporality’ in Gilbert Simondon:
Being and Technology translated by Jon Roffe in De Boever et al, 2012, pp. 57-73.
63
Sauvagnargues, A., p.60.
61
22
being ‘the relation between noise and signal, including fluctuations and
microvariations, entropic emergences and negentropic emergences, positive
feedback and chaotic processes.’ 64 As such Terranova argues that the
informational quality to contemporary culture is not because informational
exchange is ubiquitous or because of the commodification of information, but
because ‘cultural processes are taking on the attributes of information—they
are increasingly grasped and conceived in terms of their informational
dynamics.’65 Terranova’s engaging in the processual dynamics of culture and
information allows for a determination of its dialogic relationship with the
social, physical world. She thus produces a cultural politics of information as it
necessitates the consideration of how information’s (predominantly theorised
as “immaterial” or “massless”) flows fundamentally determine how cultural
paradigms and experienced reality is (re)organised.66
Through a Terranovian lens in the case of cultural heritage it no longer makes
sense to ‘attempt to come to terms with "internet culture," because now
"internet culture" is increasingly just "culture”. 67 This can be seen in the
increased prevalence of critical discourse which no longer conceives of
internet culture as a discrete entity, but instead sees all culture as
reconfigured by our era of internet enabled neoliberal capitalism. Through this
prism archivists can account for how all forms of contemporary culture today
are in some way circumscribed by web 2.0’s sociality and production. It can
64
Terranova, p.7.
Terranova, p.7.
66
See Moss, C., ‘Expanded Internet Art and the Informational Milieu’, Dec, 2013,
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/dec/19/expanded-internet-art-and-informationalmilieu/?ref=tags_ceci-moss_post_readbtn#_ednref13
67
See Connor, M., 2013.
65
23
be seen in the powerful role social media played in historical and political
events such as the ‘Arab Spring’ (2010-11), the ‘London Riots’ (2011), as well
as the on-going #BlackLivesMatter movement (2013) to name but a few. It is
also seen in the increasing confusion of the modality of state-sovereign claims
versus the emerging sovereignty of the informational-network or ‘Cloud’: as
seen in the Google-China conflict (2009), or the Google-Earth clash between
Costa-Rica and Nicaragua (2010).68
One can no longer realistically adopt a position about cultural productions on
the outside of the Internet (as in Lowenthal), or outside of corporately owned
social media platforms (as in DeKosnik). To refine a mythical essentialist
criteria of what should belong inside formal (read institutional) and informal
(read grassroots) collective memory is not tenable in the contemporary era, if
it ever were. However it does illuminate the social constructs and cultural
hegemony that relegate items inside and outside cultural heritage memory
institutions. As such cultural heritage professionals need rethink of existing
approaches, in order to accommodate the cultural and informational shift
which Terranova describes. It is pertinent to create conceptual frameworks
that account for the fact that information and cultural artefacts are increasing
grasped and conceived in the terms of their informational dynamics. This
informational shift emphasises with urgency the fact form is never abstract
from matter, and content can never be separated from its context.
68
See Bratton, B., ‘On the Nomos of the Cloud’ lecture, November:2012, available at
http://bratton.info/projects/talks/on-the-nomos-of-the-cloud-the-stack-deep-address-integralgeography/, last accessed 03/08/17.
24
Chapter Two
2.1 Archives on social media
Web 2.0. technologies have been considered a productive avenue for
encouraging community participation in archival practice. 69 In a recent
conference ‘Diversifying the Digital Historical Record’, Angela Ford, director of
The Chicago Defender archives, noted how important social media was to
grassroots and community archives in providing an affordable and effective
way to network, access and share information.70 The functionality and ease
offered by social media platforms enable accessible and affordable area for
collaborative archival practice and can be a tool in the aid of the
democratisation of history.
It is however necessary to heed philosopher Jodi Dean’s observation that the
networked sociality of web 2.0, and communications technologies such as
social media are based on a techno-utopian rhetoric of democratic
participation: ‘access’, ‘inclusion’, and ‘feedback’.71 Yet the driving force of
web 2.0 networked culture and social media functions first and foremost as an
economic form. Dean dubs this cultural shift ‘communicative capitalism’,
whereby ‘communicative exchanges, rather than being fundamental to
69
See Krause, M. and Yakel, E., ‘Interaction in virtual archives: The polar bear expedition digital
collections next generation finding aid’ in American Archivist, 70, 2, 2007, pp. 282–314 and Shilton, K.
and Srinivasan, R., ‘Participatory appraisal and arrangement for multicultural archival collections’, in
Archivaria, 63, 2007, pp.87–101.
70
See http://diversifyingthedigital.org/forum-three.html, accessed 03/08/17. Community archives
will be defined throughout as “collections of materials created, held and managed primarily within
communities and outside the formal heritage sector.’ see Community archives and identities:
documenting and sustaining community heritage, available at
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis/icarus/projects/community-archives, last accessed 03/08/17.
71
Dean, J. ‘Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the foreclosure of politics’, Cultural Politics 1,
no. 1,2005, pp. 51-74.
25
democratic politics, are the basic elements of capitalist production’.72 Under
communicative capitalism despite unfettered communication exchange most
communication merely serves into the excessive flows of information as
entertainment: what is being said or who is saying it is irrelevant, all that
matters is circulation of content, too often not branching into consequential
political action.
Nevertheless collaborative communications technologies like social media do
have the significant potential to interrupt the existing field of historical
production and invigorate cultural heritage and archives community towards
more participatory endeavours. Nina Simon author of the Participatory
Museum defines a participatory cultural institution a space where visitors can
‘create, share, and connect with each other around content’.
73
User
participation mediated by web 2.0 in archives can be seen as enabling a
range of initiatives, some which seek to benefit from the skills of user groups
and their ‘cognitive surplus’, such as crowdsourcing and community
engagement programmes.74 Whilst definitions of participation are vast and
contestatory, in the archival sphere relevant literature tends to be divided.
Advocates of archival participation see its benefits as promoting a social
trajectory of the archive, diversity and access. However this is met with
resistance from some archivists who perceive participatory practices as a
72
Dean, p.56.
Simon, N., The Participatory Museum, Museum 2.0, 2010, p.ii.
74
See lecture DCDC15 | Enhancing Engagement Experiences with Blended Collections - Jenny Bunn,
Alexandra Eveleigh, Published on Dec 15, 2015, available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Hwvt4jgNA, last accessed 03/08/17.
73
26
potential threat to profession, and the accuracy and reliability of archival
descriptions.75
Participatory processes in the archive can be seen as opening up access and
visibility to a broader audience. It sees traditional boundaries between
producer and consumer of content and resources dissolved, and necessitates
a different mode of spectatorship and user engagement with the archive.
There is however a tenuous relationship in theories of ‘participation’ between
aesthetic forms of participatory approaches and actual forms of democratic
civic participation as outlined by Dean previously. A study by Alexandra
Eveleigh demonstrates that despite the rhetoric of participation often archival
institutions only allow interactions on the edges of their organisations
activities. 76 Eveleigh’s research demonstrated many participatory initiatives
where in fact the core of the record-orientation was kept in tact, and the
distinction between professional output and user output very clear.77
Yet utilising social media as a platform to initiate and constitute particpatory
archives can enable an archival arena where collaborative discussion is
enabled, encouraging value-added knowledge through user-generated
commentary and annotations. These provide multiple readings of a text,
slicing through any over deterministic readings of the archive. It has the
potential to provide an alternative mode of spectatorship and engagement that
75
See Flinn, 2010.
The response of the archives community to the concept of participation has been mixed, see
Eveleigh AMM, Crowding out the Archivist? Implications of online user participation for archival
theory and practice, 2015, UCL Doctoral thesis, available at http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1464116/, last
accessed 03/08/17. Her research demonstrated that participatory approaches were more constrained
than anticipated by the community.
77
See Eveleigh, 2015.
76
27
decentres and subverts prevalent viewing modes in cultural heritage
institutions that often frame marginalised communities as a curiosity, or object
of interest. 78 Further to this, self and community led archives memory
practices facilitated via social media can also subvert universalising and
liberal notions of access and legibility, as social media folksonomy can often
be esoteric to a particular community. 79 If archivists and non-professional
experts were to provide contextual and interpretive information in addition to
the original folksonomy, this would be able to capture language and
vernacular otherwise lost in more traditional metadata practices.80 As such
languages and descriptions on social media throw into high relief the uneasy
tension between legibility and illegibility of cultural materials without trying to
adhere to Western institutional models of legibility as informed by a neoliberal
politic of diversity and inclusion.81
Moreover alterative access models can be facilitated easily online. For
example curator Kimberly Drew’s ‘VV Rare: Black Librarians and Archivists
Link Share Facebook group’ allows access only to specifically black librarians
and archivists. According to many Western institutional models information
systems limiting access are often considered as censoring: standing in the
way of open access for the public good. However archivist Kimberley
Christensen aptly reminds us that ‘not every instance of not seeing is an
78
See panel discussion ‘Digital Social Memory Keynote: Failures of Care’, held at the New Museum,
New York, 04/02/17, in particular Kameelah Janan Rasheed comments on Western instituional
viewing models.
79
See panel discussion, ibid.
80
See Christen, K., ‘Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation’ in The American Archivist, Vol. 74
Spring/Summer 2011, pp. 185-210 and see http://plateauportal.libraries.wsu.edu, last accessed
04/08/17.
81
See panel discussion ‘Digital Social Memory Keynote: Failures of Care’, held at the New Museum,
New York, 04/02/17, in particular Kameelah Janan Rasheed comments on legibility.
28
abuse of power’. 82 Rather if archivists consider it more accurately as the
implementation of protocols that cannot be homogenised under Western
liberal value systems, then they can be read as an act of resistance against
problematic institutional structures, and avoid reinforcing arrangements of
exclusion and reify conservative cultural hierarchies that commonly exist in an
institutional framework.83
2.2 #veteranas_and_rucas
The potential of community archives utilising and indeed operating on social
media can be seen in the Instagram account ‘veteranas_and_rucas’, an
archive of user contributed images dedicated to Latin(a) women raised in
Southern California from the 90s and earlier.84 The collection is curated by
artist Guadalupe Rosales who created the archive response to the absence of
historical material relating to the community, both online and in institutional
archives. As of 2015, Rosales was receiving approximately five submissions a
week, from those who witnessed the period and younger generations.85 The
archive relies almost entirely on user contribution, consisting mostly of
digitised analogue photographs but also includes of a variety of ephemera
from written poetry, prison drawings, to photographic ID cards. Once
82
Christen, p.189.
Consider the use of limited access and inclusion as a means of creating safe spaces for critical
discussion and organising is well documented. Often inclusive strategies draws attention to how
exclusion operates in supposedly integrated environments. See Laure-White, A., The Case for Safe
Spaces, in Dissent, April 25, 2016, available at https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/freespeech-campus-defense-safe-spaces, last accessed 11/08/17. See Plateau Peoples' Web Portal,
available at http://plateauportal.libraries.wsu.edu, accessed 03/08/17.
84
See veteranas_and_rucas, SoCal Youth Foto Archive SoCal Youth Culture. Dedicated to women
raised in SoCal from '90s and earlier, available at
https://www.instagram.com/veteranas_and_rucas/?hl=en, accessed 04/08/17.
85
Zenerosa, M., ‘How an Instagram Account Became a Portal to L.A.’s 1990 Chicano Gang Life’ in LA
Weekly, available at http://www.laweekly.com/arts/how-an-instagram-account-became-a-portal-to1990s-chicano-gang-life-6235366, accessed 08/08/17.
83
29
uploaded users and visitors (included but not limited to the community
represented) are able to be comment on the material.
The role of the user as contributor, commenter and audience blurs
professional boundaries and ensures the material is narrated and
contextualised from below in sidebar comments opposed to traditional cultural
heritage institutions delivery of material and description from above. Whilst the
curation of the archive largely remains with Rosales, there is a sense in which
veteranas_and_rucas can be aligned with archivist Isto Huvila’s definition of a
participatory archive, as an archive implementing ‘decentralised curation,
radical user orientation and contextualisation of both records and the entire
archival process’.86 Huvila’s definition illuminates how participatory community
archives like veteranas_and_rucas shift from the more traditional records
centric view of the archive to a more socially oriented trajectory.
86
Huvila, I., Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and
broader contextualisation of records management in Archival Science, 2008, 8, pp.15–36.
30
Figure 1. Teach. Organize. Resist. Repeat. "The East Los Angeles Walkouts or Chicano
Blowouts were a series of 1968 protests by Chicano students against unequal conditions in
Los Angeles Unified School District high schools.
For sections of the archival community who tend toward a more functional and
transactional notion of an archive and record, the question that tends to be
launched at these kinds of community and participatory collections is whether
the collections are sufficiently “archival” to be categorised as such? For
example, previous president of the Society of American Archivists, William
Maher, writes ‘I always have the sense that when we see ‘archive’ used as a
verb, or the word ‘archives’ used in a bastardised way to describe what is
clearly a singular, idiosyncratic, and synthetic gathering of documents, we are
being confronted with a challenge to our position as professional archivists.’87
Maher’s telling use of ‘bastardised’ (an artificial term created and maintained
by a patriarchal social order) to declare non-professional archives as the
illegitimate child to more legitimate archives, reveal an underlying crisis of
87
Part quote cited in Flinn, 2010. See also Maher, W. ‘Archives, archivists, and society’, The American
Archivist, 61, 2, 1998, pp. 252-265, p.254.
31
authority in more traditional archival institutions, and indeed the patriarchy that
underpins them.88
Proponents sharing Maher’s view tend to follow the Jenkinsonian logic that
archives are ‘drawn up or used in the course of administrative or executive
transaction…and subsequently preserved for their own information by the
person or persons responsible for that transaction’.89 Followers of this view
strictly heed Jenkinsons opinion that ‘…archives were not drawn up in the
interest or for the information of posterity’.90 There are however less restrictive
approaches which acknowledge the agency of archives and archivists in
‘subjectively assigning’ values of what is archival and what is not. 91 As
archives scholar Andrew Flinn notes, the ‘recordness and archivalness of
what is in the collection is assured and denoted by those who create and keep
the archive’, positing that ‘something becomes an archive when it is put in an
archive or is designated as an archive…not through some magic application
of a purely objective and organic formula’.92
So whilst the ‘idiosyncratic collections’ which constitute many participatory
community archives may not necessarily comply to ISAD(G) guidelines, they
88
Feminist literary scholars have noted the subversive nature of ‘the bastard’, historically the stigma,
marginalization and exclusion of bastards from hereditary forms of employment, as well as the
inability to inherit property has led theorists to suggest that bastardry was created as an affront to
female sexual transgression, and is indicative of a phobia and fear of the destabilization of patriarchal
authority over the female body as property. See Howard, J. and Rackin, P., Engendering a Nation: A
Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories, Routledge, 2002.
89
Jenkinson quoted in Flinn 2010.
90
Flinn, A., ‘Impact of Independent and Community Archives’ in Hill, 2011 pp.p145-170, p.160.
91
Flinn, 2011, p.160.
92
Flinn, 2011, p.161.
32
have different evidentiary dimensions.93 What follows then is an analysis of
the alternative evidentiary dimensions to veteranas_and_rucas. It will
elucidate its role in redressing ontological, social and epistemological
absences of the marginalised history veteranas_and_rucas narrates, and
explore the affective and subjectifying evidentiary dimensions facilitated by it.
It will suggest mainstream cultural heritage institutions and archives need
develop guidelines, approaches and frameworks which take due cognisance
of these valences and expanded evidentiary dimensions in according
‘archival’ status to collections.
2.3 Subjectifying dimensions
Archival scholar Michelle Caswell’s body of work is dedicated to explicating
the ontological, social and epistemological role that archival records play in
community archives. She sees community archives role as particularly
pertinent
in
countering
‘symbolic
annihilation’
of
individuals
and
communities.94 The term ‘symbolic annihilation’ was developed by feminist
media scholars in the 1970s to articulate the effect of groups marginalised,
absent, or grossly misrepresented by mainstream cultural media. Caswell
sees this concept in operation in the archival field when archives and cultural
heritage institutions ignore or overlook materials of particular communities.
Her research evidences that the ongoing absence of certain community
narratives from the archives can have profound negative effects on individuals
and community members.
93
See ISO, 2016.
Caswell, M., ‘Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives in the Fight Against Symbolic
Annihilation’, in The Public Historian, 36, 4 November 2014, pp. 26-37.
94
33
Figure 2. Barrio Norwalk 1978
Caswell suggests the experience of ‘seeing oneself in history’ can shift a
community member from a position of ‘loneliness and despair’ to ‘solidarity
and hope’. 95 Robust self-representation enables community members to
envision a life outside existing systems of oppression and to ‘imagine
otherwise’, thereby impacting an individuals well being.96 She suggests the
epistemological impact can be seen in the ability to have empirical proof of a
community’s existence, including the ability to access more accurate and
nuanced representations of a community. These are able to both validate
contemporary experiences and enable consciousness of a history overlooked.
She argues for the beneficial social impact in community representation
facilitated by the archive, what she terms ‘representational belonging’ and its
95
Caswell, M., ‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: community archives and the importance of
representation, in Archives and Records’ in The Journal of the Archives and Records Association, 38,
2017, 1, pp.5-26, p.17.
96
Caswell, 2017.
34
ability to redress patterns of privilege and promote a sense of community
cohesion, thereby benefitting society in general.97
Figure 3. Oscar Castillo, "Education Not Repression (Roosevelt High School Walkouts),"
1970
2.4 #map_pointz
After the success and popularity of veteranas_and_rucas, whose audiences
comprise 117,000 followers, Rosales has created a sibling account
‘map_pointz’,
another
community-generated
image-based
archive
of
historically marginalised materials only this time specifically dedicated to the
underground party crew and rave scene in Los Angeles in the 1990s.98 The
archive documents the phenomena of daytime gatherings, or so-called ‘ditch
parties’ in residential backyards and warehouses across neighbourhoods in
97
See Harmon, J., ‘Michelle Caswell: New Study to Chronicle Users of Community-Based Archives’
September 30, 2016, available at https://ampersand.gseis.ucla.edu/michelle-caswell-new-study-tochronicle-users-of-community-based-archives/ accessed 13/08/17.
98
map_pointz, Documenting SoCal 90s party crew/rave scene.
https://www.instagram.com/map_pointz/?hl=en accessed 04/08/17
35
Southeast Los Angeles. The collection revises frequent distorted media
representations of the phenomenon, re-narrating the history of the Latin(a)
subculture that emerged in response to being ‘disempowered and criminalized
by the public school system and at times mainstream media’.99
Ditch parties despite occurring during school hours enabled disenfranchised
youth to ‘engage in resistant cultural practices, organizing for the sake of
unity’. 100 The social and political climate in LA during the 1990’s was
particularly oppressive to Latin Americans. Take for example, the 1992 LA
riots where approximately 51% of those arrested were Latin American and in
1994 the introduction of California's Proposition 187; a measure that
prohibited undocumented immigrants from receiving non-emergency health
care and education. Rosales reflects ‘[w]e have to remind ourselves: There
was so much going on in the '90s. There was a lot of violence; the schools
were removing classes that we were really interested in, so in a way, school
wasn't really made for us. So we were creating places that felt really safe to
us.’101
99
This can be attributed to the morally panicked scare piece by Fox News Undercover in 1993, see
‘OLD SKOOL DITCH PARTIES L.A. SCENE 1993 NEWS COVERAGE’,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duG9o7oUjfA, last accessed 04/08/17.
100
Rosales, G., ‘When Chicana Party Crews Ruled Los Angeles’ in Anthony Bourdin Parts Unknown, 27
April 2017, available at https://explorepartsunknown.com/los-angeles/when-chicana-party-crewsruled-los-angeles/, accessed 04/08/17.
101
Castillo, A., ‘Guadalupe Rosales created an Instagram portal into a history of East L.A.’, 01/12/17,
in VivaLA, available at http://www.vivala.com/los-angeles/veteranas-and-rucas-instagram-east/1662,
last accessed 04/08/17.
36
Figure 4. Author screenshot of map_pointz Instagram page
As such a significant feature of the map_pointz archive is redressing
misconceptions about gang culture and party crews. Rosales remarks ‘I
wasn't from a gang; I was in a party crew… I don't want those two things to
mix, because they were different. That's why I feel really sensitive — to make
sure it's really clear.’102 Ditch parties became a social practice that facilitated
spaces ‘where we felt like we belonged, where we could actually relate to
other [when] school or other places in East L.A. didn't provide [such space] for
us. It was an alternative to gang’. 103 The archive illustrates how through
dance, fashion and music Latin(a) youth cultures were able to create a ‘more
102
Abu-Saada, L., ‘This Instagram Captures The Glory Days Of L.A.'s Chicana Party Crews’ on Refinery
29, 01/04/16.
103
Rosales.
37
culturally relevant and self reflective space’ than that permitted by public
media.104
Philosopher Judith Butler writes in Giving an Account of Oneself , ‘There is no
“I” that can fully stand apart from the social conditions of its emergence, no “I”
that is not implicated in a set of conditioning moral norms, which, being
norms, have a social character that exceeds a purely personal or idiosyncratic
meaning’.105 Here Butler indicates that the self is always already implicated in
a social context and temporality which conditions the subjects emergence. As
Butler suggests ‘I’ is both conditioned by and conditions the social context,
relations and strucutres that precede its constitution. Whilst the body of
Butlers work is focused on transgender and queer subject formation and
social intelligibility, her observations aid in elucidating the interpolative
functions of the archive, how the archive operates as a Derridian tool of
inscription.
Butler’s theories draw from philosopher Louis Althusser’s concept of
‘interpollation’ to describe the process in which an individual or collective
group, is produced as a subject proper, that being a subject intelligible to
society. 106 Subject formation is only possible through the operation of
legitimating ideological norms, of which the archive as a tool of
104
n.a., ‘Talk: Guadalupe Rosales Presents “Southern California Chicano Party Crews And Rave Scene
In The 1990s’ at UCLA Chicano Studies Research Centre, 20/01/16,
http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/events/talk-guadalupe-rosales-presents-“southern-california-chicanoparty-crews-and-rave-scene-1990s, accessed 04/08/17.
105
Butler, J., Giving an Account of Oneself, Ashland, Ohio, Fordham University Press, 2005, p.7.
106
See Macherey, P., and Bundy, S., ‘Judith Butler and the Althusserian Theory of Subjection’ in
Décalages, Vol.1, 2, 13, 2012.
38
representation is complicit in its ability to render intelligible or marginalise and
malign communities and identities. In this sense the archive becomes a
source of citation for subject formation, where individuals acknowledge and
respond to their representation, thereby recognising themselves as subjects.
As such archives and archival processes can be a powerful tool to enable the
subject to (re)negotiate their place within the world.107
Significantly for Butler existing cultural norms are not ‘merely cultural’,
because they are inseparable from their material affects.108 She asks ‘is it
possible to distinguish, even analytically, between a lack of cultural
recognition and material oppression when the very definition of legal
‘personhood’ is rigorously circumscribed by cultural norms that are
indissociable from their material effects?’.109 Her observation enables us to
trace a socio-political impact of social subjectification and situate the archive
as a process that enables refiguring cultural norms. As such systematic
exclusion from the archive can symbolically annihilate and thereby influence
the material effects of personhood. Through a reading of Butler one can
observe that the self-narration, self-representation in the archive can
107
It worth acknowledging the oppressive legacy of photographic archives, which were often carefully
orchestrated systems of representation that are able to construct, rather than represent identity. The
photographic archive was often deployed by the state to guarantee ‘the authority of the images it
constructs to stand as evidence or register as truth’ due to the historically assumed positivist
authority assumed in its voracious encyclopaedism and syntagmatic configuration. However because
of the users ability to interject into the narrative this enables kind of agency which has historically not
been in the hands of the photographed subject. See Tagg, J, The Burden of Representation, Amherst,
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. See also Sekula, A., ‘The Body in the Archive’ in October, Vol.
39 (Winter, 1986b), pp. 3-64.
108
Butler, J., ‘Merely cultural’ in Social text 52/53, 1997, pp.265-277.
109
On the material effects of subjecthood see Bliss, E., ‘White Debt: Reckoning with what is owed and
what can never be repaid for racial privilege’ in New York Times Magazine, 02/12/15, available at
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/magazine/white-debt.html, accessed 04/08/17.
39
empower community members to ‘imagine otherwise’.
110
In accessing
representations of their history, communities are able situate themselves in
past, present and future.
Figure 5 Maria and Vivian at cousin Vero’s wedding in Huntington Park in 1994.
2.5 Affective dimensions
The last decade has seen the emergence of ‘affect’ as a point of enquiry
within cultural studies.111 Whilst it would lead too far to describe this ‘affective
turn’, what is common to such scholarly endeavours is an interest in
understanding affect, feelings and emotions as central to the social and the
political, and not just something reducible to the subjective and private
110
111
See Caswell, 2017.
See The Affective Turn, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough, Duke UP, 2007.
40
realm.112 Archival scholar Marika Cifor advocates for an examination of the
role of affect in archives. She suggests that the ’circulation of affect’ in the
archive is able to shape social change and engender political struggle.113
Indeed, Cifor aptly cites how the integration of affect throws into high relief
gendered binaries that underlie archival “science” and its subsequent
methodologies. The predominant gendering of scientific and scholarly
discourse sees socially constructed notions of the impersonal/personal,
objective/emotive, neutral/subjective, mind/soma presented as binaries.
These binaries are both underpinned by and reinforce an epistemological
regime which divides intellectual labour (predominantly conceived masculine)
from emotional labour (predominantly conceived as feminine).
114
The
continued exclusion of affect theory from the archive only serves to continue
to blind practitioners to the gendered epistemological regime underlying
archival “sciences” most treasured tenants and methodologies. Furthermore
it overlooks a more nuanced account of our engagement with archival and
material culture.115
In archives, Cifor suggests archivists should consider affect within our matrix
of appraisal, which can only serve to supplement our understanding of
material culture and complicate predominant institutionalised appraisal
112
Affect is in Nigel Thrifts words ‘complex, self-referential states of being’ which precede emotional
descriptions as the cultural interpretation of affects, in Sensitive Objects Affect and Material Culture
edited by Jonas Frykman and Maja Povrzanović Frykman, Nordic Academic Press, 2016, p.14.
113
Cifor, M., ‘Affecting relations: introducing affect theory to archival discourse’ in Archival Science,
2016, 16, pp.7–31, p.11.
114
See Fox Keller, E, Reflections on Gender and Science, Yale University Press, New Haven and London,
1996.
115
Affect studies pioneer Brian Massumi suggests affect works synesthetically requiring the senses to
work together. As such binary separation between ‘soma and matter’ is dismissed, see Jonas Frykman
and Maja Povrzanović Frykman, Nordic Academic Press, 2016, p.14.
41
frameworks which too often marginalise experiences and materials of
communities from the archive. Affect theory can help us analyse ‘when, how
and for whom and why particular objects become sensitive’.116 To recognise
and articulate that archival materials and cultural texts are encoded with
feelings and emotions only serves to expand our conceptualisations of what is
valued as sufficiently evidentiary to be included in the record.
Rosales when curating images for veteranas_and_rucas, describes her
appraisal system as one based on subjective interpretation and affect,
choosing specifically ‘images I felt were really empowering, with some history
or background’.117 As such her appraisal strategy can be seen as based on
affective contemplation of the cultural, social and historical relations that
inform our ‘sense of place in the world’.118 To chronicle affective experience
into appraisal practice would enable due cognisance of the social and
emotional energies that constitute material culture. That being the nostalgic,
liberatory, sentimental, traumatic, and oppressive valences that constitute
users embodied interactions with archival materials. To account for these, and
include them within the appraisal matrix means archives can adequately
attend to a more expanded concept of an evidentiary text’s recordness and
the significant properties of material culture.119
116
Frykman and Frykman, p.17.
http://www.vivala.com/los-angeles/veteranas-and-rucas-instagram-east/1662
118
Caswell, 2016, p.10.
119
The integration of affect theory and objects need not be considered too radical a shift. In the mid
th
20 century the Frankfurt school Marxists and cultural materialists suggested that our relation to
objects is characterised by structures of alienation and estrangement, both affective dimensions.
Objects not only offered ways to understand the malaise of contemporary and past conditions but
crucially had the potential to also transform social relations in the future. On the unsettled
boundaries between subject and object in cultural materialism see Mussell, S., ‘Object-oriented
117
42
The predominance of photos on veteranas_and_rucas is significant in relation
to recognising the affective dimensions particularly in photo archives.
Photography
theorists
have
long
grappled
with
the
affective
and
phenomenological dimensions of interpreting a photograph.120 Our ways of
seeing are conditioned profoundly by habit, ideology and convention.
Traditional habits of seeing are based on identifying with characters, seeking
out signifiers and imputing intention. 121 The family photograph or personal
portrait is deeply imbibed with affective and subjective potential, they are
about social and emotional communication and feature gestures, motifs,
symbols and social routines. Their aesthetics can reveal a common
vernacular, they function both as a personal keepsake and social tool for the
creation of identity, culture and history; they are at once personal and political.
On Feburary 6th 2017 Rosales asked ‘Why is veteranas_and_rucas Instagram
important to you How is this page unique from others?’. Users responded with
279 comments which illustrated the highly personal, affective, social and
emotional impact that archive had made on the lives of users, a sample of
which can be seen in Appendix A (page 65). Acknowledging the affective
dimensions and impact from these user comments, one can appreciate how
veteranas_and_rucas affects an intimacy and a discreet nostalgia. The
concept of nostalgia has long been theorised as having the ability to vitalise or
debilitate. It is most commonly understood as a longing for halcyon days gone
Marxism’, Mute, 28/08/13 available at http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/object-orientedmarxism, accessd 04/08/17.
120
See Barthes, R., Camera Lucida: reflections on photography, New York, Hill and Wang, 1981,
Camera Lucida, is one of the most influential, if not the most widely read study on photography, is
underpinned by Barthes grieving his recently lost mother, as he looks for her among old photographs.
121
Berger, J., Ways of Seeing, British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1973.
43
by. In its most negative versions it renders a rose tinted recollection of the
past, where the rough edges of reality are balmed in idealism. This aspect of
nostalgia often serves as a stultifying means to avoid a critical examination of
the past and present, enabling a tacit acceptance of the status quo. 122
However Cifor reminds us that ‘[a]rchives are a powerful trigger for nostalgia
on personal and collective levels’.123 In a bid to rescue nostalgia, she argues
for its critical potential, she suggests ‘critical nostalgia’ has the ability to both
emphasise ‘longing for past time and space in order to attend to its
ambivalences and complexities’: able to straddle both critical thinking and
longing.124
Through
this
prism,
the
affect
of
nostalgia
apparent
in
the
veteranas_and_rucas archive attests to the fact that the social memory of
Latin(a) culture is only partial, and as such the archive serves as a timely
reminder for the need of the active production of identity histories in the
present. This can be surmised as a nostalgic affect that ‘arises from an
awareness of distance between the past and the present, an awareness that
something has been “shattered” and is in danger of being lost. And it is this
shattering that creates the distance necessary for criticism…Living among the
debris of the past, the nostalgic’s challenge is to construct a world and an
identity out of this debris.’ 125 Thus nostalgia in this instance pertains an
actively critical and socially mobilising potential.
122
On nostalgia see Wilson, J., Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning, Lewisburg Bucknell University Press,
2005.
123
Cifor, M. L., ‘Your Nostalgia is Killing Me’: Activism, Affect and the Archives of HIV/AIDS, PhD
Thesis, UCLA: Information Studies, 2017, p.19.
124
Cifor, 2017, p.254
125
Steven T. Ostovich, quoted in Wilson, p. 46.
44
2.6 Inclusion in institutions
According to Hall the inclusions and exclusions from our national stories and
heritage institutions reinforce those very inclusions and exclusions in lived and
experienced society. He suggests ‘a shared national identity thus depends on
the cultural meanings, which bind each member individually into the large
national story… The National Heritage is a powerful source of such meanings.
It follows that those who cannot see themselves reflected in its mirror cannot
properly “belong”. 126 For Hall, culture can be defined in terms of
shared
‘maps of meaning’ or shared conceptual maps’, those ‘frameworks of
intelligibility’ which enable people to see themselves reflected. 127 Archives
such as veteranas_and_rucas, expand those maps and render new territories
for national heritage to acknowledge and intersect with. The issue then
becomes not how archivists can appropriate these technologies for their
purposes but instead how can the outputs and archives created on these
technologies be preserved and managed?
In light of this question it is worth mentioning that archival collections
originating from community endeavours or social movements do not always
want to form an affinity with mainstream institutions of national heritage.128
Relationships
between
mainstream
formal
archive
and
participatory
community archival groups can be contentious, particularly in instances where
126
Hall quoted in Flinn, 2010.
See video lecture Stuart Hall: Representation and the Media, dir. Sut Jhally. Media Education
Foundation, 1997, colour. 55 min, full length preview available at
https://shop.mediaed.org/representation--the-media-p174.aspx, accessed 04/08/17.
128
On this see Fife, K., The Personal is Historical: The Ethics of Archiving Zine Subcultures, Masters
thesis, UCL, 2013.
127
45
they invoke oppressive legacies. Indeed integration into a traditional institution
can subvert the work that a community archive makes to redefine their
historical narrative and have agency in self representation. In a conversation
between Rosales and Rhizome director Micheal Connor on the subject of
hypothetically
integrating
veteranas_and_rucas
with
formal
memory
institution, Rosales remarked:
‘I didn’t feel like the institutions should have this stuff 100%’, it does feel
like material that needs to be studied and researched, that’s what I
wanted to do there but, I don’t know it’s a little complicated’
Connor: ‘it reminds me of, I went to school in North Carolina we talked a
lot about Appalachian culture and my professors would be like ‘when the
government sends the guy to document your culture that’s when you
know you’re on the way out, and you know that’s bad news, you don’t
want that guy to come around! And your Instagram is not that thing, and
it’s specifically not because it’s an active site where memory is actively
produced, not something where memory goes to die.”
Rosales: “Right, well it feels more like a collaboration with the audience or
the followers, that’s how I treat it, I treat it more like a I’m building this
platform for people to have dialogue and share photographs, rather than
you’ve got to bring this to a library’
Connor: ‘So you’ve created in some way a context and the work means
something in this context…’129
The dialogue between Rosales and Connor illuminates the sensitivity in
relation to handing over community materials over to established institutions.
It also illustrates the importance of the context and the social process in
community archives on social media. Rosales comments that social
processes and context that constitute the participatory community archive are
as important as the archives materials. To borrow from Terranova, it is the
‘processual dynamic’ of the information that is salient value to the archive.
129
Transcribed by author from panel discussion "Who Owns Digital Social Media?" presented by
Rhizome at the New Museum, 02/18/16, available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g22DDaMZrec , accessed: 04/08/17.
46
This fundamental dimension to the veteranas_and_rucas archive is at odds
with most institutions appraisal and preservation approaches, and the
entrenched
institutional
focus
on
the
discrete
physical
artefact
or
‘wunderkammer’ approach, as outlined in chapter one.
As such the nature of these social media artefacts disrupt standard archival
protocols. These archival collections require developing frameworks and
conceptual methodologies which can attend to the social and material
energies that constitute them. Archives professionals have a unique
opportunity to reflect on how they can enable and ensure the long term
preservation and care of these archives in national cultural heritage. What is
the role of archivists in such endeavours? Acknowledging the personal and
often sensitive nature of these collections if archivists align closely with post
custodial orientation and assume that the collections will be held and
managed primarily within the communities, how can archivists serve those
communities in ensuring the long term continuity of those collections?130 Can
archivists develop appropriate care and preservation frameworks that might
also be translated to inform and expand institutional archival policies? Indeed
archival scholar Victor Gray suggests archivists acknowledge their role as
‘holders of archival knowledge’, and redirect their focus to ‘the mantle of
outreach’, to make the profession truly valuable to participatory, community
and non-traditional archival endeavours. 131 However the need remains to
130
On these questions see Stevens, M., Flinn, A., Shepherd., E., ‘New frameworks for community
engagement in the archive sector: from handing over to handing on’ in International Journal of
Heritage Studies 16:1-2, pages 59-76.
131
Gray, V., ‘Who's that Knocking on Our Door?’: Archives, Outreach and Community in Journal of the
Society of Archivists Vol. 29 , Iss. 1,2008, p.7.
47
develop a dialogue and conceptual framework that can inform approaching
community archives on social media.
48
Chapter 3
3.1 Preservation of Participtation
Memory institutions have developed strategies to preserve digital artefacts
such as e-books and journals, personal digital data, digital research data
usually through strategies such as emulation, migration and storage.
Preservation approaches to complex digital objects are so not straightforward
and challenge traditional musealogical approaches to preservation. These
participatory community archives on social media are complex objects, and
demand a rethinking of the categories of archival authenticity and integrity in
order to develop preservation frameworks adequate to their needs.
According to digital curation specialist David Anderson the essential first step
when considering complex digital objects is to acknowledge that there are
‘multiple layers of difficulty’ when trying to analyse them. 132 According to
Anderson, this requires recognising the ‘interconnectedness’ of the complex
digital object with its technical environments.133 Research has demonstrated
that using preservation approaches such as emulation to preserve
videogames necessitates a broad analysis of the digital object in order to
record, characterise and develop an ontology of the object’s significant
properties and its technical environment. The following section will examine
these ‘multiple layers of difficulty’ when considering how to preerve an archive
like veteranas_and_rucas, and then reflect on some approaches from a range
132
Konstantelos, L., Delve, J., Anderson, D., Billenness, C., Baker, D Dobreva, M., The Preservation of
Complex Objects Volume 2 Software Art, 2012, p.9.
133
Konstantelos et al., p.9.
49
of disciplines in order to suggest alternative conceptual frameworks that
archivists might borrow from to attend to participatory digital archives on
social media.
3.2 Ecology of archives on social media
Whilst archiving the web is nothing new, archiving dynamic social media in
view of preserving community and cultural heritage is in its relative infancy.
The dynamic web is a performance of digital content, rendering and
performing binary code. It exists within a larger computational environment;
this consists of digital software applications, operating systems and hardware
platforms and multiple human actors. To engage with the web requires
complex engagement modalities in the form of human cognition, interaction,
dynamic navigation and decision making. As DocNow engineer Ed Summers
notes ‘the experience [of the web] is performative – it’s a particular set of
contingencies that has more in common with preserving a dance piece or
performance art than what we normally think of as digital preservation. It is a
performance that involves many actors, but the primary role is yours.’134
To attend to this shift Rhizome’s 2016 Webrecorder and in The Internet
Archives’ 2012 subscription based Archive It have since emerged. These
move beyond traditional web crawlers which functioned in a largely heuristic
sense. Instead tools like Webrecorder are able to capture dynamic and
interactive embedded content in the page from the point of view of a human
user, thus capturing the performative nature of the web. Webrecorder is a
134
Summers, E., ‘The Web as Performance’ on InkDroid, March 31, 2017, available at
https://inkdroid.org/2017/03/31/webrecorderplayer/, accessed 04/08/17.
50
complex software that enables users to create a high-fidelity and interactive
collection of social media and other dynamic content. When using
Webrecorder the content of the webpage is captured and then downloaded as
a WARC file, therefore if the user was to disconnect from the Internet they
would still be able to interact with the content as if they were still online,
enabling regular Internet users to determine and own the web archiving
process. Yet whilst this tool provides a solution to capturing the content, it
requires a conceptual shift in archival protocol of the user and/or archivist
actively documenting the website. This requires an altered sense of
authenticity and integrity, than found in the traditional archival theory.
3.3 Authenticity and Integrity adapted
The following then will take heed of Summers observation and trace an affinity
between participatory community archives on social media and the
preservation of non-traditional artworks, such as performance, process and
software artworks. Like non-traditional artworks participatory community
online archives challenge traditional cataloguing systems and musealogical
approaches. They require complex, cross-disciplinary documentation which
aligns itself more closely with an ecological point of view as seen in arts
preservation approaches, than a traditional archival frameworks.
Firstly participatory community archives on social media, similarly to nontraditional art forms require a reconceptualization of the traditional
musealogical tenants of fixity, authenticity, integrity and provenance. In order
to ensure their long-term continuity non-traditional and media art forms often
51
arts-conservationists preserve artefacts as variable manifestations rather than
a fixed object. 135 In the digital context the concept of an ‘original’ digital
document is fleeting, the very information which generates a digital
representation is gleaned from an array sources, moreover each time it is
recreated the attribute data on which the representation is based constantly
changes. Digital conservator Seamus Ross suggests perhaps the ‘first
renderings of digital objects might be best referred to as an initial
representation or instantiation’.136 Ross suggests that to ensure integrity and
authenticity of the digital object all subsequent instantiations need to share a
‘precision of resemblance in content, functionality and behaviour with the
initial instantiation’.
137
Thereby creating a more dynamic version of
authenticity.
However the challenge remains in ensuring the integrity of instantiations and
their likeness to the original event, Ross asks, ‘how can we record the
functionality and behaviour as well as the content of that initial instantiation (II)
so that we can validate subsequent instantiations? Where subsequent
instantiations (SI) share precision of resemblance in content, functionality and
behaviour with the initial instantiations, the ‘SI’ can be said to have the same
authenticity and integrity as the ‘IIs’.’138 In this sense the notion of provenance
is recalibrated into a chain of well-documented instantiations. This notion of
provenance as not informed by an original or single record creator is adaptive
135
On this see Innocenti, P., ‘Bridging the gap in digital art preservation: interdisciplinary reflections
on authenticity, longevity and potential collaborations’ in The Preservation of Complex Objects. JISC,
UK, 2012, pp. 71-84.
136
Ross quoted in Innocenti, p.76
137
Ross quoted in Innocenti, p.76.
138
Ross quoted in Innocenti, p.76.
52
enough to approach multiple author records. Seen this ‘allographic’ way,
authenticity is flexible enough to contend with complex digital artefacts
variable nature.139 Authenticity and trustworthiness is dependent on its ‘fidelity
to the original event’, the precise resemblance of content, functionality and
behaviour with the initial instantiation. 140 In this way authenticity is not
conceived as the original condition, but instead authenticity becomes
understood as a dynamic process. Part of that dynamic process then is to
ensure there is a trustworthy chain of documentary evidence about the
complex digital artefacts origins, custody and ownership, and its various
instantiations.
Having borrowed from digital preservation strategies and non-traditional art
preservations adapted notions of authenticity, provenance and integrity, a key
aspect remains in capturing participatory community archives online: their
context. Taking Terranova’s observations about the contemporary digital era
as outlined in the introduction, veteranas_and_rucas is clearly a phenomena
that can only be meaningfully understood when its informational dynamics are
considered. This has been noted by information specialist Luke Tredinnik who
argues in the digital era that authenticity is ‘no longer rooted in the material
cultural artefact and thus in the physical object but rather the way it is used
and contextualised’.141 These informational dynamics pivot around how it is
conceived and grasped by the community. It is the tacit dimensions of
veteranas_and_rucas
conception
and
139
Innocenti’s term see Innocenti p.78.
Innocenti, p.78.
141
Tredinnik cited in Convery, N., p.193.
140
53
reception
as
seen
in
the
epistemological, affective and social impact of the archive outlined in chapter
two, which exceed traditional archival approaches.
In response to electronic records archival theorist Hugh Taylor’s observed the
need to return to the oral tradition. Taylor saw that ‘[e]lectronic
communication, especially in its interactive mode’ has the ability to ‘become a
continuous discourse without trace, as both act and record occur
simultaneously with little or no media delay or survival.’142 In response to this
Taylor suggested a ‘return to conceptual orality in the wake of automation’,
which he posited was a situation where an evidentiary text or cultural artefact
only gains meaning so long as they are ‘closely related to their own context
and to actions arising form that context’.143 For Taylor the oral tradition saw a
records meaning arose not in the records themselves but rather in the
‘transactions and customs to which they bore witness as ‘evidences.’144 This
oral tradition requires the use of a documentation strategy to capture the
context of a collection. 145 To account for the why, what and for whom a
collection was created, as well as the collections relationship to other
systems.
Traditionally a documentation strategy consists of four activities, these are: ‘1.
choosing and defining the topic to be documented, 2. selecting the advisors
and establishing the site for the strategy, 3. structuring the inquiry and
142
Hugh Taylor cited in Cook, T., ‘Macroappraisal in theory and practice: origins, characteristics, and
implementation in Canada, 1950–2000.’ Archival Science 5, no. 2, 2005, pp.101-161, p.123.
143
Taylor cited in Cook, p.123.
144
Taylor cited in Cook, p.123.
145
Indeed recently Christie Peterson suggested that in archiving the internet archivists are essentially
th
pursuing an updated version of the documentary strategists of the late 20 century, see ‘Web
Archives Performans & Capture’ on Archivy, Dec 15, 2015, available https://medium.com/onarchivy/web-archives-performance-capture-78f06c119850, accessed 13/08/17.
54
examining the form and substance of the available documentation, and 4.
selecting and placing the documentation.”146 If archivists are to draw up a
documentation strategy to attend to participatory community archives on
social media they will need to incorporate the ecology that makes up the
archive, that being its social, environmental and tacit dimensions. Given the
social
and
affective
dimensions
in
an
archival
collection
like
veteranas_and_rucas this would necessitate stakeholder engagement and
community outreach, and specifically participatory conservation.
3.4 Participatory conservation
Archaeological sites are often on contested ground with a range of social
implications. Conservationists and archaeologists acknowledge the increasing
difficulty to deny their complicity in a heritage industry that ‘commodifies the
past and packages it for hegemonic narrations of history’.147 As such efforts to
repatriate materials to those who seek to reclaim ancestral relics and engage
in public outreach during site conservation processes have increased.
Archaeological conservationist Glenn Wharton suggests that despite the
pragmatic nature of the conservation discipline there is a need for models that
incorporate the non-professional voices of those who are directly impacted by
the conservation project. He argues for developing conservation models that
incorporate multiple and non-professional voices into conservation decision
146
Samuels, Helen. ‘Who controls the past’, in The American Archivist, 49, no. 2, 1986, pp. 109-124,
p.116.
147
Wharton, G., ‘Collaboration And Community Involvement In Archaeological Conservation’ Current
Trends and Future Directions, edited by Emily Williams and Claire Peachey in 2010, p.201.
55
making and actions, and can contribute and challenge and the conservation
authority.148
A striking similarity between participatory models in archaeological site and
participatory community archives online is the intergenerational social
dimension. This conceptual shift to emphasising and taking into account the
human dimension of archaeological sites and objects is a significant one and
perhaps helpful to the archival community who seek to develop better models
for aiding in the long term preservation of community archives on social
media. In archaeological sites the descendants of those who created the site
may remain local and have added affective investment in the project. This
personal connection can be understood as operating on a participatory
community archive such as veteranas_and_rucas whose photographs feature
friends and family of users, and thus users have an added interest and
investment in the archive. This social and affective dimension requires a
sensitive, ethical and socially aware outlook.
Conceptual participatory models that incorporate the views of the public are
apparent in conservation circles but by no means widely accepted and theory
is rarely translated to practice. However one such an instance can be seen in
Wharton’s account of a 1996 conservation project of ‘King Kamehameda I’
sculpture, a monumental painted brass sculpture of the first king of united
Hawaii.149 As lead project conservator Wharton drew a report that suggested
148
Wharton, 2010, p. 201.
Wharton, G., ‘Dynamics of Participatory Conservation: The Kamehameha Sculpture Project’ in
Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, Vol. 47, 2008, pp.159-173
149
56
due to local interest the conservation project should be developed as a
participatory project. His proposal was originally rejected by the state capital
authorities, however despite opposition he secured funding as a multi-agency
partnership for locally based, participatory project. The project was based on
the following mantles: public outreach, professional collaboration, community
involvement, as well as taking into account the political and regulatory arena.
This consisted of conducting interviews with community members to help
determine the best and most ethical plan of approach.
Throughout Wharton’s account he stresses the benefit of negotiated
conservation treatment. He writes ‘some of the most helpful information came
from reactions to conservation treatment procedures, as the sculptures
surface visually changed through progressive stages.’ 150 Furthermore the
social dynamics of participatory conservation encouraged not only the
enrichment of technical information but contextual information. Public
outreach enabled evolving cultural and evolved value-added knowledge that
could only have been ‘elicited through the conservation process itself’. 151
Wharton’s
account
demonstrates
integrating
public
concerns
into
conservation research promotes the interests of the archaeologist (read
archivist), and also crucially enables the contribution of evolved cultural and
value added knowledge. Moreover the project enabled a kind of
democratisation of historical process, as Wharton notes, the non-professional
contributors to the project found ‘value in an active process of exploring
versions of the past and deciding how to communicate the past to future
150
151
Wharton, 2008, p.162.
Wharton, 2008, p.170.
57
generations’.
152
This observation situates non-professionals as actively
benefiting from and contributing to deciding ‘what kind of past should the
future have?’, the very question which instigated this study.
Whilst Wharton’s paper should be considered exemplary in the illustration of
participation theory into practice; scholars in the archaeological field continue
to generate and develop conceptual and practical models of participatory
conservation. Wharton points out the growing literature on social inclusion in
conservation, with a focus on how integrating non-professional and nontechnical expertise can enhance conservation plans.
For example,
archaeological conservator Erica Avrami notes that community engagement in
conservation can enable the on-going care and maintenance of heritage
objects, this she terms ‘sustainable conservation’.153 Her case study is an
example in how conservators are able to establish links with communities,
drawing on and contributing to the knowledge base so that community
participation can inform and influence conservation decisions. Conservators
Judith Levinson and Linda Nieuwenhuizen describe the beneficial impact of
negotiation when treating culturally sensitive materials with representatives
from indigenous communities at the American Museum of Natural History in
their essay Chiefly feasts: A collaborative effort.154 Additionally archaeologist
Nancy Odegaard created a model for considering both physical and cultural
criteria when developing conservation plans alongside communities it will
152
Wharton, 2008, p.170.
Avrami, E., cited in Wharton, 2008, p. 160.
154
Levinson, Judith, and Linda Nieuwenhuizen. ‘Chiefly feasts: A collaborative effort’, in Loss
compensation: Technical and philosophical issues. Objects Specialty Group Postprints, 2, 1994, p.9-21.
Also cited in Wharton, 2008, p.160.
153
58
impact.155 Such scholarly developments aid in ameliorating what conservator
Miriam Clavir has highlighted as how museum values can often contrast with
the communities they hold materials on.156
In the same trajectory archives are making efforts to create community
projects which integrate a participatory approach to archiving and
preservation. In ‘Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation’ archivist Dr.
Kimberly Christen describes her account of the pluralised heritage project the
‘Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal’, an archival project she co-directed at
Washington State University.157 The project used digital content management
tools to devise an open source platform ‘Mukurtu’, to digitally repatriate
cultural materials of three Pacific North-Western tribes in the U.S. 158 It
imaginatively rethought traditional notions of stewardship by enabling cocuration with tribal representatives, ensuring multiple authorial voices and
value-added knowledge in the production and preservation of the information
objects.159 Furthermore it is widely noted in the digital preservation community
that digital information management depends crucially on ‘user input and
responsibility’ as it does on professional expertise.160
155
Odegaard, N. ‘Artists' Intent: Material Culture Studies and Conservation’, Journal of the American
Institute for Conservation, 1995, 34, 3, pp.187-193, cited in Wharton, 2008, p.160.
156
See Clavir, M., Preserving What is Valued: Museums, Conservation and First Nations, Vancouver
BC, UBC Press, 2002, cited in Wharton, 2008, p.160.
157
See Christen.
158
http://mukurtu.org/about/ (last accessed 10/12/2016).
159
On information objects and value-added archival description see Duff, W. and Harris, V., ‘Stories
and Names: Archival Description’ in Archival Science, September 2002, Volume 2, Issue 3, pp. 263–
285.
160
Convery p.193
59
Meeting the needs of community archives on social media reveals a close
relationship with ethics, activism and intellectual property arrangements.161 A
collaborative participatory conservation policy can ensure that the voices
within these archives are honoured and take positive steps forward in the
conservation of community materials and archives. A documentation strategy
engaging these projects this would entail stakeholder engagement such as
the completion of questionnaires documenting the collection at the time of
acquisition. These questionnaires could be oral or written interviews with
authors, co-authors, co-creators, conservation, preservation, curatorial,
archival, community and users. Such community engagement will also
determine the intent and expectations or the long-term preservation of the
archive. Implementing a survey to evaluate the extent, risks; ethical and
otherwise, of the collection and the preservation needs associated with them.
Such research can help aid in terms of risk management, data protection
concerns and report any ethical, access and copyright implications.
Furthermore semi-formal interviews may incorporate some of the functionality
of a donor policy. Given the rich and often sensitive content of participatory
archives on social media this could be an opportunity in which the community
can maintain some agency over who might be able to access and research
these collections.
3.5 Participatory Metadata and Folksonomy
161
Jules, B., Some Thoughts on Ethics and DocNow’ in DocNow, 03/06/16, available at
https://news.docnow.io/some>thoughts>on>ethics>and>docnow>
d19cfec427f2#.v9dbf93sa accessed 24/02/17.
60
An area that could inform a participatory conservation process is the
development of democratised or grassroots metadata. The nature of
descriptive vocabularies used in participatory archives on social media, where
they originate, the motivation for their creation, the collections they emerge
from, and their search purposes needs be carefully considered and
preserved. 162 Metadata standards provide a common ground in which a
community can identify, understand and relate. When established on a grand
scale metadata standards have ‘immediate social implications’.163 Standards
are usually developed in a top down system, by standards developing bodies,
such as the International Standards Organisation and are often adopted on a
broad scale. However increasingly folksonomies and tagging systems are
gaining increased popularity over corporately built taxonomies because of
their user focused and instinctive nature.164
Given the grassroots nature of participatory community collections on social
media it would however necessitate a different kind of metadata standards.
Projects such as the Rhizome Vocab Wiki have sought to develop a different,
grassroots model for developing metadata standards. Rhizome found that the
broad scale ‘Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus’ (AAT) lacked terms to
describe the nuances and granularity of new media art.165 Rinehart notes that
in 2008 the AAT did not have an entry for net art, internet art or post-net art
the very medium which informs the content of much of Rhizome’s online art
162
On this see Jorgensen,C., ‘Photos: Flickr, Facebook and other social networking sites’ in Managing
Digital Cultural Objects: Analysis, Discovery and Retrieval eds. Foster, A., and Rafferty, P., Facet
Publishing, London, 2016.
163
Rinehart, p.59.
164
Convey p.201.
165
Rinhehart p.59.
61
archive artbase. Rhizome responded by collaborating with institutions and
Getty that they would gather groups of experts to develop terms, inviting
artists and the public to contribute. The most commonly used terms
developed by the grassroots community informed the consensus. This
practice of folksonomy by non-professionals was then combined with the
terms developed by the professionals and was a hybrid effort to create new
metadata terms. Such approaches could see the development of fruitful
engagement with archival practitioners and community archives in better
defining
how
collections
should
be
termed
and
expand
metadata
epistemologies. A participatory conservation process and metadata can lead
to better understandings of authenticity and integrity, all tenets dear to the
archival community. Whilst these practices may be indeed expensive, labourintensive and perhaps not conducive to widespread adoption there are
elements that can hopefully be replicated in participatory archival projects on
social media. Extended processes of public discussion, understandings about
how the archive fits into contemporary life and non-technical expertise from
users would serve ensuring the long term continuity, authenticity and integrity
of participatory projects well.
62
4.0 Conclusion
Symbolic annihilation illuminates that an absence of representation in society
is indissociable from its tangible social affects. The archive is a tool able to
represent, render intelligible, and provide a point of self-articulation for
individuals and communities. It is able to influence and shape the
understandings, expectations, wants and needs of people. Failures of care in
archives and national heritage can contribute to feelings of alienation,
marginalisation and social disempowerment. Lack of representation can erase
groups and individuals from public consciousness and reinforce existing
hegemonic social relations. However, archives have the possibility to enable
‘representational belonging’, that being the emotional and political dimension
of seeing yourself represented in the archive when you have felt previously
excluded.
This dissertation has sought to consider in more detail the fruitful opportunities
and ‘representational belonging’ offered by community and participatory
archives on social media. Social media’s reach, accessibility and ease of use
enable projects and materials such as veteranas_and_rucas to open up the
historical record to the life and experiences of the Latin(a) American
community in Los Angeles in ways that are unimaginable in traditional archival
practice and outlets. Materials and projects operating on social media do not
fit easily into predominant guidelines, frameworks and traditional archival
theory. To attend to them requires interdisciplinary research and looking
beyond archival traditional archival tenets and international guidelines. By
utilising affect theory and Cifor’s affective archival discourse, as well as
63
Caswell’s social, epistemological and ontological frameworks, archivists can
illuminate the need for an expanded notion of what designates phenomena as
archival. Including affect theory into appraisal matrices dealing with
community heritage materials can only serve to enrich archives and the
historical record, increasing the potential for cultural heritage to have
beneficial social impact.
To ensure the inclusion of community archives on social media requires
redressing longstanding notions of formal and informal cultural production.
Whilst terms like formal and informal are useful when analysing the dynamics
of cultural production, they are too often invoked to create an essentialising
criterion of high (formal) or low (informal) culture. The theory shapes the
practice and if not used carefully these terms are invoked to perpetuate the
othering of cultural productions in collective social memory discourse and
institutions. If scholars and archivists alike accept that these days all culture is
in some way circumscribed by Internet enabled neoliberal capitalism,
archivists can begin to accommodate current cultural productions into national
and cultural heritage in a timely fashion as opposed to denying their cultural
validity, watching them become obsolete and regretting it later. To accept the
existing state of culture in our informational era would ensure that
participatory
community
archives
on
social
media,
such
veteranas_and_rucas, will be adequately preserved for future generations.
64
as
When ensuring the long-term continuity of community archives on social
media it is clear there will be ‘no one silver bullet solution’. 166 It requires
challenging and changing ontologies and professional assumptions. The
opportunities afforded by social media for community archives necessitates a
shift in professional identity for archivists. It will most likely see archivists
become ‘mantles of outreach’ or ‘knowledge mediators’ using their expertise
to evolve from custodian to facilitator, seeing archivists play an advisory role
to communities. 167 Looking to archaeological accounts of participatory
conservation this thesis sought to demonstrate that such activity is possible
and moreover desirable as publically engaged preservation approaches
enables ‘evolving cultural knowledge’, enriching both technical and contextual
information in the archive.168 Conscious of this thesis’ limitations as a purely
speculative diagnostic exploration, it has nevertheless sought to demonstrate
that experimenting with a range of interdisciplinary approaches and dialogue
will be necessary.
These are all pieces in the preservation puzzle when approaching new
opportunities afforded by cultural and community archives on social media.
Through the explication of a range of examples, this thesis hopes to have
illustrated that whilst technology is an important aspect to invigorating the
archives community, it is through fostering collaborative practice and
engaging actively with communities that archivists can adequately redress the
historic and epistemic exclusion of cultures, identities and communities.
166
Rineharts term, p. 71.
Convery, p. 202.
168
Whatrons term, see Wharton, p. 170.
167
65
66
Appendix A
User comments in response to ‘Why is Veteranas and Rucas important to you?’
Available at https://www.instagram.com/p/BQLbeHVgycq/?taken-by=veteranas_and_rucas
Accessed 11/08/17
67
List of Figures
Figure 1, page 31.
Teach. Organize. Resist. Repeat. "The East Los Angeles Walkouts or
Chicano Blowouts were a series of 1968 protests by Chicano students against
unequal conditions in Los Angeles Unified School District high schools.
Photo coursey of Veteranas and Rucas
Available at https://www.instagram.com/p/BULB8p_Fve8/
Accessed 11/08/17
Figure 2, page 34.
Barrio Norwalk 1978
Photo courtesy of @raegabriela/Veteranas and Rucas
Available
at
https://www.instagram.com/p/BK_wdBYBbH_/?takenby=veteranas_and_rucas
Figure 3, page 35.
Oscar Castillo, "Education Not Repression (Roosevelt High School
Walkouts)," 1970
Avalilable at https://www.instagram.com/p/BP0T932BPWy/?hl=en&takenby=veteranas_and_rucas
Accessed 11/08/17
Figure 4, page 37.
Author screenshot of map_pointz Instagram page (courtesy of map_pointz)
Available at https://www.instagram.com/map_pointz/?hl=en
Accessed 11/08/17
Figure 5, page 40.
Maria and Vivian at cousin Vero’s wedding in Huntington Park in 1994.
Photo courtesy of @velvetVivian/Veteranas and Rucas
Available
at
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSew91dFQ0y/?takenby=veteranas_and_rucas
Accessed 11/08/17
68
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Archiving Social Memory in the Age of Social Media: Exploring the opportunities and challenges of archival collections on social media
In the age of social media the nature of records and social memory is fundamentally changed. The archive is a tool used in the process of transforming social experience, memories and history into collective remembering. The increased prevalence of cultural archives and collections generated on social media present challenges to traditional concepts of what constitutes an archival record and disrupt standard archival protocols and procedures set by international guidelines. Contending that archival appraisal frameworks and protocols codify what is kept and what is left out of the archives and thus societal memory, this thesis will be a diagnostic exploration looking at the opportunities and challenges these types of archival collections present to contemporary professional practice. Exploring specifically the Instagram based community archive veteranas_and_rucas, it will argue for an expanded professional approach to appraisal and preservation to integrate the affective, epistemological, ontological and social valences of such an archival project. Borrowing from arts and archaeological conservation practices it draws upon real life examples to speculatively reconcile these challenges and provide examples to attend to the preservation requirements demanded by these projects. ...Read more
