Photographs and manuscripts: working in the archive

Abstract

This essay opens out a series of questions concerning matter and materiality in the age of the digital via engagement with the literary papers of Australian writer Eve Langley , held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Among those papers is a single black and white snapshot labelled 'The Manuscript Cupboard, 1970', which shows three shelves of a household cupboard filled with exercise books, folders and paper-wrapped parcels. The same collection also contains a series of colour snapshots showing Langley's manuscripts arranged in a variety of tableaux laid out across her untended lawn. That Langley should have first taken and then preserved such photos is perhaps not surprising given her deep attachment to material conditions of writing and, in particular, to manuscripts and paper. For Langley, to write was quite simply to inhabit paper and she framed the experience of writing as one of immersion, not just in ideas and words, but literally in paper. Framed by a consideration of the anxieties around materiality provoked by the emergence of digital technologies, this essay explores paper's presence as an integral dimension of the experience of being in the archive and working with original materials.

Kohti kestävää kuluttamista: Materiaalitaju kuluttajien ja materiaalien aktiivisen suhteen hahmottajana

“…Empiirisessä tutkimuksessa materiaalilukutaidon käsitettä on käytetty erityisesti arkistodokumenttien tutkimisessa tarkoittamaan historiallisten dokumenttien uudelleen lukemista ja tulkintaa (esim. Kuipers 2004;Dever 2014). Viimeisimmissä keskusteluissa käsitettä on sovellettu myös designtutkimuksen alalle, jossa se liitetään ymmärrykseen erilaisten tuotteiden materiaaleista, valmistusprosesseista ja käytettävyydestä (Solanki 2018(Solanki , 2019(Solanki , 2020.…”

Making Traditions: Girls’ Carnival Morris Dancing and Material Practice

“…19. The material turn is typically positioned in response to a parallel "digital turn" (Dever 2014), which now impacts most areas of life and research, including music.…”

Blank pages, brief notes and ethical double-binds: micro digitisation and the ‘infinite archive’

“…As Maryanne Dever and Linda Morra have demonstrated, decisions about whether to scan and upload paper archives are a source of tension in the co-existing 'digital turn' and 'material turn' in literary studies. 31 Why digitise if too much meaning will be lost, or potentially great mistakes result from loss of non-textual meaning in digital records versus contact with analogue originals? Researchers in the digital humanities must 'understand how archived paper fonds -or individual documents -might be understood to do things or perform in ways that the digitised or born-digital cannot' .…”