This chapter seeks to link digital humanities and African American/Black studies to question “how humanity is framed in the digital humanities” with the purpose to explore the ways that technology create humanities as a racialized social construct (1). It seeks to intervene in the racialized systems of power in our understanding of digital humanities and how to utilize technological techniques for this purpose. It contributes to archive ethnographic theory and practice by drawing from Alexander Weheliye to challenge categorization of humanity, thinking critically about how people are marginalized through studies of interest. The text focuses particularly on technology of recovery, “the construction of humanity that has been historically excluded”, a main topic for black digital studies to connect black studies and digital humanities (3). With these two in mind, the text suggests that technology, applying to archives as well, can categorize humanity as well as build alternate human modalities that are politically based or social movement oriented.
The content of the course aims to capture relationships between digital humanities and African American studies. It explores Black Digital Humanities, drawing from Kim Gallon as the unmasking of the “racialized systems of power at work in how we understand digital humanities as a field” (1). It contributes to the theory and practice for archive ethnography by engaging with readings from digital humanities, African American studies, and cultural studies.
The text addresses the reluctances of anthropologists to create ethnographic archives although they keep data materials that haunt them. They argue that anthropological work and archives have a lot in common if we consider Bakhtin’s concept of centripetal and centrifugal pulls. Applying them to language, standardization and normativity can be seen as centripetal pulls. Meanwhile, everyday realities of linguistic diversity are centrifugal pulls. These pulls are “forces that impinge on archive-making and archive-imagining”, suggesting that archives are different than against the grain, rather, against and along the grain. Through this lens, the authors state that archives are never fixed and have “a myriad of agentive forces” (70). Archives have a lot in common with anthropological ethnography in that they have “lingering and tugging resonances, echoes, hauntings, associations, traces, and the like” (69).
This text addresses transparency in ethnography and the use of new technology. It suggests standards for transparency and discusses ethical implications. It contributes to theory and practice of archive ethnography by building standards for ethnography practice. The paper specifically attempts to answer how ethnographers have answered to the second reckoning in ethnographic research: confidentiality and data verification. They argue that standards for recording data, collecting data, anonymization, verification, and data sharing would bolster transparency and replicability.
This article discusses the concept and application of community archives. Community archives are established with skepticism of mainstream archival practices such as those made by heritage organizations addressing the power of erasure. The author explores the impacts of community archives and their relationship with mainstream archives. Community archives often form with agendas that are political and/or activist. These independent archival practices often seek to “redress or rebalance” the “history of a place, occupation, or interest” (74).
The text points out the oversaturation of the concept of Archives. They argue that “too many uses and meanings are being loaded onto the term” making conceptual and practical use disordered and siloed. Two examples are referring to archives as memory and as the internet. The author offers two new models to metaphorically view archives and the practice of archiving through which contributing to theory and practice.
The article provides a number of philosophical insights on how we are anthropologists should engage with archives and the prevailing practices that continue to this day. Drawing from Derrida's Archive Fever, the authors push forward the post modern mission to take on archives, the archivists and the process of archiving itself as objects of study, complicating their understanding as being constitutive of the very 'past' and 'memory' that they seek to preserve. However, present day archiving of social scientific data continues to draw upon the belief of an ontological divide between data and context, instead of viewing data as being reflexively constituted through historical and cultural specific practices. Furthermore, there is even less of an inclination to consider data archiving and/ or the process of data collection, curation and analysis as being more than mere techniques of preserving data and context instead of being constitutive of the very data that they seek to preserve and represent.
Therefore, the need to take into account the performative and constitutive aspect of data archiving and curation practices is vital to the field of archive ethnography. Materials of archives need to be understood within their relation to the archiving practices that materially and discursively constitute them. The article draws upon examples of data cleaning, data anonymization and meta data preparation to explore the conceptual assumptions underpinning these practices of data curation i.e. as being neutral and technical. However, all three practices enact and embody normative conceptual assumptions ( sexual orientation, the personal vs meaningful , etc) that constitute the kind of data that is then preserved, categorized and discarded as being "unlikely", "impossible" or to be retained or discarded.
So therefore, what is required is not to reject categorization of any kind or archival practices in totality ( which is impossible as no archives would then exist) but rather to place them within the framework of analysis in order to engage with the assumptions underpinning them and to deconstruct the process in which they are naturalized and taken as granted. Furthermore, what is vital is to understand archived data as being "made and remade through multiple practices ... practices that are normally treated as neutral and innocent techniques ... (which) renders invisible their constitutive role in the ontological formation of data, records and artifacts" ( pg 166)
Zeitlyn's article was certainly a stimulating one, since the piece raised a number of questions that we as anthropologists have to deal with, both in terms of how we engage with the 'field' as well as archiving the 'data' that we draw from the said engagement. Archives themselves are not 'neutral' repositories of human events but rather are part and parcel of the politics of power, memory and knowledge that the past, present and future are entangled in. The article draws from Foucault, Derrida and others to argue that archives have traditionally served as instruments of hegemony, whether it be colonial power structures or governments in general in order to gain control over subjects. Furthermore, the role of archivists in this equation is important in terms of determining which materials are included in the archives and which are discarded which leads to the question of the instrumental use of power in such knowledge categorization. "Present choices determine future history, selecting the materials available to future historians" ( pg 463 )
However, archives can also function at the opposite end of the specturm as instruments of subversion, as studying the archive to recover or restore silenced voices, dissident narratives and "understand people from archives in ways never intended or envisaged by those creating or maintaining the archives " (pg 464). Therefore, the focus is not on using archives but rather engaging with the archives themselves in an ethnographic manner ( ethnographic archives) in order to understand the practice of said archives, the archivist as well as the historian, in order to complicate the homogenity of discourses in order to 'reveal' the silences beneath and the processes that silenced these heterogenous narratives.
However, archives and archivists can and do function as "liminal zones in rites of passage between memory and forgetting" ( pg 466 ). Instead of building the understanding of the past on the quotidian practice of everyday memories, archives and museums are valorized as the product of collective memory. Hence, engaging with archives not as mere documentation but rather as social organizations in all their complexities, allows for the production of ethnographies of archives. What was in particular interestiing about Zietlyn's article was the insight that the way archives 'forget' is very different from how individuals forget memories, both in the process ( the role of archivists for example ) and the irremediable nature of the former. The past for the latter is based on the active reconstruction of events' remembered which can lead to new narratives about that past.
Zeitlyn's proposal for understanding archival ethnography as a performance is certainly one that I hope to read further into during this quarter. How do we view our anthropological 'archives' gleaned from fieldnotes, interviews, etc as archives of performance and what impact does that have on our own positionality within our field ( both when we are in the field collecting 'data' and when we are outside of it, drawing from the data to write our papers )? Furthermore, how does it further impact the divide between the idea of 'native' and the 'non native' athropologist or the 'insider -outsider' analogy? Furthermore, the ethical dilemma of anthropologists in relation to the use and archiving of their data gains traction as noted by Zeitlyn " They ( anthropologists) were reluctant to cede or allow access to their field notes ... yet were reluctant to ensure this will ever happen by burning or contemplating other forms of destruction " ( pg 472 ). Notwithstanding the institutional demands of the IRB, etc as well as the questions raised over anonymization or consent ( is that even possible in the truest sense, particularly in terms of reusing the 'data' for future research in ways that was not intended when it was first collected ?), is the destruction of our field notes even ethically viable, since the basis of those notes are not ours to own ( the memories of others for example)? How does archive ethnography, particularly in terms of archiving these anthropological research data, engage with these ethical questions? Zeitlyn argues that one way could be to engage with the different agents involved in the archiving of research communities as well as field sites.
What concepts, ideas and examples from this text contribute to the theory and practice of archive ethnography?
In the piece, I liked how the author combines the concepts of both Stoler (2009) and Trouillot (1995) by encouraging scholars to read along the grain and across it. Citing Trouillot (1995, p. 29), Zeitlyn argues that such an approach helps us “think about the power plays affecting silences, determining which stories get told and which leave traces.” Referring to the work of Guha (1983), Zeitlyn claims we can focus on understanding both “how records were created (reading along the grain) to recover history from below (reading across the grain)” (p. 465). Though I am a bit unsure of what it means to read along and across the grain, I think this approach is a helpful reflective practice that can be used in archive ethnography to reexamine how the creation and curation processes of archives affect the stories they tell and, importantly, who gets to “speak.”
What concepts, ideas and examples from this text contribute to the theory and practice of archive ethnography?
The idea that data curation practices are “performative” (p. 156) is an important consideration for the data collection and curation practices for both archive ethnography and social science research in general. As Mauthner & Gardos (2015) write, “Data curation practices are ‘performative’ in that they help bring into being the data they ostensibly preserve” (p. 156). It is not only the positionality of the archivist or structure of the archive that can influence an archive, but data curation practices themselves. In this sense, routine data curation practices that we may take for granted such as data cleaning or metadata, may themselves shape the archive and the knowledge it provides. Thus, it is essential that scholars not only critically reflect on how their positionality affects their knowledge production, but how the most routine and mundane tasks of data management during the research process can ultimately privilege a certain narrative while excluding others.