Microfilms and Time

2016

The technology of microfilm was one of the many technical improvements of the 19th century, which combined the advances of photography to fix images with the microscope optics to reduce them. Since then, microfilming has spread slowly in quite particular fields. Embraced by spies, shaped by librarians, loved by genealogists, microphotography presents a paradox as the basis of its survival: while the conservation of documents is probably its main goal, access to the information may be its principal obstacle. Almost like a riddle, each reel may contain hundreds of documents, but they cannot be read without the proper device. Our aim is to tackle microfilming from the perspectives of media archeology and microhistory, i.e., looking for small stories and affairs related to this imaging technique, which can still be found in the 21st century. That is why we would like to focus on three matters of this media: the traditional uses of microfilm for archival purposes, considering both succes...

Diaries and photos are technologies that solicit and generate content, and they are places to archive and to keep. The content elicited by a diary is enmeshed with a physical format that emphasises daily or hourly rhythms of life; the content and format co-exist in tension with fleeting temporality and certain mortality. Likewise, the photograph records an impression of a single moment in order to preserve that moment for an unknowable future. This paper shows how the content of diaries and photographs is shaped by a moral obligation to account for time and a temporal orientation to the future. Nineteenth century diaries and photographs are deterministic technologies orienting their users’ actions within the historical context of the industrial revolution. They both promise reparation in anticipation of future losses (adjudged on a numberless balance sheet of life) and demand an active account of personal productivity; in these discursive operations, the diary and photograph may aggravate rather than answer anxieties about time.

2021

International Journal of Electronic …, 2010

Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network

The important relationship between the material arrangement of the archive and its accompanying catalogue is discussed and rationalised from a position inside the institution, from where I argue that an understanding of physical and contextual relationships between interconnecting units is critical to the spatiotemporal understanding of the archived image. The archive catalogue list is determined by the original order of the archive material and is subsequently central to the maintenance of order, functioning as ‘detector’ and ‘effector’ (Hood and Margetts 2007). There is a consideration of the comparatively new concept of original order from its development in the late 1880s publication known as the ‘Dutch Manual’. This manual for archivists emphasised recordkeeping without anticipating specific future use, a methodology that still persists today. The diachronic nature of archival ordering systems, dependant as it is on collection and use by original owners, is examined alongside i...

Do the new archiving machines, Jacques Derrida asks, affect the essentials of what Freud demonstrated with the Mystic Pad? The Mystic Pad represented memory as the internal archivization of external perceptions. Archivization, however, produces as much as it records the event. This paper focuses on the ways in which handwriting on, in or with new archiving machines impresses archivization.

2016

This essay explores the philosophy of time and documents. It first presents a number of theories of time and discusses how time has been applied in research on documents to date. These applications have been limited by their conceptualization of time. In order to extend our understanding of documental time, this paper draws from Heidegger's experiential theory of time and the theory of document transaction in order to introduce a theory of documental time. In documental time, the past and future of the person and the past and future of the object cohere in a shared present. The special case of numinous document experiences—and numinous time—is also explored.

2003

Sonja Neef, José van Dijck, and Eric Ketelaar (eds.), Sign here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2006), pp. 183-195. , 2006

Do the new archiving machines, Jacques Derrida asks, affect the essentials of what Freud demonstrated with the Mystic Pad? The Mystic Pad represented memory as the internal archivization of external perceptions. Archivization, however, produces as much as it records the event. This paper focuses on the ways in which handwriting on, in or with new archiving machines impresses archivization.

History Workshop Journal