The archival sliver: Power, memory, and archives in South Africa

Harris, Verne

doi:10.1007/bf02435631

Cited by 198 publications

(95 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Appraisal decisions must necessarily shape the archive over time, and by extension our knowledge of the past [5,15]. It is in the particular contingencies of the historical moment that the archive is created, sustained and used [8,35,68].…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bots, Seeds and People

Summers

Punzalan

2017

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

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The field of web archiving provides a unique mix of human and automated agents collaborating to achieve the preservation of the web. Centuries old theories of archival appraisal are being transplanted into the sociotechnical environment of the World Wide Web with varying degrees of success. The work of the archivist and bots in contact with the material of the web present a distinctive and understudied CSCW shaped problem. To investigate this space we conducted semi-structured interviews with archivists and technologists who were directly involved in the selection of content from the web for archives. These semi-structured interviews identified thematic areas that inform the appraisal process in web archives, some of which are encoded in heuristics and algorithms. Making the infrastructure of web archives legible to the archivist, the automated agents and the future researcher is presented as a challenge to the CSCW and archival community.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bots, Seeds and People

Summers

Punzalan

2017

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

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“…Within archival institutions and archival studies research, there is a growing awareness that archives have the power-indeed, the responsibilityto play a significant role in promoting social justice for specific marginalized populations (Harris, 2002;Jimerson, 2009;Flinn, 2011). Archival studies research emphasizes the power and importance of creating permanent representations of the voices of marginalized populations, as well as the ways in which the documentary legacies of marginalized people can be used to counterbalance mainstream narratives and publicize marginalized histories in the struggle for justice (Carter, 2006;Flinn, Stevens, & Shepherd, 2009;Harris, 2002;Jimerson, 2009;Stevens, Flinn, & Shepherd, 2010).…”

Section: Social Justice and Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Antiviolence and Marginalized Communities: Knowledge Creation, Community Mobilization, and Social Justice through a Participatory Archiving Approach

Allard¹,

Ferris²

2015

lib

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The Digital Archives and Marginalized Communities Project (DAMC), at the University of Manitoba, is an interdisciplinary collaboration to design and develop three separate but related digital archives using a participatory archiving approach with stakeholder community groups. Working titles for these collections are the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database (MMIWD), the Sex Work Database (SWD), and the Post-Apology Residential School Database (PARSD). This article discusses research and development from the project's inception in 2012 through the end of 2014, reflecting on the practical and theoretical considerations that arise for researchers and practitioners in the information science professions as a result of engaging with anticolonial and antiviolence feminist methodologies. These methodological perspectives place the experiences and knowledge of Indigenous and sex worker communities at the center of decolonizing processes, foregrounding the need for archival processes that not only captures but also uses these knowledge(s) as the organizational scaffolding upon which to build socially just and representative archives for specific marginalized communities. Using examples drawn from all three archives, this article demonstrates how the goals, intentions, and knowledges of marginalized communities might be built into digital archives projects through a participatory archiving approach. This discussion is followed by an examination of how fostering and maintaining respectful relationships between all members involved with DAMC collaborations is fundamentally connected to both participatory archiving processes and broader social justice objectives.

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“…Archives, Derrida argues, come into existence in highly specific ontological and political configurations -what he calls 'a privileged topology' (Derrida 1995:3). It is in this sense that archives both embody and enact a specific politics: they are both expressions and instruments of power (Harris 2002). In Derrida's terms, archival 'documents in effect, speak the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law' (Derrida 1995:3).…”

Section: Jacques Derrida's Archive Fevermentioning

confidence: 99%

Archival Practices and the Making of “Memories”

Mauthner

Gárdos

2015

New Review of Information Networking

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Discussions about social science digital archives have tended to address methodological, technological, ethical and legal issues such as what digital tools to use; what metadata to collect; how to curate numerical or interview data; and how to make archived materials available in ethical and legal ways. These discussions take place on the assumption that these archival practices are ontologically independent from archival materials. Following Derrida (1995), we want to explore the relationship between archival practices and archival documents on the assumption that 'archivization produces as much as it records the event' (Derrida 1995:17). On this approach, archival practices are understood as non-innocent, culturally and historically-specific practices that, in the act of 'preservation', help make specific 'memories' at the expense of others (Barad 2007, Derrida 1995, Foucault 1972. In this paper we take up this issue in relation to the curation of social science quantitative research data. We conceptualise data curation practices in broad terms as including specific practices-e.g. cleaning up of datasets; data anonymisation; streamlining interviews; data storing, categorising and visualisation; data search tools; etc.-as well as a wider range of knowledge, ethical, legal, political and economic practices these practices are entangled with-e.g. field-and discipline-specific knowledge-making practices; national/international data management and curation policies, practices and guidelines; ethical guidelines provided by professional bodies; countryspecific data protection, copyright, and information sharing legislation; etc. For the purposes of this paper we focus on three specific data curation practices-data cleaning, data anonymisation and metadata preparation-and investigate the ontological processes through which these practices help constitute the survey data they ostensibly archive.

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The archival sliver: Power, memory, and archives in South Africa

Cited by 198 publications

References 7 publications

Bots, Seeds and People

Bots, Seeds and People

Antiviolence and Marginalized Communities: Knowledge Creation, Community Mobilization, and Social Justice through a Participatory Archiving Approach

Archival Practices and the Making of “Memories”

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