Abstract
This special issue has grown out of a shared interest by the guest editors in digital archives and the affordances of digital technologies upon archival practices, including the archiving of creative process. Situated within two different but complementary disciplines, film (Atkinson) and dance (Whatley), our aim in this issue has been to bring together a range of viewpoints and perspectives that represents a range of specialisms and subject domains. In conjunction with the fourth in the series of ‘Digital Echoes’ symposia at Coventry University, UK, in January 2014, which brought together a range of speakers and delegates from a broad cross section of the arts, we invited contributions that would capture some of the initiatives and dialogues that are taking place in archival practices within the digital environment. In line with the journal’s title, the convergence between scholars, arts professionals and digital experts has led to a very rich corpus of papers that cover a range of territories and speak to the shift from the closed to the open and from the traditional single-user archive model to emerging multi-user, collaborative forms of archival practices and scholarship. The collection explores how digital preservation and presentation of archival materials dramatically impacts upon the nature and notion of access and how the types of discoveries, insights and findings made through online digital interfaces can be radically altered.
We were delighted that the call for contributions to this issue elicited a large number of submissions and what we include here is just a selection of what could have represented this lively area of activity. We are pleased that we are able to bring together an international group of writers, thus demonstrating how there are common and convergent themes within the broad frame of archival practice.
Some articles focus on a very specific collection or art form/practice, whilst others offer a more expansive theorization of a body of work. Some are grounded in a particular community or social context and show how digital technologies have the potential to create or reveal new kinds of narratives. Within this mix, several draw on photographic archives as a source but the range of topics is diverse, including film, graffiti, broadcast television, visual arts and fan fiction. We offer this collection in the hope that it opens up new questions and propositions and may prompt further dialogue and the exchange of experiences on this broad theme.
Many of the articles refer to related resources, websites and materials that, at the time of writing, are openly accessible online. The editors encourage readers to look up, explore and engage with these rich resources in order to enhance and augment the experience of reading this special issue.
The issue begins with an article that questions the very nature of the archival process. Grayson Cooke and Amanda Reichelt-Brushett offer a provocation on memory and question the way in which archives materialize memories through a practice-based interrogation of archival dissolution. Through a convergence of analogue and digital technologies, the authors document their laboratory experimentations of applying various chemicals to photographic negatives taken from one of the authors’ own personal photographic archives. Through their presentation of the fascinating discussion of two case studies, underpinned and interwoven with archival philosophy and illustrated by documentary imagery, the authors seek to question how it is that memories reside in the photographic object. They problematize the concept of memory, what we value and how we value, and the role of forgetting in archival practice. Through a reappraisal of archival practice, the article raises a number of valuable questions about the role of destruction in creating new life, powerfully challenging the conventional view of the archive as preservation and conservation of the past.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘memory’ is a recurrent theme throughout many of the articles within the issue and is at the heart of Robert Knifton’s essay that focuses on the creation of a digital archiving platform for Kingston School of Art. Knifton draws attention to the relationships between the traditional and the digital in archive creation and the role of the archivist who negotiates between the various communities and stakeholders involved in contributing to the archives. Through reflection upon digital archival theory, Knifton provides an absorbing analysis of the multivocal dimensions of the platform and the complexities of working with community-sourced material and also demonstrates how an archive project of this nature can bind itself to the open educational processes to the benefit of staff, students and other users of the archive. The article provides a valuable focus on how archives provide access to the history (and future) of the Art School in the United Kingdom and looks forward to the evolution of future archival pedagogies. Knifton introduces the notion of a ‘living’ archive, which is a concept that persists within many of the other archival initiatives discussed within this issue.
Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni offer another perspective on photographic archives in their article that discusses the paradoxes implicated in Google’s hosting of Life magazine’s picture collection. Their article discusses in some depth a particular collection within the whole (that of Life staff photographer James Burke) to expose the serendipitous nature of discovery within online archives, what they describe as ‘the haphazard conjunction of search terms, and in which the concept of something being “in” an (or the) archive is erased by the possibility that there may be nothing that is beyond its reach’. Through their own archival interactions and meaning-making processes, the authors describe their experience as ‘user builders’ in how they engage with the archive, rooted in a range of intellectual debates and theoretical constructs, and point to the generative nature of the digital archive and the multiple realities that are endemic within a digitally modelled archive.
A contrasting approach to the photographic archive is the subject of the next article, by Patricia Prieto Blanco, Miriami Schuppert and Jake Lange, which is located in a very different context, that of the community photograph collection emerging from the photographic initiative in Northern Ireland: Belfast Exposed. The article discusses the establishment and organization of the physical spaces of the archive, as well as the digitization process and as with the previous article, draws attention to the political agendas that have consequences for the creation and interpretation of digital archives. The article weaves together the historical journey from analogue to digital with a selection of images and other examples to illustrate the ways in which objects might change meaning over time (e.g. from political statements to art objects) and are shaped by shifting community structures and ambitions. The authors discuss initiatives that enabled metadata and tag generation through community workshops with users and an example of an artist project, which mapped the material traces of archival encounters.
The next article by Samantha Edwards-Vandenhoek turns to focus upon the archiving of grafitti and specifically the Sydney Grafitti Archive, a work-in-progress resource created by the author within an open-source content management system. Using location-based and spatial modalities and metaphors, her principal research method is documentary photography as it ‘provides the means of sampling and archiving the graffiti’. Edwards-Vandenhoek provides an illuminating discussion about her research that she claims is ‘about hacking into, recovering and honouring graffiti’s discursive sites to reimagine graffiti’s place as digital heritage’. We can read about the construction and design of the archive and the impact of the Internet on how grafitti is created, viewed and shared. Edwards-Vandenhoek also draws our attention to the cultural significance of grafitti, its contribution to the urban experience and how digital technologies have afforded grafitti a place within our cultural heritage. Through the utilization of media archaeological methods to document and preserve this transient and ephemeral medium, the theme of memory and the concept of the living archive returns.
The theme of spatial archives continues in the next article in which geographic location provides the focus for Les Roberts’ explorations into the idea of the ‘archive city’. Once again the idea of memory is invoked, in this case, urban cultural memory. Through Roberts’ refocusing of the question ‘what’ is the archive? to ‘where’ is the archive? – an illustrative instance of the recent ‘spatial turn’ in archival studies is presented. With a focus on two case studies – the cities of Liverpool in the United Kingdom and Bologna in Italy – Roberts sets out a compelling argument about the role of location in the archive, pointing to the locatedness of the user in part to ‘rethink the possibilities and future scope of archival film practice’. He neatly concludes his article with a reminder that archival practice depends not only on archivists in the conventional sense but also on ‘everyday archivists’ who together provide the foundation on which the archive city rests.
The focus upon film in an archival context continues in Caroline Frick’s foray into archival policy, strategies and structures through the lens of repatriation. The article takes a recent fictional mediation of the archive through the Hollywood repatriation narrative of The Monuments Men (2014) as a way to instantly shine a light on the need to bring archival artifacts into public view. The article proceeds to focus upon several repatriation projects, pointing to the way in which preservation organizations use the concept of ‘repatriation’ to gain public sympathy and support. The article is a persuasive account of the problems in current media repatriation policy and offers suggestions of how this can be addressed and where improvements can be made.
The next article explores institutional contstraints of another kind through an exploration of what might be seen as the most challenging of UK media archives, those of the BBC. Simon Popple’s article takes Lord Reith’s famous statement in 1925 as a point of departure. With reference to specific projects, Popple describes how digitsations isn’t necessarily the solution to creating new ways of thinking about the relationships between institutions, archives and audiences. Acknowledging the significance of the BBC in British media and British society more generally, Popple discusses the potential for the BBC to reconceptualize the audience as purely receptive towards an audience that could participate in the archival process. We learn that this thinking led to the setting up of the Pararchive Project and the conceptualization of the ‘citizen animateur’ as a way to create collaborative and creative practices including the creation of oral histories that counter dominant voices and facilitate a more democratic polyvocality. The Pararchive platform will lauch in 2015 as an open-source platform to ‘demonstrate the benefits of working with the broadest possible coalitions to create open resources and embed collaborative partnership’.
From the earlier spatial considerations of archives of Edwards-Vandenhoek and Roberts’ – the final article foregrounds the temporal dimensions of archival analysis within the interrogation of online fan fiction archives. The article presents the findings of the Fan Data project, which developed an innovative approach to ‘data scraping’ through software development and visualization tools in order to perform a quantitative analysis. The authors focus upon the fan fiction archives relating to three blockbuster movies – The Avengers, the Batman trilogy and Inception – in order to measure fan engagement and production over time in terms of ‘mindshare’ space. The article raises a range of useful questions about ‘fandom’ and the power of the Internet archives in building audience engagement as well as illuminating novel and emergent modes of archival content analysis using digital tools.
Collectively, the articles in this issue represent a renewed interest in the archive as an object of study and demonstrate the transformative impacts of digital technologies, which are extending our understanding of what constitutes an archive. Individually the articles are rooted in the writers’ deep encounters with archival practices. They illuminate a diversity of approaches for their study and introduce new and novel methodologies, which span the analogue (as applied in the first article) and the digital (as in the last). There are common themes that pervade and cross-pollinate many of the articles, such as the role that archives play in memory formation, the notion of the living archive and the place of the archive in capturing and preserving, or recreating and regenerating, the transient and the ephemeral. The proposition of new digital archival pedagogies and their impact upon educational and classroom practices is also a recurring consideration. From traditional physical institutional repositories to the dynamic and generative structures of born-digital archives, these rich and contrasting perspectives are a useful reminder that the archive is not a static form and each article invites us to rethink our experience of ‘the archive’ and how it functions in our social, cultural and personal lives.
We thank all our contributors and the reviewers who engaged so openly with the articles, providing wonderful feedback in support of the authors. We also offer special thanks to Lily Hayward-Smith for her editorial assistance in bringing together this issue.