A call to rethink archival creation: exploring types of creation in personal archives

“The only way we knew how:” provenancial fabulation in archives of feminist materials

“…In her article “A Call to Rethink Archival Creation” ( 2018 ) Jennifer Douglas asks: “What does it mean to create a record? To be a record creator?” My research into records creation in archives of feminist materials responds to Douglas’ assertion that more critical inquiry should be directed towards identifying and understanding records creation and its iterations across diverse archival settings.…”

“…Over the past twenty years, provenance, as a system of records origins and order, has been critiqued for its inability to account for the complexity and collectivity of records creation. Grappling with the reality of distributed contexts of creation, multiple creator forces, and evolving rosters of records intervenors and interlocuters, archival scholars have introduced a range of language and frameworks for understanding the limitations and potential of provenance (Hurley 2005 ; Bastian 2006 ; MacNeil 2008 ; Caswell 2014b ; Wood et al 2014 ; Drake 2016 ; Douglas 2017 , 2018 ; Brilmyer 2020 ). As a system of attribution, provenance has been guiding archival arrangement and descriptive practices in the West for over 200 years (Drake 2016 ).…”

“…Eric Ketelaar characterizes this range of creatorship as “activation.” He suggests that “every interaction, intervention, interrogation, and interpretation of a record, by creator, user, and archivist is an activation of that record…All these activations are acts of co-creatorship that participate in determining the record’s meaning” ( 2010 , p. 203). Indeed, concepts of “co-creation” and “community creation” have been taken up by a number of other archival theorists working to problematize and provoke the nature of records creation (Hurley 2005 ; Bastian 2006 ; Iacovino 2010 ; Caswell 2014b ; Douglas 2018 ). Taken together, these archival scholars demonstrate the distinct impossibility of containing a record’s context to a singular record-creating body.…”

“…Despite the archival field’s tendency to extol the virtues of an expanded understanding of archival creation, discussions surrounding the nature of provenance and records creation lack a nuance and precision that “belies the depth of the discussion that has occurred regarding creatorship in the archival literature” (Douglas 2018 , p. 31). Jennifer Douglas ( 2018 , p. 45) suggests “while there has been high-level, theoretical discussion about the need to expand the principle of provenance in the archival literature, there has been little empirical research that directly shows how archives—personal or organizational—are created over time”. Responding to Douglas’ call for more nuanced and in-depth explorations of records creation, this article aims to provide an elaborated framework for understanding records creation in archives of feminist materials through the concept of provenancial fabulation .…”

Conceptualizing and studying information creation: From production and processes to makers and making

“…Lund, 2004), data (data management Faniel et al, 2019), records (archival studies and records management, e.g. Foscarini, 2010; Douglas, 2018), or physical and digital artifacts (makeology, e.g., Peppler, Halverson, & Kafai, 2016a, 2016b), whereas the term used for actions is coupled with theoretical perspectives on how things come into being in terms of, for instance, creating, making or producing. In this respect, creation appears to unfold as the most theoretically unspecific term whereas with making and production, it is easier to sense direct and indirect influences of making (cf.…”