Announcing the “Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age” Book Collection and NeMLA Panel
The BU Center for the Humanities hosts forums on topics of significance to humanities scholars and the broader public. These forums bring a range of professional and institutional perspectives into dialogue with the intention of generating future, ongoing discussion. Forum 2017 has fulfilled this mandate in the form of a collection, Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age, edited by Center director Susan Mizruchi and due to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in April of this year. The collection features prominent scholars and practitioners working in the fields of digital humanities, archives, and preservation, most of whom participated at Forum 2017.
As Mizruchi writes in the introduction to the edited collection, “The role of archives and libraries in our digital age is one of the most pressing concerns of humanists, scholars, and citizens worldwide. Questions of what to keep and how to keep it touch the very core of who we are as individuals, cultures, nations, and humankind.”
Invoking contemporary political exigencies, Mizruchi further notes, “Now, more than ever, the accessibility of curated historical information, the sharing of resources, and the uses of digitization raise questions central to democratic societies.”
In addition to accessibility, the collection posits preservation as a political act––important to restoring the stories and perspectives of “lost” communities to fuller view and, at times, producing new communities in the process. “As those who study politically embattled nations have revealed, libraries and archives hold secrets, and the recuperation of their contents can both expose the violence of authoritarian regimes and recover the memories of their victims. Regimes destroy collections as expressions of power, and their restitution can be tantamount to redressing injustices and identifying lost peoples,” writes Mizruchi.
Forum 2017 participant and collection contributor Beatriz Jaguaribe, a visiting professor of comparative literature at Harvard University, for instance, writes about a series of photographs of indigenous people taken as part of Brazil’s Rondon Commission, reflecting on how the digitization of these photographs not only democratizes them by making them widely accessible but also dematerializes them. This process, Jaguaribe argues, disconnects us from the concrete reality of those that came before.
“The material and concrete life of objects bear the scars and the imprint of time. As such they are remnants of a lived past and connect us to the world of the dead,” Jaguaribe noted in a recent interview with the Center. “By contrast, an archive of sheer digital images becomes unmoored from concrete existence and makes life a free floating arena of fluxes. This increases the sense of a dematerialization of the world and contributes to a sense of what the scholar Scott Mcquire has termed as the ‘technological uncanny,’ meaning the blurring of reality and fiction.”
Jaguaribe also remarked on the unique experience of preparing for this essay, saying “undertaking research for this essay was a new experience for me and dwelling in the archival collections of France and Brazil was truly revealing. It made me appreciate intensely the institutional value of document preservation. It also opened up fascinating worlds of discovery and interpretation of the past through its documentary materiality.”
Engaging a core theme of the collection, Jaguaribe also spoke to the serious institutional consequences of current political arrangements. “In terms of Brazil, it is really a question of whether archives, libraries and other very relevant cultural institutions will have any public support given the current destructive policies of the Bolsonaro government. This is quite crucial in terms of the material support that will be given for the forging of historical and cultural memory. It has direct implications on the capacity to further critical thought and to learn from the past in order to envisage alternatives for the future.”
The late renowned scholar Rudolf Wagner, who also spoke at Forum 2017, likewise points to the political ramifications of archival work in his essay titled, “Future Memory: Preserving Diverse Voices From and About China From a Time of Unification of Thought.” In this essay, Wagner charts the challenging, decades-long project of creating an expansive archive of cultural, political, and intellectual materials that resists the prerogatives of official censorship. Culminating in the Digital Archive of Chinese Studies (DACHS), Wagner’s exploration of this ongoing project suggests the ways in which the collection encourages future discussion and continued archival work.
The contributors to the collection also reflect on issues related to preservation and digitization, as other contexts that inform our understanding of the politics of archives.
Writing a contribution that responds to multiple essays in the collection, including those of Jaguaribe and Wagner, Maurice Lee, a professor of English at BU, critiques prominent utopian views of digital archives, namely that they are “global, transparent, and comprehensive.”
“The essays I respond to all show in thoughtful and complex ways how digital archives do not escape or leave behind the challenges of traditional archives,” Lee said during a recent interview. “Photographs from an early-20th century French expedition in Brazil are available online but remain haunted by national boundaries and imperial mediations; the recovery of Cold War archives from Latin America cannot overcome histories of repression and erasure; and efforts to preserve current Chinese web information subject to censure remain partial and vexed.”
Inspired by his original role as a moderator at Forum 2017, Lee’s contribution seeks to capture the exciting exchange generated during the panel. “I thought the Forum panel (on which I was a respondent) was quite successful, so I made a conscious effort to try to recreate its synergies and dynamics.”
The conversations that first inspired the book are continuing in the near future. On Friday, March 6 at 10 a.m., essayists from the collection will be part of a round table on libraries and archives at the Northeast Modern Language Association annual convention at the Marriott Copley Place. The panel will be moderated by Mizruchi and will feature Jaguaribe and Lee (who will also deliver the keynote address at the convention), as well as contributors Ellen Cushman (Northeastern) and Vika Zafrin from BU Libraries. As Forum 2017 and Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age indicate, the reunion of these speakers is certain to spark new ideas on the topic.