Tuesday, March 28, 2017

On Gazing and Erasure ... and Our Preliminary Processing Plan

Dear Archiving Folks,

You may not be experiencing the positive affective rewards of all your work thus far, but I think you have done tremendously much and should take a moment to reflect on it all!

I've been paying special attention to three things in your work and in your interactions with one another: (1) the knowledge you make in your journals and reflections, whenever you develop a new lens for critique, or discover a new possibility for archival work; (2) the ethic and care with which you take stewardship of the materials you are examining; and (3) the theories you build when you let the collection speak back to what you read, and vice-versa. In all these things, I have only seen upward progress. Nicely done.

Saturday, March 25, 2017

"Women in the Archives, Vandals in the Stacks"

Dear ENG 4938 Seminar,

A fuller post will appear here in advance of next class, recounting some highlights of our previous unit. For now, in the interest of two reminders:
  1. Tuesday's readings by Ramsey and Yakel have been moved to Thursday 3/30. Although we will meet in Special Collections on that day, please plan to have finished your third Problem-Solving exercise and bring those readings to class so that we can discuss the implications of archival digitization on a collection like Nellie Godfrey King's.
  2. As we convene in Special Collections on Tuesday 3/28, I have asked you to keep in mind some central questions from our discussions this week, most notably:
    • How can/does "whiteness" become an archival imperative?
    • How might we be sensitive to "whiteness" -- or avoid it from becoming -- an imperative in our processing of Nellie Godfrey King's papers? (A related question brought up by Mallorie right at the end of last class: "Why/Would we want to?")

Thursday, March 9, 2017

On Planning ...



Taking "Social, Critical & Feminist Consciousness" to the Archives

Dear ENG 4938 Seminar,

In the interest of two reminders:
  1. The Women Writers Project offers free access for the month of March, so I have invited you to use that as one of your repositories for Problem-Solving Exercise #3;
  2. our next reading assignment (for Thursday 3/23) is Ramirez ("Being Assumed Not to Be") and Eubanks ("Mississippi on My Mind"). And yes, I'll ask you one more time to bring back Steedman chapter 6. Next time, I will open our discussion with some passages from her chapter to create a reflective backdrop for the other two essays.

Friday, March 3, 2017

Steedman, Davy, and Kirsch: Cultural Memory and the "Feminist" Archive

Dear Folks,

I promised I would bring two things back into our discussion:
  • Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's dohistory.org project
  • Carolyn Steedman's "What a Rag Rug Means."

Promises kept.