Adventures in Archives
Pathways into the Past
A few years ago, I taught a foundations course in Libraries, Special Collections and Archives at the University of Toronto. Being a Medievalist obsessed with “the medium”—and not a Librarian—I made sure this experience was hands-on, with a twist. No student of mine was going to escape without depth-training in primary-source research methodologies. My rationale? I wanted them to put on the researcher perspective because we need library and information management specialists who can design excellent tools and provide top services for researchers. And a good thing too: several of my students from that year went on to study Library and Information Sciences at the graduate level, and many others went on to complete internships or begin careers in archives and museums across the country and internationally.
I unleashed my students on the Special Collections at the J. M. Kelly Library at St. Michael’s College. They had to learn all the protocols for handling rare books, ephemera, and other text-based artefacts. This included the ability to discover and decode non-digitally-born texts in both physical and electronic storage environments.
Research and scholarship are only ever as good as the information management systems supporting them, and those systems that exist are only as good as the researchers who use them. Unless manuscript and print archives are actively being used, they are lost resources. In the age of the digital, the ability to discover and work with these materials is more essential than ever.
The manuscript and print documentary heritage is vast. Only a fraction of it is digitized. Only a fraction of that fraction has been transcribed, translated, and/or fully remediated. Although many items have been scanned and lodged on the Internet, this process of digitization is in its infancy. The digitization of texts is no guarantee of access, permanence, or enhanced readability. Depending on how it is managed, it can go a long way to achieving these ideals, but it is not a replacement for “the real thing.” Some forms of digital remediation have enhanced our ability to recover lost information, as for example in ancient and medieval manuscripts, but no one would argue that the original should be discarded or fall into disuse. The digital and the original must exist in tandem. Too much still remains shrouded in unreadable obscurity, hidden from the view of even the most nuanced search engines, or locked behind the doors of inaccessible repositories. Barriers create a situation where pathways to the past lie undiscovered.
This is true also of mass-produced print material. Whereas medieval manuscripts are now generally perceived as highly valuable artefacts, printed books—unless deemed “early” or “rare” in relation to “print culture”—are viewed as disposable or unnecessary to retain or even acquire, especially under the influence of digitization and the ebook. The folkloric assumption that one copy of a printed book is much like another—and thus unworthy of preservation or access—leads to the loss of valuable knowledge about individual readers, their reading habits, and reading contexts across time and space. Annotations and other markings, like page folds and highlighting, are invaluable artefacts of readership that help researchers understand the reading experience and the “lifeworld” of the book as it exists among its readers; that a book exists in the holdings of a particular institution is another important record telling us something about its accessioning priorities in relation to community. The selective nature of digitizing processes, as well as the loss of the physical stratum that serves as a medium for the recording of reader interaction with books and other documents, exerts a radical pressure on how we perceive the past and how we shape our historical narratives.
Through ownership of the remediation process and the promise of eternal preservation in their industrial memory-banks, large corporatations have managed to gain ownership and control over material they deem culturally relevant. In the public sphere, many discipline-specific, primary-source databases exist, but these tend to come into existence through researcher interest, institutional backing, and targeted funding. Think “Digital Humanities” initiatives. These interconnected streams often exist behind paywalls. All of these approaches are just as subject to the Zeitgeist and trends in technology as the real-life scenarios that produced the original texts in the first place.
There are further pressures acting against the use of manuscript and print archives in original research. The institutionalization of “New Media” ideologies and an atmosphere of presentism in the academy tend to drive down their perceived relevance to innovation and creativity in the now.
Without access to and engagement of the voices of the past, stories become lost, and with them, the nuances of history. Generalized and homogenized views of the past contribute to distorted metanarratives that are easily put into the service of social and political convenience of whatever stripe. The deplolyment of critiques, even corrective ones, is no replacement for sound research based on solid methodology. Researchers must have the practical know-how to come into direct contact with the multitude of stories waiting to be heard. This know-how is essential in the conversation we hold with the past.
Throughout the course at Toronto, I gave my students research challenges. One of my favourites was a transcription exercise beset with remediation issues. The students had to decipher a selection from the hand-written records of civilian claims for losses during the War of 1812 in the Niagara District of Upper Canada. For them, it was the research equivalent of going over the Falls in a wooden barrell: they had to overcome the idiosyncracies of bureacratic scrawl in early nineteenth-century cursive handwriting and a totally alien format for the storage of detailed information.
Because cursive handwriting is no longer de rigueur, and students have less and less practical or theoretical understanding of how letters are formed using this method, it was difficult for them to even guess what word a squiggle was gesturing towards, especially in the context of abbreviations. They also had to struggle though the information gains and losses of remediation in the archival preservation process. The samples they pored over were digitized copies of greyscale microform copies (from photograph) of paper originals, accessed via a combination of printed PDF and onscreen versions (JPEG, PDF) from the Library and Archives Canada online database. As an added bonus, the database was itself “archived” on the web, meaning that it is no longer maintained or updated but remains as-is. Further, the records are unsearchable in and of themselves. The only way to get through them is to go word by word, item by item. To my delight, they really got into it, and were able to come up with some great solutions to transcription problems both individually and in group. Library and Archives Canada’s Co-Lab allows members of the public to contribute to the transcription of a number of hand-written, digitized sources for enhanced public access in much the same way.
As a challenge intended to put focus on the basic skills needed to produce an accurate transcription of a handwritten source, and to demonstrate how these skills could unlock “information,” it was a success. The students discovered that they could peel back the many layers standing between them and the past through persistence and the acquisition of basic skills.
These skills, however, are only ever a starting point. The researcher must walk the line between purposeful inquiry and happy accident in what comes next: going behind the veil of “information” to glimpse life-as-lived. This principle is more difficult to get across. Arguably, it is better modelled than taught. It requires a sustained attitude of learned ignorance leading to inquiry. It requires a commitment to “stay with the problem” and to follow the opportunities for exploration that present themselves, often by chance.
To be sure, there’s nothing more boring than a set of 200+ year-old financial records. No one can say why, long after that course finished, I kept coming back to them—except as proof of the principle outlined above. And then I hit paydirt.
As a direct corollary of the War of 1812 exercise, I made a surprise discovery that demonstrates the exciting potentials lurking in even the most boring of historical archives. In amongst the tedium of official accounting I discovered something personal and intimate: a torn and folded scrap of paper with “Mary Tuttle her book 1813” written repeatedly by an uncertain hand in between what looked like handwritten lines of poetry. My mind exploded with questions. Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?
My “discovery” of Mary Tuttle and “her book” was at once pure accident and total fallacy. Mary Tuttle lived and died. She was known, and likely loved. Even the archivist in charge of microforming the original must have been struck by this scrap, nestled like a rare treasure among the files: two different photographic exposures of the scrap are lodged in the database. Of course I did not discover her. I recovered her for my own time and place. And she led me on an amazing journey into her world. I have written more than one full-length article on this discovery … coming soon.
The Mary Tuttle document represents a swirl of interconnections between past and present. Here is where the value of non-digitally-born archives and the magical combination of the digital, the Internet, and algorithms converge. True “multi-media literacy”—the ability to move between manuscript, print, and digital text—comes into play. Practical research know-how and a theoretical position of ‘learned ignorance’ dovetail to create new knowledge. The accidental, multi-directional, and multimodal nature of historical investigation is nowhere more obvious than in this process.
Pathways to the past are anything but linear. That is a lesson every researcher learns over and over again in making genuine contact with what has gone before. The more we rely on one-way access to the past—with our technological biases moving us down one stream of flow—the less we are able to truly engage, and the more history looks like a prefigured line running from point “a” to point “b.” Such a line can be a precursor to entrenchment. Entrenchments may have the look of facts. Facts are easily misused. Our job is to hand over know-how of the many open pathways to the next generation.
Citation:
Reid, Jennifer. “Adventures in Archives: Pathways into the Past.” Winnsox, vol. 4 (2023).
ISSN 2563-2221
