#DarkArchives
Roundtable (12.ix.19)
The Future of the
Archives
Here are some
points that I had made for myself, but didn’t present, at the Oxford Sociey for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature conference, #DarkArchives (darkarchives) Roundtable
on ‘The Future of the Archives’, chaired by Pip Willcox. Thank you to the organizers, Drs Julie Dresvina and Stephen Pink, for inviting me to participate; it was lively and interesting. The roundtable was held
at 11.30am, and I zoomed in from California (in my pyjamas!) to participate and
to hear colleagues’ considered and perceptive views on where academics, archivists and
librarians in the medieval and early modern periods go from here; and to learn about and what
priorities might emerge in these textual and historical fields.
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| Hopetoun House fire-proofed archive room |
I believe we are
close to a point of stasis in the world of medieval and early modern textual
materials. There is such an abundance of information available through images, online projects, and a plethora of mismatched finding aids, that it is in danger of overwhelming those who work in these areas. Being overwhelmed, as all students know, leads to stasis--an inability to move in any direction. More, we know much of what archives can be and can do, though we focus too
much on the big repositories, and too little on the less-well known places (as
well as those that are under significant cultural and political threat). I
think scholars have a very good idea of what the digital can be, what it can do
for scholarship and research, and we are increasingly getting hints of what it
cannot be or do. There is also an awful lot of reinvention of the technological
and theoretical wheels (as I, and others, have been saying for the past five or
six years).
So. What next? One
thing is sure--despite the tools, the digital medium, the catalogues and
editions--expert librarians, archivists and scholars still need their eyes on
these collections and their rare materials, as, indeed, some speakers have commented in
the Twitter stream (at #DarkArchives). If anything, digitization has shown us
how important the physical object is; how we need to look, and then look again, but also feel our way through the object. That aside, as of right now, I have
a list of nine (and-a-half) As in my role as prognosticator:
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| Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 3 'A' |
1. Avoid loss of
momentum. Beyond digitizing more and more materials, when most of what’s
available is rarely accessed or studied, how can interdisciplinary teams of
scholars maintain the momentum created thus far? How do we make these materials
discoverable and accessible (another ‘A’ = accessibility)? How do we encourage
more widespread use of the archives that are now in the public domain?
2. Abandon small-scale
thinking. Let’s be Audacious in our planning for the future. Events like
#DarkArchives, bringing colleagues from all over the world and in many disciplines
together, are critical to the discussion and opportunities to build on work
already achieved. This means more virtual conferences, perhaps; less ‘ownership’;
less of a rush to be the first, to discover the magic formula. It means…
3. Abundant
collaboration and generous Aspirations for the community at large. This is easy
to say and really difficult to do. IIIF (@iiif_io) is exemplary in this regard
with their community conversations and openness to all-comers. Internationally
shared resources are critical to the life of this kind of scholarship and
curation (with all that that entails, including cataloguing and display). If I
cannot do something myself, I should be able to find a freely available
resource. If someone has expensive equipment, is there a way to share it?
4. Advocacy for
the human, especially when doing work at scale; the human eye is essential. Applied Humanities
as a wide-ranging set of disciplines is essential, too. Increasingly, teams
working on datasets (whether image-based or not) are almost exclusively engineers. Humanities needs advocates; it needs Appreciation.
5. Attend to the
next generation. We must find ways to get a seat at the table of innovation and
massively funded research. We must Argue for funds and fellowships to train,
support, and create a meaningful career trajectory for our upcoming archivists,
graduates, postdoctoral fellows, librarians, academics.
6. Artificial
intelligence and Augmented intelligence. Using massive datasets for handwriting
recognition development, or large-scale investigation, or crowd-sourcing, means
we are reliant on multiple repositories’ clear metadata (as I, Will Noel, Ben
Albritton, and many others have pointed out) and consistent digitization outcomes. It
also means recognizing the inherent biases in datasets, and the lack of
standardization. AI (and AugI) will be critically important in exploring all
the data we now have at our disposal, which is still such a tiny amount of what
exists, so we must be invested in being involved, but also publicly anticipating the pitfalls.
7.
Acknowledgement. We need to loudly and publicly acknowledge each others’ work;
acknowledge and credit all team members; acknowledge the undergrads and grads,
contingent and precarious scholars who facilitate the projects we initiate. Institutions
must be persuaded to recognize how significant team-work is to humanists now and that is it part of many scholars' effort and output. I, for one, could not do lots of areas of my work and thinking without the inspiration and input of Orietta Da Rold, Ben Albritton, Andrew Prescott, all the digitizers, and many others.
8. Acceptance of
the fact that none of our collections, or our prioritizing of tasks, is
neutral. There are always choices in what we do, and choices are subjective. What
do we stand to gain through our choices? Who loses out? How can we be sure to
seek representation and inclusivity in our work?
9. Accounting for
time: funded time, daily time. Large data, collections of manuscripts, require
time to analyse and evaluate. Those of us who’ve run two-year, or five-year,
projects to catalogue or create new tools, or design algorithms, know that this
takes times. Training of colleagues on teams takes time. But after all that,
when those projects are ‘done’, the data (248,000 images of embellished capitals
in Stanford Global Currents (SGC), for example,) takes a great deal of unbudgeted time
to explore and write-up. This needs to be properly accounted for and properly funded or recompensed.
9.5. Amen to all
that.
