The Archive Project

Archival Research in the Social Sciences

Niamh Moore, Andrea Salter, Liz Stanley, Maria Tamboukou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367596224
• eBook ISBN: 9781317044611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent scholarship on archival research has raised questions concerning the character and impact of 'the archive' on how the traces of the past are researched, the use and analysis of different kinds of archived data, methodological approaches to the practicalities involved, and what kind of theory is drawn on and contributed to by such research. The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences builds on these questions, exploring key methodological ideas and debates and engaging in detail with a wide range of archival projects and practices, in order to put to use important theoretical ideas that shed light on the methods involved.

Offering an overview of the current 'state of the field' and written by four authors with extensive experience in conducting research in and creating archives around the world, it demonstrates the different ways in which archival methodology, practice and theory can be employed. It also shows how the ideas and approaches detailed in the book can be put into practice by other researchers, working on different kinds of archives and collections. The volume engages with crucial questions, including: What is 'an archive' and how does it come into existence? Why do archival research and how is it done? How can sense be made of the scale and scope of collections and archives? What are the best ways to analyse the traces of the past that remain? What are helpful criteria for evaluating the knowledge claims produced by archival research? What is the importance of community archives? How has the digital turn changed the way in which archival research is carried out? What role is played by the questions that researchers bring into an archive? How do we deal with unexpected encounters in the archive?

A rigorous and accessible examination of the methods and choices that shape research 'on the ground' and the ways in which theory, practice and methodology inform one another, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in archival and documentary research.

1 In other archives and beyond

Niamh Moore, Andrea Salter, Liz Stanley and Maria Tamboukou

DOI: 10.4324/9781315612577-1

The archival turn

This book is about archival research and ways of crafting methodological frameworks for carrying it out. ‘Methodology’ signals a framework that harnesses both method or specific research tools, and also theory in the sense of a framework of ideas, and its meaning is fairly settled. The word ‘archive’, however, can conjure up different things for different people and is a term still very much in the making. Indeed, the interest and excitement around it remains palpable and infectious.

An archive is a repository of some kind; and while for some people this is seen in formal ‘archives of the nation-state’ terms, in fact it can variously also be a building, cardboard-box, photograph album, internet website, or discourse of interconnected ideas such as community heritage and shared memory; and it holds or contains documents, which can take the form of written texts, photographs, sound recordings, postcards, medical records, printed materials, material objects… and not just official records, nor necessarily things on paper either. For some people, the word conjures up excitement, noise and the Da Vinci Code. For others, it is the New York Public Library or a National Archives Repository with researchers silently focused on their documents of choice. It can bring to mind a group of people sharing a cause, hobby or job who collect materials of some kind and make them available to like-minded others. It can emphasise, as does the UN’s convention on intangible cultural heritage, the interdependence between the intangible, the oppression of ‘outsider’ groups, and the materiality of formalised means of valorising some forms of heritage and memory rather than others. In a more playful register, it might also be that labyrinthine library as infinite as life itself that figures large in the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (1998). Some of the people associated with archives are professional archivists and historians, the groups most often linked with archival investigations; but cheek by jowl will be found family researchers, genealogists, radical or community activists wanting to make or remake the historical record, journalists, hobbyists, computer geeks, collectors of all kinds, and social scientists and arts scholars, medical researchers, scientists…

Archives, then, are the preserve of none because they are engaged with by many kinds of people, who use or create them in diverse ways. However, there is a canonical version that tends to dominate, the state archive version associated with a disciplining view of what archives and archival research ‘ought’ to be like (and challenged by, among others, Foucault, 1972; Richards, 1993; Derrida, 1997; Steedman, 2001; Farge, 2013 [1989]). It is therefore no surprise that the existence of competing and disparate envisionings of archives should give rise to contrary assumptions about their constitution (a ‘proper’ state archive, versus new initiatives and countervailing projects), organisation (arcane systems of classification, solitary study and silence, versus the noise of collective endeavour), contents (facts versus fictions, representations versus referentialities), and also concerning what the ‘it’ is that archival investigations are concerned with (knowledge, understanding, change, commemoration, recognition…). Different examples of what ‘the archive’ is and what happens in it are discussed in The Archive Project, influenced by ideas associated with the archival turn that has taken place over the last few decades. This has involved a general re-thinking and re-visioning of what archives are, who can be an archivist, the purposes archives serve, the character and boundaries of their contents, how these should be investigated, all of which are discussed in this book.

The social science presence within the archival turn has been relatively muted until recently, when there has been an increase of interest in archives and collections as sites for research, and also archiving research data such as meta-archives, ethnographic fieldnotes, recorded or transcribed interviews, numerical datasets and the products of webscraping, twitter feeds and other forms of ‘big data’ and data mining. It is worth asking why now, in terms of the increased social science attention to archiving and the archive and its experience of the archival turn. Is it just that at long last the social sciences are catching up, or the ongoing renewal of historical sociology, or the rise of interest in big data, or the pull of secondary analysis, or the archiving of qualitative as well as quantitative datasets? We see it as an amalgam of all these, but with particular attention given to the more textual and long-standing instantiations of what ‘the archive’ is. A lively body of work has emerged here, exploring and debating key issues (cf. Hill, 1993; Burton, 2006; Craven, 2008; Kirsch and Rohan, 2008 a; Stoler, 2009; Jobs and Lüdtke, 2010; Tamboukou, 2010 c; Valles Martínez et al., 2011; Levy, 2011; Stanley, Salter and Dampier, 2013 a; Dirks, 2015; see also Hughes and Goodwin, 2013; Stanley, 2013). Valles Martínez et al. (2011) have usefully tabled key questions about archiving, the re-use and re-analysis of existing archived data, digital transpositions, approaches to archival research and other crucial matters. There are, as they point out, achievements and strengths but also areas that need to be further explored and theorised within the horizon of an archival sensibility. The Archive Project provides such an exploration, by engaging with key theoretical and methodological questions and debates, drawing on our wide-ranging collective experiences of doing research in archives located around the world, and also our extensive involvements in creating new kinds of archives.

Broadly, archival research is concerned with a collection of documents – texts of different kinds, including but not confined to words on paper, visual materials or physical objects; and it involves analysing and interpreting these so as to explore a particular topic or question or concern (Danto, 2008; Dobson and Ziemann, 2008; Gidley, 2011; Jordanova, 2012; Brundage, 2013). A single document or a collection of items may form the focus, or this may be part of a denser fabric of archival data that a research investigation is concerned with. In addition, while often associated with the discipline of history, many contemporary historians resist the assumption that ‘for historical research read archive research’, and instead emphasise that in addition to documents other sources (including oral recordings, photographs, organisational records, census data, leaflets and ephemera…) should come under inquiry (Jordanova, 2000: 172–98).

As this indicates, a widely held but misconceived assumption is that the documents that archives hold are always from and about ‘the past’. The complications need to be recognised, for many archives are organised around contemporary concerns and interests, while of course the contents of all archives are always read and understood within the present moment because of the particular concerns that lead researchers to investigate a particular collection or set of documents. In Britain, there is a regularly updated ‘Ambridge archive’ concerned with characters and plots, actors, producers and directors associated with a radio soap opera called ‘The Archers’, with parallels existing for many other television and radio programmes and films and their ‘stars’. In a very different way, ‘big data’ constituted by ‘mining’ or ‘scraping’ internet sources – say, the contents of Project Gutenburg’s book corpora – can also be continually modified by creating a sub-archive of just novels, or those of the eighteenth century, or everything by male authors in a particular genre. As these examples indicate, while some contents of archives may be ‘old’ and ‘closed’ (that is, nothing new is added to them), others are very much ‘new’ and ‘open’ and with continual accretion or modification a driving force. And given the capabilities provided by digitisation, some previously old and closed data has become very much new and open.

A result is that the particular approach and methods used in doing archival research need to differ according to the constitution, organisation and purpose of an archive or collection and the data or contents in question, as well as because of the researcher’s stance and preferred research strategies. Some of the examples discussed in The Archive Project’s chapters concern long-established collections in major public or university institutions, others involve researchers as protagonists in the formation and availability of new archives, and with the older collections having started out in a similar way to this. Relatedly, a blurred line exists between ‘archiving’ as an activity involving finding, classifying and filing archival materials, and ‘researching’ as an investigation of the contents of these.

At basis, archival research involves making sense of sources – the traces, what remains of people and events of the past – in a particular kind of location called an archive, which is a repository of some kind for holding and making available collections of things, ranging from institutional and formal edifices to personal collections shared between family or friends. Research is done to address ‘I want to know about X or Y’ questions, and also indicates the kind of sources and data that are appropriate and sufficient for answering them. These might be questions that people in the past were interested in (for example, could the Indian famines of the nineteenth century have been prevented?) or formulated around present-day concerns (for example, how should LGBT+ history be recovered to ensure a sense of community longevity?). Generally, then, the contents of an archive relate to the past, sometimes the distant past (the letters on wooden tablets written by Roman soldiers at Vindolanda in northern England, perhaps); however, in some circumstances they can be documents which are about ‘now’ and collected and made available because of their topicality (the papers of recent US presidents concerning their foreign policies, for example).

There are some very different responses to the question of why archival research is important and why discussing and debating it matters. One, the most simple but with profound implications, is that ‘the past’ is a shorthand for everything that has come before and made us, our lives and the societies we live in, what they are. So understanding even small parts of the past can give us a handle on things in the present and possibly aspects of the future, too. Another, and related, response is that the present and the future are uncontrollable, while the remaining traces of the past, including the near-past that contemporary archiving is concerned with, are finite and can be made at least provisionally known, albeit with many ifs and buts.

Or at least that is the seduction involved, that what is contained in archival places and spaces will indeed be appropriate and sufficient to produce understanding and knowledge. There is another more disconcerting response to why it matters, associated with the work of some of the great theorists of archives and particularly Michel de Certeau (1998). This is that the archive in its canonical form represents, not ‘the past’ in an amorphous sense, but rather the deaths of all those who lived it, and therefore it invokes or stands for the certainty of our own death too. Herein, engaging with the archive represents a kind of machinery or technology for asserting life against death, giving voice to the past by fixing the meaning of what it inscribes. De Certeau (1998: 5) calls this a ‘labour of and against death’; and as he also points out, there are limits to what this labour can produce because the past is ineluctably past.

There are, then, some grand reasons for why archives and research in them matter (life against death), but the lower key and more utilitarian ones (it is imperative that ordinary lives leave traces, and what happened in the past is interesting) are also important, and at their back are fundamental issues concerning the archival sensibility of contemporary times. Indeed, these levels of meaning are interconnected and come at the same things in different ways: the past has made us, there is a seduction effect, the sources can be tamed and classified, the possibility of knowing hovers, but all knowledge-claims are founded on the ultimately profound unknowability of the past. Consequently, although the seduction still exists, and the labour involved remains propelled by deep curiosity, certainties have to be surrendered in favour of understanding, and archival research engaged with in more open and accountable ways. This is the project and the sensibility that The Archive Project is conceived around.

The use of the word ‘project’ in the title is a mindful choice and gives recognition to the fact that the book has resulted from a collective endeavour and the ideas it explores and debates remain in progress, rather than being signed off and completed. It has a hybridic character as an assemblage somewhere between monograph, edited collection and workbook, with its contents not reducible to one seemless narrative. The title also recognises Walter Benjamin (2002, 2007) as a master of assemblage. Benjamin writes of amassing and classifying detail and, ironically, at the same time also indicates the necessary provisionality of archival research and that its intention to name, tame and to know is destined to fail. As a result, The Archive Project’s composing chapters and how they explore questions and issues are written in a way that remains open so readers can engage with them in a variety of ways.

Invoking the idea of a project is apposite for other reasons too. The book’s sub-title – Archival Research in the Social Sciences – is important here. It is concerned with theory, but in a way that is deeply engaged with the grounded practice of working in – and sometimes creating – particular archives, each with their embedded complexities and frequent vagaries, and then turning this back on to theory, to invest it with the richness of the actualities of grounded archival research practices. Another element of the project is that the examples discussed in its composing chapters show that analysis and interpretation give rise to complex and sometimes unresolvable questions and issues, with the situated and contextual nature of archival research an irreducible feature. The idea of a project has a further resonance too, which is that our approach is based around a particular archival sensibility that gives expression to an integrated set of ideas and a coherent approach to exploring them; that is, a project in the strong sense, advancing a broad methodology.

So who are we? We are an interdisciplinary group of four who came together through a symposium organised at a 2013 British Sociological Association conference in which we gave presentations. We are all located in the social sciences, sociology specifically. However, we are not exclusively of it, with our backgrounds also encompassing political science, law, geography, economics, women’s studies, education, philosophy, and feminist interventions in all these. Consequently each of us works across, as well as within, disciplinary formations. And as researchers, we enter an archive, whatever the archive, with great curiosity, intellectual intent, and also armed with grounded knowledges formed in other archives and the wide range of archival research we have between us carried out. These researches have been concerned with different historical and contemporary times, an array of research topics, and archives shaped by divergent governing and disciplining principles. They include national archives, online archives, radical archives, local archives and more, as well as a host of different collections located within these.

As co-authors, we share many ideas about archives, their constitution, organisation and use, and our chapters fit together in we hope useful and interesting ways. There are also some thought-provoking differences of viewpoint, and these too mark how we conceive of, design and carry out archive research. These differences – along with the strong shared basis of ideas that also exists – are discussed later in this chapter, and also the epilogue, to help readers think through their own choices and viewpoints. These differences are sometimes due to our dissimilar archival research experiences, some are grounded in different theoretical, methodological and other influences on us, others result from different working practices and the difficulties and responsibilities of working jointly. However, mainly they stem from the diverse character of the documents, collections, archives and contexts we work in, their situational character, and the consequent need to make informed choices about how to research and analyse them.

The Archive Project conveys a joined up set of ideas about archival research, and makes detailed use of our involvements in a range of archival contexts, then. This first chapter is a collective statement setting out the groundwork of the main body of ideas that inform our overall stance. The chapters following are individually authored, and appear in an order that most helpfully engages with the procedural aspects of archival research, so readers unfamiliar with archival research can gain a strong sense of what is involved. They provide pra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the authors
• Prologue
• 1 In other archives and beyond
• Interlude
• Interlude
• Interlude
• Interlude
• Interlude
• Epilogue
• References
• Index