The forensic imagination: interdisciplinary approaches to tracing creativity in writers’ born-digital archives

ABSTRACT

In 2013, Matthew Kirschenbaum advocated for increased collaboration between digital archivists and digital humanities specialists to make the most out of born-digital archives. Since then, researchers and archivists have experimented with innovative interfaces for access to writer’s archives that emerge from individual research cultures and practices. Simultaneously, archives such as the British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) are beginning to collect the work of authors who work in inventive digital ways. This article will therefore explore the following question: how might archivists, authors and researchers profitably collaborate to explore the nature of creativity in the born-digital archive, so that both digital preservation and digital scholarship take place? In doing so, the authors look to the complementary fields of genetic criticism and digital humanities to inform the development of archival tools as ‘hermeneutical instruments’. They will explore how such instruments might allow us to read horizontally across archival strata, building on an ‘esthetic of the possible’ to develop a ‘jouer avec les fonds’, supported through collaboration between researchers, archivists and writers. Finally, the authors consider how this approach challenges archival practices, and propose forms of collaboration that might address both archival practice and emerging forms of scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Literary archives
• creativity
• archiving

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Lisa Stead, ‘Introduction’, in Carrie Smith and Lisa Stead (eds), The Boundaries of the Literary Archive, Ashgate, London, 2013, pp. 1–12.

2. ibid., p. 1.

3. Michelle Caswell, ‘“The Archive” Is Not an Archives: On Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies’, Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, available at <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bn4v1fk>, accessed 10 September 2018.

4. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, MIT Press, Boston, MA, 2008, p. 23.

5. Matthew Kirschenbaum, ‘The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1, 2013, available at <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000151/000151.html>, accessed 15 November 2018.

6. Johanna Drucker, ‘Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1, 2013, available at <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000143/000143.html>, accessed 26 November 2018.

7. Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell, ‘Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities’, in Matthew K. Gold (ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2012, p. 79.

8. Michel Contat, Denis Hollier and Jacques Neefs, ‘Drafts’, Yale French Studies, vol. 89, 1996, p. 2.

9. S Muller, JA Feith and R Fruin, Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, trans. Arthur H Leavitt, 2nd edn, Society of American Archivists, Chicago, 2003, p. 54.

10. Jennifer Douglas, ‘Original Order, Added Value? Archival Theory and the Douglas Coupland Fonds’, in Carrie Smith and Lisa Stead (eds), The Boundaries of the Literary Archive, Ashgate, London, 2013, pp. 45–57.

11. ibid., pp. 54–5.

12. Further details of which can be found available at <https://portal.uea.ac.uk/library/archives/bacw>.

13. A full list of authors for which the archive holds collections is available at <https://portal.uea.ac.uk/library/archives/bacw/authors>.

14. Salman Rushdie’s archive, for instance, was acquired by Emory University Library in 2006, while the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas acquired Ian McEwan’s archive in 2014 for a reported $2 million.

15. British Archive for Contemporary Writing, ‘FAQ for Authors Depositing within the Storehouse of the British Archive for Contemporary Writing’, n.d., available at <https://portal.uea.ac.uk/documents/6207125/9157971/FAQ+-+The+Storehouse+British+Archive+for+Contemporary+Writing/ee13a4db-1f46-43fe-9ae2-69906d31a23b>, accessed 27 November 2018.

16. Victoria Sloyan, ‘Born-Digital Archives at the Wellcome Library: Appraisal and Sensitivity Review of Two Hard Drives’, Archives and Records: The Journal of the Archives and Records Association, vol. 37, no. 1, 2016, pp. 20–36.

17. Jonathan Pledge and Eleanor Dickens, ‘Process and Progress: Working with Born-Digital Material in the Wendy Cope Archive at the British Library’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 46, no. 1, 2018, pp. 59–69.

18. Elain Justice, ‘A World Mapped by Stories: The Salman Rushdie Archive’, Emory Libraries and Information Technology, 2010, available at <http://web.library.emory.edu/news-events/news/archives/2010/world-mapped-stories-salman-rushdie-archive-through-sept-26-2010-0.html>.

19. Dorothy Waugh, Elizabeth Russey Roke and Erika Farr, ‘Flexible Processing and Diverse Collections: A Tiered Approach to Delivering Born-Digital Archives’, Archives and Records, vol. 37, no. 1, 2016, pp. 3–19.

20. DROID (Digital Record Object Identification) is a free file-profiling tool developed by the UK National Archives. It produces a range of metadata relating to born-digital records, including filenames, file formats, last modified dates and extensions.

21. Sloyan, p. 30.

22. ibid., pp. 21–2.

23. Terry Cook, ‘“We Are What We Keep; We Keep What We Are”: Archival Appraisal Past, Present and Future’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, vol. 32, no. 2, 2011, pp. 173–89.

24. Catherine Hobbs and Sarah Kastner, ‘Literary Archives, Fictional Truths and Material(real)ities: The Yvonne Vera Project – Catherine Hobbs and Sarah Kastner’, 2014, available at <http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/literary-archives-fictional-truths-and-materialrealities-the-yvonne-vera-project-catherine-hobbs-and-sarah-kastner/>, accessed 5 November 2018.

25. Kirschenbaum, ‘The .txtual Condition’.

26. Terry Cook, ‘Remembering the Future: Appraisal of Records and the Role of Archives in Constructing Social Memory’, in Francis X Blouin and William G Rosenberg (eds), Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2006, p. 170.

27. Caswell, p. 2.

28. Johanna Drucker, ‘Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory’, Culture Machine, vol. 12, 2011, p. 10.

29. Kyle Jensen, Reimagining Process: Online Writing Archives and the Future of Writing Studies, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 2015.

30. Justice.

31. Drucker, ‘Performative Materiality’.

32. Sloyan, pp. 31–2.

33. Pledge and Dickens, p. 67.

34. Jane Winters, ‘Coda: Web Archives for Humanities Research – Some Reflections’, in Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder (eds), The Web as History, UCL Press, London, 2017, p. 246.

35. Ramsay and Rockwell.

36. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science, vol. 2, nos. 1–2, 2002, p. 93.

37. Further information on her work and archive is available from the BACW at <https://portal.uea.ac.uk/library/archives/bacw/alderman>.

38. The Diasporic Literary Archives Network was established by the University of Reading in 2012 to better understand the political, commercial and technological issues of authors’ literary archives. Further information can be found at <http://www.diasporicarchives.com/>.

39. ‘Authors and their Papers: A Guidance Sheet for Authors and Writers’, 2014, available at < http://glam-archives.org.uk/?page_id=27>

40. Vintage is an imprint of large commercial publisher Penguin Random House.

41. Lee Rourke, ‘Why Creative Writing is Better with a Pen’, The Guardian, 3 March 2011, available at <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/03/creative-writing-better-pen-longhand>, accessed 11 December 2018.

42. Anita Helle (ed.), The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2007, p. 1.

43. Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden, Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2004.

44. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, trans. Stephen Heath, in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, Fontana Press, London, 1977, p. 126.

45. Deppman, Ferrer and Groden, p. 6.

46. Drucker, ‘Performative Materiality’.

47. Paul Gooding, Historic Newspapers in the Digital Age: ‘Search All About It’, Routledge, Abingdon, 2017, p. 109.

48. Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–99.

49. Mitchell Whitelaw, ‘Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015, available at <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000205/000205.html>, accessed 18 November 2018.

50. Alan Liu, ‘Is Digital Humanities a Field? – An Answer from the Point of View of Language’, Alan Liu, 2013, available at <http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/is-digital-humanities-a-field-an-answer-from-the-point-of-view-of-language/>, accessed 13 April 2019.

51. Ramsay and Rockwell. p. 79.

52. Johanna Drucker and Bethany Nowviskie, ‘Speculative Computing: Aesthetic Provocations in Humanities Computing’, in Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (eds), A Companion to Digital Humanities, Blackwell Publishing Professional, Oxford, 2004, p. 431 (emphasis in the original).

53. Benjamin Alexander, ‘The Salman Rushdie Archive and the Re-imagining of a Philological E-volution’, in André Lardinois, Sophie Levie, Hans Hoekenand and Christoph Lüthy (eds), Texts, Transmissions, Receptions, Brill, Leiden, 2015, p. 75, available at <https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004270848/B9789004270848_006.xml>, accessed 4 January 2018.

54. Susan Brown, Tanya Clement, Laura Mandell, Deb Verhoeven and Jacqueline Wernimont, ‘Creating Feminist Infrastructure in the Digital Humanities’, paper presented at Digital Humanities 2016, Krakow, 11–16 July 2016, available at <http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/233>, accessed 14 December 2018.

55. Catherine Hobbs, ‘New Approaches to Canadian Literary Archives’, Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes, vol. 40, no. 2, 2006, p. 113.

56. Winters, p. 246.

57. Sloyan.

58. Waugh et al.

59. Pledge and Dickens.

60. Gooding, pp. 109–10.

61. Whitelaw.

62. Caswell, p. 2.

63. Hobbs and Kastner, ‘Literary Archives’.

64. Pledge and Dickens; ePADD is a free, open-source software package that supports the appraisal, processing, preservation, discovery and delivery of historical email archives. It was developed by a collaborative team including Stanford University Libraries, Harvard University, The Metropolitan New York Library Council, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Irvine, p. 67.

65. Hobbs and Kastner.

66. Hobbs, p. 113.

67. Kastner.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Gooding

Dr. Paul Gooding is a Lecturer in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow, with a specialism in digital curation and users of digital collections.

Jos Smith

Dr. Jos Smith is a lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, and has published on contemporary poetry and the New Nature Writing.

Justine Mann

Justine Mann is the Archivist at the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia.