Archiving Our Own: The Digital Archive of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at Austin, 1975–1995

Abstract

As the discipline of rhetoric and composition engages archival studies, we must not only theorize and narrate primary-source research, but also build archival exhibits. Describing our effort to construct a digital exhibit of primary source material relevant to the history of writing instruction at the University of Texas at Austin 1975–1995 (RhetCompUTX, rhetcomputx.dwrl.utexas.edu), we explain how this project speaks to current historiographic debates about the status and the shape of the discipline. We argue that, to make the shift towards an institutional-material perspective, historians and scholars in rhetoric and composition will need to build our own archives of primary-source material, archives that feature four types of items: items relevant to classroom practice, items documenting the institutional circumstances, items recording the disciplinary conversation, and items capturing the political situation. RhetCompUTX not only features all four types of items, but also encourages the user to see the relations among these layers of practice. By describing this exhibit, by summarizing its argument, and by explaining how we described and assembled its items, we encourage other researchers to build similar archival exhibits and to move towards institutional-material historiography.

Arriving at the everyday: building the NUWPArc public digital writing program archive

“…For example, "generic difficulty" encountered when building a digital archive is not "resolved" by item-level descriptions (p. 793-794). In fact, the choice to redefine and categorize objects using "contemporary terms" (Longaker et al, 2022) rather than those used in the original artifacts without offering transparency surrounding these choices to public users restricts access to the archive's intellectual capital by explaining practices only in the context of the discourse community whose members have privileged access to a scholarly journal. One belief guiding NUWPArc is the belief that in digital archival work, it is important to challenge disciplinary practices in knowledge-making that limit the potential for innovating and collaborating outside of traditional disciplinary power structures.…”

“…Because Longaker et al (2022) Lives" table matter for situating ourselves and our projects. The direction of our reasoning also matters.…”

“…Priority is, in many ways, reflective of values and beliefs and is observable in goals and practices developed for/employed in the use of tools across writing sites. I explore this idea in Chapter Four.29 This phrasing references the title ofLongaker et al (2022), "Archiving Our Own." The way I use it here connotes not only "our" as in Northeastern University but also "our" as in "our field" and more broadly, "our" labor.…”