The study of Casswell et al. (2016) aims to empirically evaluate the impact of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) in the community of South American Asian Americans in academia.
In their review of literature, the authors identify gaps in research of the social impact of community archives in four domains: symbolic annihilation, affect in archives, community archives and archival impact. The authors point out that in each of these domains little work has empirically evaluated experiences of communities or individuals actively engaged in archiving.
The concept of symbolic annihilation describes “how marginalized groups are misrepresented or absent in a variety of symbolic contexts, from media to museums to tours of historic sites'' (p. 58). The authors bring up examples of scholarly works exploring this concept, such as works of Klein & Shiffman (2009) who analyzed the content of a sample of cartoons and found that media had systematically annihilated certain social groups, such as women, racial minorities, the elderly and LGBT. The authors pointed out that mass media ``systematically dispense with imagery and messages associated with these types of persons and, in the process, send a symbolic message to viewers/readers about the societal value of the persons comprising that group” (Klein & Shiffman, 2009, cited in Casswell et al., 2016).
Casswell et al. (2016) argue that community archives can act as “powerful forces against annihilation.” The authors explain that “silences” or “absences” in historical archives can serve as “potentially productive spaces in which communities can collectively imagine records that do not actually exist, but … have affective resonance” (p. 60). The authors emphasize that, despite the rich theoretical scholarship, there is a limited empirical work that used real cases to explain the processes of “accrual” and the impact of “silences” (p. 60).
The authors describe affect as “the noncognitive, nonlinguistic, and nonrational forces that undergird thought, action, and relationships” (p. 60), such as feelings and emotions. Despite significant interdisciplinary scholarship concerned with affect in archiving, a new direction of inquiry is dedicated to conceptualization of affect in praxis. Research that explores affect and archiving is most useful in such areas as human rights and trauma, but few studies have used empirical methods to investigate the impact of affect in archiving.
The authors explain that definitions of what constitutes community archives are broad and include different types of projects. In the US, community archives usually serve as a platform for underrepresented or marginalized groups to make decisions about the content and structure of their narratives. The authors conclude that, despite ongoing research of community archives, our knowledge about their impact on individuals and communities is largely limited.
The authors describe the measurements used in the literature to assess archival impact, such as those used in the Brophy’s model developed to assess the impact of information services on individuals or groups, or the Archival Metrics project developed as a tool for archivists and librarians to measure the economic impact of archives. The authors also review the research that aims to evaluate the social impact of community archives. They emphasize that archiving is different from museums and libraries since the archiving serves not only as a source of information but also as “evidence of actions taken” (p. 63). The authors stress the social roles of archives as platforms for preservation of identity, culture and historical heritage of communities.
The authors describe four themes generated through data analysis: 1) absence or difficulty of accessing historical materials related to South Asian Americans before the emergence of SAADA, 2) the personal affective impact of discovering SAADA for the first time, 3) the affective impact of SAADA on responders’ South Asian American Students, 4) and the ability of SAADA both to reflect the diversity within the South Asian American community and to promote feelings of inclusion within the ethnic community and the larger society (p. 67).
To describe the impact of the SAADA on participants and the studied community, researchers developed a concept of “representational belonging” which serves as a “counterweight to symbolic annihilation and describes the affective responses community members have to see their communities represented in complexity and nuance” (p. 75).
Reference:
Klein, H., & Shiffman, K. S. (2009). Underrepresentation and symbolic annihilation of socially disenfranchised groups (“out groups”) in animated cartoons. The Howard Journal of Communications, 20(1), 55-72.
