Last week we considered some of the possibilities and problems with historical revisionism through writing women's lives and un-silencing their "archives," including the idea that we (as readers) may write things into the story by our own archetypal expectations.
We considered their roles as figurative pioneers and discussed at some length Elizabeth McHenry's qualifications and motivations for Forgotten Readers, but we did not discuss what her project -- or Afua Cooper's -- might reveal about how archivists "mark" their archives. We also did not discuss how much the value of archival life-writings might be predicated upon those who have discovered them, and why their forgotten figures had been so easily overlooked. When Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes that it is hard to keep the background and foreground in balance with this kind of archival recreation, she may be referring to the fact that it is often impossible to discern precisely whose story is getting told: the subject's, the editor's, the institution's, or the archivist's?
Tuesday marks our third case study, during which we will ask these questions of several collections by closely examining their finding aids. More specifically, we will look at several collection descriptions for a sense of their provenance, their audience(s), their motivations, and anything else we can discover. Here are some links, courtesy of Katie McCormick and FSU Special Collections:
For comparison sake, here are some collection descriptions of other papers at the Special Collections of UNC Charlotte:
Following the rhetorical analysis that Morris and Rose perform on the Jim Berlin papers, we may ask the following questions:
- What's included?
- What's missing?
- What do you understand about the collection and the person it was "created by" from the finding aid?
- What more do you want to know and why?
Looking forward to next week,
-Dr. Graban
