(3089,19,'2012-09-25 03:36:43','2012-09-25 03:36:43','In a world of etiquette and formality, dance cards quickly became indispensable to young women in search of dancing partners. They were a manifestation of etiquette, used to keep social order and help their users follow protocol. Though dance cards are rarely used now, the study of these cards gives a lot of insight into the societies and groups that used them.\r\n\r\nLists of etiquette books remain from all different periods, instructing men and women how to act in each particular circumstance. Dancing claims a large portion of many of these books, as it was considered an elegant pastime and a way to judge one\'s character. Dancing was a sign of culture and social class, as the upper class had formal dance training while they were young.\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image3_brand.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1341\" title=\"goucher_student work image3_brand\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image3_brand-209x250.jpg\" alt=\"Scrapbook page showing in situ location of the U. S. Naval Academy June 2, 1921 Farewell Ball dance card \" width=\"209\" height=\"250\" /></a>\r\n\r\nThe dance card furthered one\'s enjoyment of dancing, as it allowed young women to know who they would dance with; they never needed to worry about procuring a partner for the following dance, because he had already signed her card. A practice known as “dating ahead” became quite common as young women began filling out their dance cards in advance of the evening, to ensure that they would not be without a partner. Many women worried about not being asked to dance, as the most beautiful, best dancers were constantly engaged on the dance floor; the women without partners were often looked down on and pitied. Young women feared not having a partner for every dance, and having a dance card allowed them to make sure they would be busy dancing the entire night.\r\n\r\nDance cards also provided women with a way to gracefully decline a dance invitation. Johnson points out, “a lady must not decline the invitation of a gentleman to dance, unless she is previously engaged, or does not intend to dance any more during the evening” (79). Having a dance card allowed women to fill out their card with men who they would prefer to dance with, and it also allowed them to gracefully decline a dance by saying her card is full, even though this may not be true.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\nIt was also a way for young women to remember her engagements:\r\n\r\nIn the etiquette of the ballroom young ladies should be very careful to keep their promises to their various partners. Little books are furnished as memorizers, and the same honor is imperative here as in greater things. (American Code of Manners 43)\r\n\r\nThe dance card acted as a reminder of who she was supposed to dance with for each dance, which helped with confusion in promising multiple dances. The dance card also allowed a convenient excuse when a woman accidentally promised the same dance to two men; she could simply claim that her “programme had got into such a state of confusion” and refrain from offending either party involved (Aldrich 113). After the ball has ended, the dance card can serve as a memento of the event, “Each dance is entered on the program—and many a delightful memory is kept alive by glancing at these names days after the dance is held” (Eichler 97). In this way, the card acts as a reminder both at the ball and after the ball is finished.\r\n\r\nDance cards were predominantly used before the 20th century, but certain groups upheld tradition and used them much longer. As Eichler points out in 1922, “The dance program is rarely used now except at college dances, or army and navy dances. It has lost prestige with the passing of the old fashioned ball” (97).\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image2_brand.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1344\" title=\"goucher_student work image2_brand\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image2_brand-171x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"171\" height=\"250\" /></a>\r\n\r\nThe Archives and Special Collections at the United States Naval Academy holds an extensive collection of cards from many different events. The Academy, with its emphasis on tradition, used dance cards at their Winter Hops, the Ring Dance and the Farewell Ball into the 1960s. The USNA Archives provides a wonderful example of the evolution of the dance card, through the cards they have from the Farewell Ball, spanning from 1893 to 1976.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\nThe earliest dance card in the collection is from The Farewell Ball, June 2nd 1893 , donated by Mrs. Elizabeth Galt Welles (13 x 8.5 cm). The card is bound by a ribbon bow on the top vertical edge, with heavy cardstock covers in an ivory color. The cover simply states the dance and date in black ink with gold embellishments. The half-inch wide ribbon is long enough for the card to be carried on a lady’s wrist and holds a small pencil 7 cm in length. Inside the cover were 2 pages containing the list of dances with the song titles and composers. The card had not been filled out by its owner. The simple design creates an elegant card, following the guidelines for cards set by The Ballroom Guide published in the 1860s: “modern taste is inclined to favour plain and chaste designs rather than florid” (Aldrich 117). The contents of the card show that the emphasis of the card was on the order of dances, without much information about the ball.\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, the Academy does not have any cards from the balls in between 1893 and 1906, but the card from the 1906 Farewell Ball provides a beautiful example of a dance card. Donated by Mrs. Bradford Bartlett, the card is 10 x 7.5 cm with a tan leather cover. The cover has two inside pockets and a strap to attach the card to a woman’s wrist. Inside, the card contains three bifolia with much more decoration than the 1893 card. The card begins with a title page, which announces the name, date, and location of the ball. Following the title page are three pages of dances with spaces for 25 dances. For the first two pages of dances, each recto side holds a space for eight dances and on the verso is an illumination of a woman in an evening gown and a woman in a Navy coat and cover, respectively. The third page lists nine dances on the recto side and lists the committee of midshipmen who planned the ball on the verso. After these there are two blank pages with the word “Autographs” printed at the top of each page. This card—also not filled out—demonstrates the shift in focusing on only the dances to a larger focus on the card as a decorative souvenir.\r\n\r\nThe Farewell Ball card from June 5th, 1908 donated by Mary McCarthy is the first in the collection filled out by its original owner. The last names of eight different men are written in pen with a beautiful cursive hand next to the dances. Ms. McCarthy danced 17 of the 25 dances listed and most of them were two steps and waltz, which were especially popular at the time. This card is much like the 1906 card, with a section listing the committee members and blank pages for autographs. Measuring 10 x 7.5 cm, the dark brown suede cover has a Naval Academy insignia blindly stamped in the center, with a dark brown cord and pockets inside the cover. The inside was printed with brown ink and tissue paper protected the pictures from transfer.\r\n\r\nIn 1909, the Farewell Ball dance card, donated by Mrs. Bradford Bartlett, remained much the same. The 10.5 x 8 cm card had a navy blue vinyl cover with pockets inside to hold pictures and gold tooling for decoration. The inside contained the order of dances—not filled out—a supper list, and a committee list. The illustrations were in black and white with a small bit of red as an accent.\r\n\r\nAlso donated by Mrs. Bradford Bartlett, the Farewell Ball, June 3rd 1910 dance card had a dark grey leather cover with a silver cord (10 x 7 cm). A blind tooled ship decorated the front, and white paint accented the moon and water. Inside, black and white illustrations were accented with the use of yellow, red, blue and green and were protected by tissue paper. The order of dances was filled out in sloppy cursive hand in pencil. The autograph section, however, was left blank.\r\n\r\nThe example from the Farewell Ball, June 2nd 1911 provided the most intricate cover. Measuring 11 x 6.5 cm while closed, the tan suede cover folds three times, containing extra pockets. Inside the front cover is one pocket and the small booklet of paper, the back cover extends to twice the front cover’s length, folding in on itself. The right side of the cover has a simple pocket, while the middle of the cover has a more complex pocket. The pocket is vertically arranged, with a flap that closes by inserting the narrow point of the flap into a loop. Naval Academy insignia is stamped onto the inner pockets of the cover. The dance card was attached to the lady’s wrist by a dark brown leather strap, which still holds an 8 cm pencil. Inside contains a title page, pictures with color accents, the committee list, a section for autographs and the order of dances, which is not filled out.\r\n\r\nThe Farewell Ball, June 6th 1919 dance card has a navy blue vinyl cover with blind stamped Naval Academy insignia and date and a blue and yellow cord (10 x 8 cm). The inside contains a title page and the dances listed verso and spaces to fill out engagements listed recto. The card is not filled out and is decorated with black and white illustrations.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\nBound vertically in a brown leather cover, the Farewell Ball June 3rd 1920 dance card measures 11 x 7.5 cm. The cover is blind stamped with blue and yellow cords. After the order of dances, there is a calendar from June 1920 to May 1921. The months are listed two at a time, with large pictures above them. The stiff cardstock paper has gilt edges.\r\n\r\nThe Farewell Ball June 2nd 1921 dance card has a significantly different cover than the previous cards. The simple 9 x 6.5 cm white cardstock cover has a full color illustration on the cover with an embossed gold Naval Academy insignia. Previously, the covers were made of a more expensive material—usually leather or vinyl. This was the first ball held in Dahlgren Hall, one of the social buildings on the Naval Academy yard. The dances are listed 3 on a page, with no names of the songs, only the types of dances. The dances are not filled out. Next to the type of dance is a space labeled “meet under” and beneath the dances is a space for memories. There is also a different quote at the bottom of each page.\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image1_brand.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1343\" title=\"goucher_student work image1_brand\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image1_brand-195x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"250\" /></a>\r\n\r\nSimilarly, the Farewell Ball June 2nd 1922 dance card has a white cardstock cover with a color illustration (from Keith Scrapbook, Goucher College Library). The 9 x 6.5 cm cover includes blind stamping and a blue and yellow cord. The layout is very much like the 1921 card, containing a list of dances, with a “meet under” space and space below for memories. This card, however, does not have quotes at the bottom of each page. At the end, there is a committee list. The card is filled out with black pen, and in the “meet under” section, flags are drawn with pen and colored. The ball was held in Dahlgren Hall, like the 1921 card also containing a “meet under” section. Dahlgren Hall is lined with flags on either side of the long, rectangular building. The “meet under” space allowed the women to draw in the flag and know exactly where she was to meet her next dancing partner. This aided even more in making sure that the women had a dance partner for every dance; it ensured that she would always be able to find her intended dance partner even in the crowded room. It is also possible that an escort would fill out the card in advance for his date with the illustrations of flags in order to ensure she danced the night away.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\nIn 1923, the Academy went back to the leather cover for the Farewell Ball dance card. The cover is Navy blue with a gold tooled insignia, with inside pockets (11 x 8.5 cm). The recto pocket had a clear cut out to hold a photograph. For decoration, there are pictures that are whimsical in nature with tissue paper to protect the pictures from transfer. The dances are filled out in immaculately print black pen with flags drawn and colored next to last names.\r\n\r\nThe Farewell Ball dance card from 1925 has a silver cardstock cover with a picture of the Naval Academy Chapel dome in different shades of blue. Measuring 9.5 x 6.5 cm, the card contains the order of dances and a “meet under” space, but there is no room to record memories or a committee list like in the 1921, 1922, and 1923 cards. The card is filled out in pen with a shaky hand and the flags are drawn and colored next to the names. On the inside cover recto is a hand drawn cartoon of a midshipman.\r\n\r\nThere is a gap until 1942, when the collection resumes with the Farewell Ball, June 18th 1942. It has a white leather cover with stamping and gold accents, measuring 10 x 7.5 cm. The inside is printed in blue and it can be attached to a woman’s wrist by the yellow cord. The card contains a title page and committee list, names the orchestra, and announces that Mrs. John R. Beardall is receiving. The order of dances is filled out in two different shades of blue pen and each name is written in a different style of hand. This indicates another use for the dance card. A woman can hand her card to whoever asks her to dance and have him write in his name. This is very useful, especially if the woman has forgotten his name and can look on the card for a reminder.\r\n\r\nLike the 1942 card, the Farewell Ball, June 5th 1945 card was printed with blue ink and has a yellow cord. The 10 x 7.5 cm card has a dark blue faux leather cover with stamping and gold accents. The inside lists who was receiving, the hostesses, committee members and the orchestra. The dances, which are not filled out, are numbered, but there is no information as to what dance or what song each number will be. This shows the diminishing importance of the dances on the dance card.\r\n\r\nSimilarly, the Farewell Ball, May 31st 1956 dance card only lists numbers for the dances. This 10 x 7.5 cm card has an off-white cardstock cover with blue ink and an off-white cord. Inside, it lists the title page, orchestra, the woman receiving and the hostesses. It also lists the committee list for both the Farewell Ball and for the other hops held throughout the year. It ends with a quote, “Three cheers for/ those who are about/ to leave us—/ Three cheers for/ those we leave behind/ us—” This quote becomes a standard addition to each following card.\r\n\r\nThe card from the Farewell Ball, June 2nd 1959 is much the same as the 1956 card. The 10 x 7.5 cm card has a gold cardstock cover with blue wording and a silhouette of a dancing couple. The cord is also blue. The card lists the orchestra, the woman receiving, the hostesses and the program of dances—numbers only, no types of dances or names of songs. Two of the dances are filled out and the others were left blank. After the dances the card lists the Farewell Ball committee and the Hop committee, which organizes the smaller dances throughout the year. It concludes with the Three Cheers quote found in the 1956 card.\r\n\r\nThe cards from the Farewell Balls in 1964, 1965 and 1966 have almost identical contents, with different covers. The 1964 card is 10.5 x 7.5 cm with a white cardstock cover with blue ink and gold embossing and a blue cord. The 1965 card is 11.5 x 9 cm. It has a light blue cover with black embossing and a dark blue cord. The 1966 card measures 11.5 x 9 cm with a light blue cardstock cover with navy blue ink and a navy blue cord. All the cards contain a title page and list the orchestra, woman receiving, officer representative, social director and hostesses. None of the cards are filled out and they are stapled at the fold.\r\n\r\nWith each consecutive card, the changes are minimal. The 1967 and 1968 Farewell Ball dance cards are exactly the same, with a different date. They are both 11.5 x 9 cm and their covers are light blue with black ink and a blue cord. Neither card is filled out.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\nThe Farewell Ball June 3rd 1969 card provides a very interesting look at the evolution of the dance card. Very similar to the previous cards, it measures 11.5 x 9cm and lists the title page, orchestra, woman receiving, officer representative, social director, hostesses and committees. It has a white cardstock cover with blue ink and a blue cord. It also includes the Navy “Blue and Gold” song. What it doesn’t include, however, is a program of dances or even a space to write down dance partners. The point of this card is to provide a souvenir of the dance and provide information about it, but it no longer serves a way for women to write down the names of their partners.\r\n\r\nThe cards from 1970, 1971 and 1972 are the same as the 1969 card. However, the 1971 card contains one change: the midshipman’s oath appears after the title page. The all have white cardstock covers, 11.5 x 9 cm, with navy blue ink and navy blue cords.\r\n\r\nThe Farewell Ball, June 4th 1974 card presents another interesting change in the evolution of the dance card. The card no longer has a cord. The 11 x 9 cm card has a white cardstock cover with blue ink, but no cord with which a lady could attach it to her wrist. The cards from the 1975 and 1976 Farewell Balls have all the same internal elements, but measure 13 x 9 cm with a light blue cardstock cover printed in dark blue ink.\r\n\r\nThe progression of the Naval Academy Farewell Ball dance cards shows the decreased emphasis on dance and the move from the dance card as a reminder of the gentleman a woman had promised to dance with to a souvenir and program for the ball. The earlier dance cards contain little information about the ball itself; they focus on the dances, listing the order, the type of dance and the name of the song. Slowly, information is added to the card. In the 1920s, there was a place to write down memories and draw the flag under which the two would meet. These additions keep the focus on the dancing and the use of the dance card as a reminder and as a memento. In the 1940s, the cards begin to list the woman receiving, the committee who planned the ball and other information not directly related to the dancing. Also, the dances are no longer identified by type or name, they are simply numbered. This shows another step away from the focus on dancing. At this stage, the cord also becomes purely decorative. The cords attached to these cards aren’t long enough to secure around a woman’s wrist; they simply add a bit of decoration to the card. By the 1969 and into the 1970s, the dance cards no longer provide space to write the dances. They have transformed into souvenirs from the ball, giving information about the ball and incorporating quotes, song lyrics and lists of the people involved.\r\n<h5>Works Cited</h5>\r\n<div class=\"footnote\">Aldrich, Elizabeth. <em>From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance</em>. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991.</div>\r\n<div class=\"footnote\"><em>The American Code of Manners: a study of the usages, laws and observances which govern intercourse in the best social circles, and of the principles which underlie them</em>. New York: W. R. Andrews, 1880.</div>\r\n<div class=\"footnote\">Eichler, Lillian. <em>Book of Etiquette</em>. Oyster Bay: Nelson Doubleday Inc., 1922.</div>\r\n<div class=\"footnote\">Johnson, Sophia Orne. <em>A Manual of Etiquette, with Hints on Politeness and Good Breeding</em>. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885.</div>\r\n<div class=\"footnote\">Goucher College, Special Collections and Archives. Scrapbook Collection, Mary Lee Keith. Farewell Ball Dance Card, 1922.</div>\r\n<div class=\"footnote\">The Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy, Special Collections and Archives. Student Life, Dance Card Collection.</div>','My Card Is Full: The Evolution of the Farewell Ball Dance Cards ','In a world of etiquette and formality, dance cards quickly became indispensable to young women in search of dancing partners. They were a manifestation of etiquette, used to keep social order and help their users follow protocol. Though dance cards are rarely used now, the study of these cards gives a lot of insight into the societies and groups that used them.\r\n\r\nLists of etiquette books remain from all different periods, instructing men and women how to act in each particular circumstance. Dancing claims a large portion of many of these books, as it was considered an elegant pastime and a way to judge one\'s character. Dancing was a sign of culture and social class, as the upper class had formal dance training while they were young.','inherit','open','open','','1326-revision-45','','','2012-09-25 03:36:43','2012-09-25 03:36:43','',1326,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1326-revision-45/',0,'revision','',0),(3090,19,'2012-09-25 04:23:17','2012-09-25 04:23:17','Behind a low glass case in Goucher&rsquo;s Special Collection Room sits a humble blue book box that holds the first American edition of Jane Austen&rsquo;s <em>Emma</em>. Valued from nineteen to seventy-five thousand dollars on ABEBooks.com, the edition is unquestionably valuable. But how did this extremely rare copy end up in Goucher&rsquo;s modest library? In a letter to David Gilson on August 5th, 1967 Alberta Burke revealed that she owned a copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma, which formerly belonged to Siegfried Sassoon. The two corresponded from 1967 to 1975 until Alberta fell ill. Throughout this time a steady thread of conversation exists about the Philadelphia Emma.\r\n\r\nAfter seeing the interest that both Alberta Burke and David Gilson had in the first American edition of Emma, perusing the pages and studying the tome in detail was essential to discover first hand the majesty of the volumes.\r\n\r\n<div id=\"attachment_1319\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"width:281px\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image2_kendall.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1319  \" title=\"goucher_student work image2_kendall\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image2_kendall-281x250.jpg\" alt=\"First Edition of Emma (1816)\" width=\"281\" height=\"250\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Front pastedown and first flyleaf of the Burke Collection copy of the American first edition of Emma (1816), with the book plates of the Countess of Dalhousie, Frank J. Hogan, and Alberta H. Burke.</span></div>\r\n\r\nThe inside of the custom-made blue book box is coated with a light perimeter of oil damage. Nancy Magnuson, one of Goucher&rsquo;s librarians and liaisons for the Special Collections, said that Alberta Burke felt so attached to the books and bindings in her collections that she oiled the leather twice a year, far more then necessary. The first volume&rsquo;s brown leather is faded and has been repaired after cracking. On the inside cover are two pasted rectangular cutouts. The first, measuring 3.5cm tall and 8cm wide, reads &ldquo;Countess of Dalhousie&rdquo; in delicate black print. The mysterious figure of the Countess Dalhousie intrigued both David Gilson and Alberta Burke. In a letter dated August 15th 1967 Burke wrote, &ldquo;The Countess of Dalhousie&rsquo;s signature, but no date, is on the title page. I like to think, most romantically, but with no evidence that she purchased it in new york when she was in Canada with her husband who was governor-general there in 1819.&rdquo;\r\n\r\nFive months later Burke and Gilson are still perplexed by the elusive Countess and her involvement with the edition. On January 12th, 1968 she writes to Gilson hoping to answer the questions he&rsquo;d had about the 1816 Philadelphia Emma. She notes that over the first half of the page in volume I there is a note in pencil, &ldquo;not I think in Sasoon&rsquo;s writing, probably in that of Percy (Mathews) who was the agent who arranged the sale from Mr. Sasoon to Mr. Hogan.&rdquo; The note, hand-written in pencil that has faded to the extent of being almost translucent, reads &ldquo;Countess of D- wife to the 9th Earl (1770-1838). Who was Governor of Canada, Nova Scotia, etc 1819-1828- this explains her owning this edition, which was unknown to G. Keynes when he compiled his Bibliography of Jane Austen, 1929.&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\nThese pieces of evidence show that after being published by M. Carey in Philadelphia, this edition left Chesnut Street and most likely traveled into the hands of Lady Dalhousie. &ldquo;This copy,&rdquo; Gilson writes in his bibliography of Jane Austen, &ldquo;was in the present century found in Salisbury by Siegfried Sassoon.&rdquo;\r\n\r\nIn the same letter dated August 15th, 1967 in which she writes to Gilson about her romantic notion that the Countess of Dalhousie purchased Emma when visiting New York, she alludes to another letter involving Siegfried Sassoon. &ldquo;You may be amused at a sentence from Siegfried Sassoon&rsquo;s letter to Mr. Percy Elkin Mathews (who arranged the sale of the other 1816 Emma to Mr. Hogan in 1941. G. Keynes will be livid with me, as he wrote saying he must collate it as he wants to write something bout it for the Times Lit Supplement- which is poaching on your preserves, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; She writes specifically to Gilson that, &ldquo; this is not for quotation in any article, but solely for your own pleasure.&rdquo; Alberta Burke must have known this would tickle David Gilson&rsquo;s fancy. Since Gilson first intended to write his bibliography on Jane Austen as a revised edition Geoffrey Keynes&rsquo;s 1929 bibliography, he would understand Muir&rsquo;s frustration with people encroaching on his research topic.\r\n\r\nBetween the letters from Burke and Gilson and the evidence left behind inside Emma, the provenance of this edition is fairly clear. Emma travels from the Philadelphia publisher to the Countess to Siegfried Sassoon. Inside the first volume of the Emma being examined lays a piece of lavender stationary, measuring 17.6cm tall x 13cm wide, folded in half. Opening it reveals that at the top of the stationary is typed &ldquo;Heytesbury House, Wiltshire&rdquo; and at the end of the letter is the minute script signature of Siegfried Sassoon.\r\n\r\nThe letter, addressed to Muir, dated March 12th, 1941 is written in Sassoon&rsquo;s light and witty style. He starts his letter with, &ldquo;Emma returns to you in a twitter of excitement about going to California. She is sure that Mr. F. Hogan is a very nice man, though she intends to be a bit sharp with him until she gets to know him.&rdquo; He then jokes with Muir at the expense of Keynes, writing how &ldquo;G. Keynes will be livid with me, as he wrote saying he must collate it as he wants to write something about it for the Times Lit Supplement- which is poaching on your preserves, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;\r\n\r\nIn 1941 Sassoon sold the edition through Elkin Mathews to Frank J. Hogan (Gilson, 100). Under the Countess of Dalhousie&rsquo;s book label is the red leather label of Frank J. Hogan. Around the name in gold lettering it reads &ldquo;the true university of these days is a collection of books.&rdquo;\r\n\r\nIn addition to the lavender letter from Siegfried Sassoon, two additional correspondences hide between the inside cover and the title page. One letter was written to Mr. Hogan from Mr. Muir relating that the 1816 Philadelphia edition of Emma was on its way. The stationary was that of The Antiquarian Booksellers Association, shown by the stamp on the top right corner. Printed at the top is the name &ldquo;Elkin Mathews LTD&rdquo; followed by the director&rsquo;s names: Greville Worthington, Ian L. Fleming, and P. H. Muir. Underneath the names describes the objects in which these men were interested in: &ldquo;Rare Books, Manuscripts, Literary Portraits, Music.&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\nLetters leading to other letters seems to be a theme when following this first American edition of Emma. In the letter to Mr. Hogan from Mr. Muir, Muir writes how he feels it is important that Mr. Hogan also get, along with the copy of Emma, the letter from Mr. Sassoon (the lavender letter found in the first volume.) &ldquo;I think it is only right and proper that you should have with the book the letter that Sassoon sent me when sending the book to me. My own feeling is that one cannot have too much of this kind of thing in association with books.&rdquo; The truth in Muir&rsquo;s statement could not be more paramount as it relates to this particular edition of Emma. Burke and Gilson&rsquo;s letter lead to examining the 1816 Philadelphia edition, which hold the additional correspondences from Sassoon and Muir. Being able to handle and analyze one of the three first American editions is a privilege in itself (Gilson, 100). Yet more than just handling the two volumes, I found the circuit of corresponding materials equally intriguing and helpful to track how the book came from Philadelphia, to the Countess Dalhousie, to Siegfried Sassoon to Frank J. Hogan and finally to Alberta Burke.\r\n\r\nThe last letter found inside the first volume relating to Emma&rsquo;s provenance is from Mr. Muir to Alberta Burke. Muir writes to Alberta on different stationary then when writing to Mr. Hogan, perhaps to add a more personal touch. Typed on yellow paper with the green &ldquo;Elkin Mathews Ltd&rdquo; insignia printed at the top, the letter is typed and dated May 22nd, 1945. Mr. Muir writes that Mr. Hogan purchased the first American 1816 Philadelphia edition for Alberta for only 300 dollars. &ldquo;I congratulate you,&rdquo; he writes, &ldquo;on getting it so cheaply. It is exceedingly rare.&rdquo;\r\n\r\nThe last letter from Alberta Burke to David Gilson is dated February 4th, 1975. After this date the Austen letters continue between Alberta&rsquo;s husband Henry Burke and David Gilson. After Alberta&rsquo;s death on May 22nd, 1975 Goucher&rsquo;s library received her Jane Austen collection. According to Goucher&rsquo;s pamphlet &ldquo;Twenty-Five Years of Jane Austen,&rdquo; Alberta had always intended to donate the collection to Goucher. &ldquo;From the time when my Jane Austen material first began to overflow the one-shelf bounds assigned to it, I have always intended that Goucher should be the ultimate recipient, and I have hoped that, sometime in the future, others would partake of the very great pleasure which they have given me for many years.&rdquo;\r\n\r\nWhen David Gilson in 1982 published A Bibliography of Jane Austen he acknowledged his gratitude to Alberta and Henry Burke. Both Alberta Burke and David Gilson benefited from their letters to one another. Alberta Burke, with her deep seeded love and interest in all things Austen, was able to help David Gilson with his mission to track down Austen texts, study and describe them.\r\n<h5>Works Cited</h5>\r\n<div class=\"footnote\">Gilson, David. <em>A Bibliography of Jane Austen</em>. first. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.</div>\r\n<div class=\"footnote\">Austen, Jane. <em>Emma</em>. First. Philadelphia: M.Carey, 1816.</div>\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n<h5>Letters From Alberta Burke to David Gilson</h5>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>&ldquo;Apartment Stationary&rdquo; 18.8 cm tall x 25.9 cm wide, written section is 18.8cm tall x 13.1 cm wide, folded into four quarters for mailing, black ink, cream paper, red print of &ldquo;Apartment 1318 116 West University Parkway Baltimore, Maryland 21210.&rdquo; Gray and maroon thin stripe border.</li>\r\n	<li>&ldquo;Blue Air Mail&rdquo; 30.5 cm tall x 18.1cm wide, folded into a 9.7cm tall x 14.8cm wide envelope, black ink, written completely on first side and on first fourth and last fourth on other side.</li>\r\n	<li>&ldquo;Gray Apartment Stationary&rdquo; 18.8cm tall x 25.9cm wide, written section is 18.8 cm tall x 13.1 cm wide, folded into four quarters for mailing, black ink, cream paper, gray print of &ldquo;Apartment 1318 116 West University Parkway Baltimore, Maryland 21210.&rdquo; Gray thin stripe border.</li>\r\n	<li>&ldquo;Small Note Card&rdquo; 14cm tall x 8.4cm wide, thicker note-card type cream paper, written only on one side, addressed to &ldquo;Mr. D.J Gilson, J1 Blenheim Drive Oxford OX2 8DL England&rdquo; Airmail! is written above the address in red marker. &ldquo;Burke 1318 Broadview Apts. 116 W. University Parkway Baltimore, Maryland 21210&rdquo; is typed in upper left corner. Written in blue ink.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>August 5, 1967\r\n</strong><em>Apartment Stationary\r\n</em>Tells Mr. Gilson that she has the Frank J. Hogan copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma, which formerly belonged to Siegfried Sassoon.\r\n\r\n<strong>August 15, 1967\r\n</strong><em>Apartment Stationary\r\n</em><em>Written in black fountain pen (script writing), fairly uniform line spacing\r\n</em>&ldquo;You may be amused at a sentence from Siegfried Sassoon&rsquo;s letter to Mr. Percy Elkin Mathews (who arranged the sale of the other 1816 Emma to Mr. Hogan in 1941. &ldquo;G. Keynes will be livid with me, as he wrote saying he must collate it as he wants to write something bout it for the Times Lit Supplement&mdash;which is poaching on your preserves, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; This is not for quotation in any article, but solely for your own pleasure.&rdquo;<br /><br />&ldquo;Since my copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma…her signature, but no date, is on the title page) I like to think, most romantically, but with no evidence, that she purchased it as a new work when she was in Canada with her husband who was governor-general there in 1819.&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<strong>January 12, 1968\r\n</strong><em>Apartment Stationary\r\n</em>&ldquo;I hope that I can answer your questions about the Philadelphia 1816 Emma satisfactorily. On inside cover of both volumes is a book place or visiting card (I don&rsquo;t know which it is) bearing only the engraved words &ldquo;Coweliers Dalhousie&rdquo;…no device etc. In the first volume at the left and perpendicular to the lives of priutsey on the title pages is the signature &ldquo;Cou C Dalhousie&rdquo; (there is a bit of extra curlicue over the first letter.) However in volume two the signature…is plainly &ldquo;C B Dalhousie&rdquo; over the first preliminary half of volume I here is a note in pencil, not I think in Sassoon&rsquo;s writing, probably in that of Percy (Mathews) who was the agent who arranged the sale from Mr. Sassoon to Mr. Hogan.&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<strong>June 10, 1969\r\n</strong><em>Blue Air Mail\r\n</em>&ldquo;Does Mr. C.B. Hogan&rsquo;s copy of the 1st Am. E [Emma] conform to the Goodspeed, Boolm Cat. No 317, p.4, 1940 description: &ldquo;Three vols. In 2…Published by M. Cary. 21 Chestnut St. ….Boston 1816.&rdquo; I – not sure M. Hogan&rsquo;s article so can&rsquo;t collate my copy until his description of his E of my 1st edition is bound(?)&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<strong>November 18, 1969\r\n</strong><em>Gray Apartment Stationary\r\n</em>&ldquo;I was delighted to know of a 3rd (if imperfect copy of the Philadelphia E turning up. When I first read the description of it in Goodspeeds (I think) 1940 catalogue I thought it was some Bookshop.\r\n#16 went for $1300 to the same buyer\r\n#17 \" \" 550 \" \" \"\r\n#18 $40.00\r\n#19 $35.00\r\n#20 (The companion to the A--) was valued at $1250 00 by the estate and had a reserve price of $550 which was not reached so that the item was withdrawn.&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<strong>March 11, 1973\r\n</strong><em>Small Note Card\r\n</em>&ldquo;In looking for something else, I picked out a letter of Dr. R.W. Chapurace to me dated 13.10.51. In it he says &ldquo;The 1816 Philadelphia Emma was the result of Scott&rsquo;s Quarterly Review, I guess. One day I looked out [the word looks like &ldquo;whatelup&rdquo; but this is impossible!] 2 R 1826 and found that it is of a ‘New Edition&rsquo; N.A+P that lso is unrecorded.&rdquo; I haven&rsquo;t checked further to see if I, or any one else has these listed, and perhaps, I am first causing you unnecessary trouble or being commonly behind the fair.&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<strong>December 16, 1973\r\n</strong><em>Gray Apartment Stationary\r\n</em>&ldquo;The only first in boards which I have which has its labels intact (they match Keynes) is M.P. The E has had the backstrips repaired and the N.A.+P 2 packstrips have crumbled away completely + 2 are very cracked + missing the labels&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n<h5>Letters from Gilson to Henry Burke (after Alberta falls ill)</h5>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>&ldquo;Small White Paper&rdquo; 17.9cm tall x 13.7cm wide, blue ink, almost transparent white paper, written on only one side.</li>\r\n	<li>&ldquo;Blue Air Mail&rdquo; 30.5 cm tall x 18.1cm wide, folded into a 9.7cm tall x 14.8cm wide envelope, black ink, written completely on first side and on first fourth and last fourth on other side.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<strong>June 14th, 1975\r\n</strong><em>Blue Air Mail\r\n</em>&ldquo;I see that Sotheby&rsquo;s are selling on 23rd of June &ldquo;an autograph letter by Jane Austen to her publisher commenting on the review of her novel Emma by Sir Walter Scott&rdquo;: presumably RWC 127, marked as ‘original not traced&rsquo;. I suppose the Pierpont Morgan will be bidding for this!&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<strong>August 3rd, 1975\r\n</strong><em>Small White Paper\r\n</em>&ldquo;It would be very kind if you could give me the correct address of Goucher College, and also the name of the librarian whom I should contact with any query relating to Alberta&rsquo;s books (there may be queries over some of the rarer items, especially the 1816 Philadelphia Emma.)&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<strong>October 16th, 1976\r\n</strong><em>Small White Pape</em><em>r\r\n</em><em>Written on both sides.\r\n</em>&ldquo;I spent a very interesting morning on 1st September at John Murray in Albemarte Street; they kindly allowed me to see their ledgers, giving the publication costs and other details of the first editions of Emma and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<strong>December 26th, 1976\r\n</strong><em>Small White Paper.\r\n</em><em>Written on both sides.\r\n</em>&ldquo;Miss Jones of Goucher College has very kindly sent me-free of charge- an excellent photograph of the title page of Vol.1 of Alberta&rsquo;s copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma (my reproduction in the Autumn 1969 Book Collector was from a Xerox of Mr. Hogan&rsquo;s copy; this photograph is much clearer).&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<strong>March 20th, 1977\r\n</strong><em>Small White Paper\r\n</em><em>Written on both sides.\r\n</em>&ldquo;Christie&rsquo;s sold first editions of Emma and of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion on 2nd February- not particularly good copies (from the catalogue descriptions) although with the half-titles in each case; I don&rsquo;t know who bought them, but they fetched 350 pounds and 230 pounds respectively. I have been given an extremely imperfect copy of the first-edition of Emma, consisting only of Vol.1 (lacking the half-title), and Vol.3 (lacking all before p.19.) It clearly has no commercial value, but still seems worth having.&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n<h5>Letters Found Inside First Volume of 1816 Philadelphia <em>Emma</em></h5>\r\n<strong>Letter 1\r\n</strong><em>17.6cm tall x 13cm wide, grayish blue stationary with &ldquo;Heytesbury House, Wiltshire&rdquo; printed on top, dated &ldquo;12a.3.41,&rdquo; hand written in script, black ink.</em>\r\n&ldquo;Dear Muir,\r\n‘Emma&rsquo; returns to you in a twitter of excitement about ‘going to California.&rsquo; She is sure that Mr. F. Hogan is a very nice man though she intends to be a bit sharp with him until she has got to know him.\r\nSeriously- I am greatly obliged to you and --- agree to your 15% etc, and my wish you are making a bit more out of it. (G. Keynes will be livid with me, as he would say, he ---- collate it as he wants to write something about it for the ----- which his --- on your ---, isn&rsquo;t it?) ….\r\nYours, SS (written on top of each other)\r\n\r\n<div id=\"attachment_1316\" align=\"wp_caption alignnone\" style=\"width:250px\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image3_kendall.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1316\" title=\"goucher_student work image3_kendall\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image3_kendall-186x250.jpg\" alt=\"Siegfried Sassoon\'s letter to Percy Muir\" width=\"186\" height=\"250\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Siegfried Sassoon\'s letter to Percy Muir, antiquarian book dealer, regarding Sassoon\'s sale of the American first edition of <em>Emma</em> (1816) to Frank J. Hogan (dated December 3, 1941). The letter was discovered inside the front cover of the Burke Collection copy.</span></div>\r\n\r\n<strong>Letter 2</strong>\r\n<em>&ldquo;Antiquarian Booksellers Association&rdquo; stamp on top left, written March 18, 1941 and received April 17, 1941 (received date written in pencil on top right corner,) stationary is of &ldquo;Elkin Mathews LTD. Directors: Greville Worthington, Ian L. Fleming, and P.H. Muir,&rdquo; underneath is typed &ldquo;Rare Books, Manuscripts, Literary Portraits, Music.&rdquo;</em>\r\n&ldquo;Dear Mr. Hogan,\r\nThis is just a brief note formally to announce the fact that &ldquo;Emma&rdquo; left here today on her long journey to California. I think it only right and proper that you should have with the book the letter that Sassoon sent me when sending the book to me. My own feeling is that one cannot have too much of this kind of thing in association with books. I think Siegfried Sassoon a great writer and I would be glad to have this letter myself were I buying one of his books, and I have the feeling that you may think that way, too, so I enclose the letter. He was a great friend and admirer of Charlotte Mew&rsquo;s, by the way, which may help to endear him to you.\r\nWith every good wish and kind regards,\r\nYours very sincerely,\r\nP. H. MuirHand\r\nwritten note (in same green ink as Muir&rsquo;s signature) written below signature of &ldquo;P.H Muir&rdquo;:\r\n&ldquo;Note the date on SS&rsquo;s letter, evidently written on 131h&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<strong>Letter 3</strong>\r\n<em>Yellow paper, green &ldquo;Elkin Mathews Ltd,&rdquo; dated May 22, 1945, typed in faded black ink.</em>\r\n&ldquo;Dear Mrs. Burke,\r\nThank you very much indeed for your letter of May 6th. I congratulate you on getting the &ldquo;Emma&rdquo; so cheaply. It is exceedingly rare and Mr. Hogan as very glad to pay 300 dollars for it. I mention the price in dollars because at the time he bought it the 1-pound was below par and fluctuating, so that the price was actually quoted in dollars. I say that the price was set by Mr. Sassoon and not by me, but I saw no reason at the time to take exception to it.\r\nI always have you in mind for any interesting Jane Austen items, which turn up.\r\nYours very sincerely,\r\nP.H. Muir (signed in green ink)\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n<h5>Emma (1st Edition Philadelphia 1816)</h5>\r\n18.3cm tall x 11.1cm (cover)\r\n\r\n<em>Inside Cover</em>\r\ncut and pasted paper of: COUNTESS OF DALHOUSIE, below: maroon and gold sticker of: Ex Libris Frank J. Hogan (around name says: the true university of these days is a collection of books&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<em>Next Page</em>\r\nwritten by hand in faded pencil: &rdquo;Countess of d.- wife of the 9th Earl (1770-1838). Who was Governor of Canada, Nova Scotia, etc. 1819-1828- This explains her owning this edition, which was unknown to G. Keynes when he compiled his Bibliography of Jane Austen, 1929.&rdquo;\r\nunder this is the paper square for the &ldquo;Alberta H. Burke&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<div id=\"attachment_1314\" align=\"alignnone\" stlye=\"width:147px\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image1_kendall.jpg\"><img src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-work-image1_kendall-147x250.jpg\" alt=\"American first edition of Jane Austen&#039;s Emma\" title=\"goucher_student work image1_kendall\" width=\"147\" height=\"250\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1314\" /></a> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Title page of the Burke Collection copy of the American first edition of Jane Austen\'s <em>Emma</em> (1816).</span></div>\r\n\r\n<em>Title Page</em>\r\nEMMA:\r\nA Novel\r\nHere Volumes in Two\r\n(written on side, vertically: A.B. Dallhousie)\r\nBy the Author of &ldquo;Pride and Prejudice,&rdquo;\r\n&amp;c. &amp;c.\r\nVol. 1\r\nPHILADELPHIA:\r\nPublished by M.Carey, No. 121 Chesnut Street\r\nAnd for Sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston\r\n1816\r\n\r\n<em>Next Page</em>\r\nTo his Royal Highness\r\nThe Prince Regent, This Work Is, By his Royal Highness&rsquo;s Permission, Most Respectfully Dedicated, By His Royal Highness&rsquo;s Dutiful and Obedient Humble Servant, The Author.&rdquo;\r\n\r\n<em>First Page of Text</em>\r\n18cm tall x 9.8cm wide\r\nA2 at bottom of first page – 8 pages later is &ldquo;B&rdquo; (vol.1), 4 pages later &ldquo;B2&rdquo;, 8 pages later &ldquo;C&rdquo; (vol.1.), 4 pages later &ldquo;C2&rdquo;, 8 pages later &ldquo;D&rdquo; (vol.1)\r\naverage full page text block: 12.5cm tall x 7.4cm wide\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n<h5>Letters Found Inside Second Volume</h5>\r\n<strong>Letter 1</strong>\r\n<em>21.5cm tall x13.9cm wide, typed: &ldquo;Charles Sessler Inc.&rdquo; Established 1882, Bookseller and Printseller 1308 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA. 19107&rdquo; stationary</em>\r\n<em> dated April 24, 1967</em>\r\n&ldquo;Dear Mr. Burke:\r\nIn 1945 we purchased in New York at the sale of the Frank J. Hogan Library, item No. 7, a copy of EMMA, printed in Philadelphia by Carey in 1816.\r\nDo you still have this book and would you be willing to part with it?&rdquo;\r\nYours Sincerely,\r\nMabel Zahn (signed in ink)\r\nZ.T. in bottom left corner, typed (?)\r\n\r\n<strong>Letter 2</strong>\r\n<em>Typed, same stationary as letter 1</em>\r\n<em> dated May 3, 1967</em>\r\n&ldquo;Dear Mr. Burke:\r\nThank you so much for your letter of May 1st.\r\nI am glad that you still have the copy of EMMA. Our inquiry was for a bibliographic purpose. Someone who is working on the bibliography has asked us about the copy we sold you and naturally we followed through for him.\r\nWith best wishes,\r\nYours Sincerely,\r\nMabel Zahn\r\n-Z.T. in bottom left corner, typed (?)','How Emma Travels: by letters, hands and libraries','Behind a low glass case in Goucher’s Special Collection Room sits a humble blue book box that holds the first American edition of Jane Austen’s Emma. Valued from nineteen to seventy-five thousand dollars on ABEBooks.com, the edition is unquestionably valuable. But how did this extremely rare copy end up in Goucher’s modest library? In a letter to David Gilson on August 5th, 1967 Alberta Burke revealed that she owned a copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma, which formerly belonged to Siegfried Sassoon. The two corresponded from 1967 to 1975 until Alberta fell ill. Throughout this time a steady thread of conversation exists about the Philadelphia Emma.\r\n\r\nAfter seeing the interest that both Alberta Burke and David Gilson had in the first American edition of Emma, perusing the pages and studying the tome in detail was essential to discover first hand the majesty of the volumes.','inherit','open','open','','1300-revision-63','','','2012-09-25 04:23:17','2012-09-25 04:23:17','',1300,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1300-revision-63/',0,'revision','',0),(3091,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','<div id=\"map3d_dowdle\"></div>\r\n<div class=\"small light\">Installed Plugin Version: <span id=\"installed-plugin-version\" style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Loading...</span></div>','Walters - Amazon Dowdle Live','','inherit','open','open','','1209-revision-19','','','2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','',1209,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1209-revision-19/',0,'revision','',0),(3092,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','<div id=\"map3d_tkacs\"></div>\r\n<div class=\"small light\">Installed Plugin Version: <span id=\"installed-plugin-version\" style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Loading...</span></div>','Walters - Romances Casket Tkacs Live','','inherit','open','open','','1205-revision-21','','','2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','',1205,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1205-revision-21/',0,'revision','',0),(3093,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','<div id=\"map3d_devos\"></div>\r\n<div class=\"small light\">Installed Plugin Version: <span id=\"installed-plugin-version\" style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Loading...</span></div>','Walters - Beaupre Devos Live','','inherit','open','open','','1200-revision-22','','','2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','',1200,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1200-revision-22/',0,'revision','',0),(3094,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','<img class=\"size-full wp-image-1185\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/walters_student-action-photo_dowdle.jpg\" alt=\"Elizabeth Dowdle (in striped shirt) with Capitoline Amazon, marble\" width=\"640\" height=\"426\" /> <span class=\"caption\">Elizabeth Dowdle (in striped shirt) with Capitoline Amazon, marble (Roman copy after Kresilas, Greek, active ca. 450 BC - 420 BC).</span>\r\n\r\n<strong>1. Describe the sorts of work you did in developing your Google Earth presentation on this object. (You might consider both the unique forms of research involved and modes/methods of interpretation.)</strong>\r\nMy research focused on discovering the provenance of the Walters’ Capitoline Amazon, a Roman copy of a Greek bronze sculpture. Though the beautiful marble immediately caught my attention, I was surprised to find how little the museum actually knew about the object’s history. In order to unravel the mystery surrounding the sculpture, I looked for similar examples of sculpture in other museum collections and, consulting the records that came with them, began to piece together a tentative history of this ancient artwork.\r\n\r\n<strong>2. What did you learn from this project that distinguished it from other academic courses?</strong>\r\nThis project was unique in that I was provided with an ending point in the Walters gallery, but lacked a starting point for my research. This issue forced me to think outside the box and look for new ways to come up with the information I needed to draw out this object’s provenance. This called for more than an average trip to the library; I had to consult other institutions with similar sculptures in their collections and find possible answers to my questions based on the records they had on their pieces. It was a unique challenge, but this project truly taught me that where there is a will, there is a way.\r\n\r\n<strong>3. What was it like to be creating a final project that would be presented to the public?</strong>\r\nIt was both exciting and inspiring to create a project that would be presented to the public. Knowing that my work would be recognized outside the classroom inspired me to design a product that would make a difference not only for the Walters, but also for anyone looking for information about the Capitoline Amazon. I was driven to deliver a professional, museum-quality presentation that the Walters would be proud to add to their website.\r\n\r\n<strong>4. What did you learn from working in a professional museum and in conjunction with its staff?</strong>\r\nIt is always a privilege to work with professionals in the field you aspire to join, especially when you get to do so in the museum itself. Working with the staff at the Walters gave me insight into the everyday activities of registrars, curators, and collections managers as well as the challenges they face when caring for their collections and working to further their institutions’ missions. Especially in collections containing antiquities, it is not uncommon to come across objects with questionable histories. My time at the Walters taught me that it is of the utmost importance to authenticate the contents of your collection by making their unique histories known, despite the challenges this task might pose.\r\n\r\n<strong>5. What did this course/project and the opportunity to work with museum objects and their archival records mean to your education? your future plans? your general interests?</strong>\r\nThis course and the project I produced solidified my desire to pursue a career in museums. The opportunity to work with museum objects and their records has inspired me to continue my education so that I can also work in an institution dedicated to the preservation of culture for future generations. I graduated from Johns Hopkins University in May 2011 with a degree in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology and am now pursuing a master’s degree in Museum Studies at George Washington University, with a focus in museum administration and classical studies.','Elizabeth Dowdle - Commentary','My research focused on discovering the provenance of the Walters’ Capitoline Amazon, a Roman copy of a Greek bronze sculpture. Though the beautiful marble immediately caught my attention, I was surprised to find how little the museum actually knew about the object’s history. In order to unravel the mystery surrounding the sculpture, I looked for similar examples of sculpture in other museum collections and, consulting the records that came with them, began to piece together a tentative history of this ancient artwork.','inherit','open','open','','1152-revision-20','','','2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','',1152,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1152-revision-20/',0,'revision','',0),(3095,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1220\" style=\"margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"Elizabeth Rodini\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/rodini.jpg\" alt=\"Elizabeth Rodini\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />Material Migrations, like many of the practicum courses offered in the Program in Museums and Society (M&amp;S), gave students the chance to engage directly with objects, conduct research in and around those materials, and, most distinctively, develop a final project to be shared with a general audience—in this case, Google Earth “tours” of object provenance histories, to be incorporated into the website of the Walters Art Museum. M&amp;S practicum projects take the form of exhibitions, both actual and virtual; interpretative materials, such as audio tours, gallery guides, and websites; and program development. I like to think of them as works of “public humanities,” sharing the research we do in the university with a larger audience.\r\n\r\nWhy bother with such an exercise? The answer Ben Tilghman and I provided in our syllabus for this course: “To share what we are learning with the public. This is a fundamental task of museums. . . <em>in this course we extend that mission to the undergraduate classroom.</em>” Universities suffer from being removed from the broader community, while humanistic disciplines without clear “practical” applications are particularly at risk from this sort of isolation and perceived irrelevance. On the other hand, archives, museums, and other collections with a public face are places where humanistic research can be made available, accessible, and meaningful.\r\n\r\nAlthough historians are familiar with the sub-field of public history, other disciplines have not developed the potential for outreach in such a direct, institutionalized way. It is hard to imagine the awarding of a degree in, say, public art history. But in this class our students were taking on that very role as curators presenting research through a lively interactive tool with broad dissemination.\r\n\r\nIn developing their object itineraries for the Walters Art Museum and Google Earth, students had to consider both the historical narratives they were tracing and the matter of presenting them to the public. What information would be accessible? How could they both engage and challenge their audience? How would they balance the nuanced elements of their story with the broader theoretical issues at stake in the project? What is lost in the task of producing highly condensed text, and what might be gained?\r\n\r\nIn all of our museum-based practicum courses we face the challenge of fitting student work into an established institutional frame. Classrooms are messy places where ideas are tested and debated. Despite our best efforts, the many young voices we work with over the semester may not easily gel into the perfect, marketable whole that modern museums require. Our students carefully crafted their texts, which Walters professionals then polished to a sheen. The students constructed imaginative itineraries that we honed to fit a simpler, more streamlined model.\r\n\r\nIf it seems like the nature of university research (independent, serendipitous, evolving) cannot quite square with museum exhibitions (corporate, formal, fixed), there is nevertheless much to be gained from encouraging their intersection—for students, audiences, and collections, and for universities as well. University humanities made more public are also more relevant, appreciated, and valued.','Elizabeth Rodini - Commentary','Material Migrations, like many of the practicum courses offered in the Program in Museums and Society (M&S), gave students the chance to engage directly with objects, conduct research in and around those materials, and, most distinctively, develop a final project to be shared with a general audience—in this case, Google Earth “tours” of object provenance histories, to be incorporated into the website of the Walters Art Museum. M&S practicum projects take the form of exhibitions, both actual and virtual; interpretative materials, such as audio tours, gallery guides, and websites; and program development. I like to think of them as works of “public humanities,” sharing the research we do in the university with a larger audience.','inherit','open','open','','1132-revision-13','','','2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','',1132,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1132-revision-13/',0,'revision','',0),(3096,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','Art on the Move was an outcome of the course “Behind the Scenes at the Walters Art Museum: Material Migrations,” offered at the Walters Art Museum through the <a href=\"http://krieger.jhu.edu/museums/\">Program in Museums and Society</a> at Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 2009. Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman were co-instructors and, with the technical guidance of Reid Sczerba, Senior Programmer Analyst in the university’s Center for Educational Resources, devised and oversaw this project. The course and project were funded by an Arts Innovation Grant from Johns Hopkins.\r\n\r\n<strong>Except From Course Syllabus</strong>\r\n\r\nThe goals of this class can be broken down into several categories:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>investigating the various ways/means/motives for the circulation of objects, and considering how meaning is shaped by context, from antiquity to the present and including the museum itself;</li>\r\n	<li>conducting in-depth, independent research on objects in the Walters’ collection;</li>\r\n	<li>experimenting with different styles of writing and narration;</li>\r\n	<li>learning about different areas of museum practice, including curation, conservation, registration, and education;</li>\r\n	<li>applying these experiences to the production of interpretative tools for public audiences of the Walters, in the form of Google Earth itineraries.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nEach student will choose two* objects from the Walters’ collection to research, focusing on the “trajectory” of the objects and their shifting significance in different contexts. Research will involve studying the objects and object files at the museum as well as work in the Hopkins library and on-line. That work will be analyzed, interpreted, and gathered into a Google Earth Map “itinerary” for each object. Why? To share what we are learning with the public. This is a fundamental task of museums . . . in this course we extended that mission to the undergraduate classroom.\r\n\r\n(*The seven students worked on two objects each; a selection of these was made for the final presentation on the Walters website.)','Walters - Project Description/Syllabus','','inherit','open','open','','1130-revision-17','','','2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','',1130,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1130-revision-17/',0,'revision','',0),(3097,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','<img class=\"size-full wp-image-1189\" title=\"walters_student action photo_devos\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/walters_student-action-photo_devos.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"426\" /><span class=\"caption\"> Dakota DeVos (pointing at books) with Antiphonary for Abbess of Sainte-Marie of Beaupré, ink on parchment (Flemish, 1290).</span>\r\n\r\n<strong>1. Describe the sorts of work you did in developing your Google Earth presentation on this object. (You might consider both the unique forms of research involved and modes/methods of interpretation.)</strong>\r\nThis project required a diverse approach to research, including reading topical books and contemporary articles, conducting interviews with Walters conservators and curators, and making comparisons with similar objects from the period or in the artists’ oeuvres. However, an exhaustive physical examination of the objects themselves was the starting and ending point for piecing together the objects’ paths of alteration, ownership, and usage.\r\n\r\n<strong>2. What did you learn from this project that distinguished it from other academic courses?</strong>\r\nThis course offered three unique qualities. First, our research was meant for publication for museum visitors rather than exclusively for our professors. Second, we were able to do hands-on research with many of the Walters’ most revered objects while curators and conservators guided us in our examinations. Finally, this course encouraged an object-centric view of history, which was antithetical, conceptually, to the art history courses I had taken until that point. As an art history major I was accustomed to viewing specific art historical objects as close studies of broader trends that characterized the periods in which they were made. However, our assignment for Material Migrations was concerned not only with a study of the object’s creation and use in its own time, but also how its use changed throughout its history. I came away from the course with a greater appreciation for the power of contextualization. Art objects rarely remain static relics of a bygone era; rather, they continue to have vibrant lives and changing effects on their successive owners and audiences, not the least of which is their position as a tool for learning in the museum.\r\n\r\n<strong>3. What was it like to be creating a final project that would be presented to the public?</strong>\r\nThe project was intended to engage as broad a scope of museum visitors as possible, including youths and viewers who might have no background on the object, while still interesting our academic peers. Part of what made these objects so fascinating was the very unwieldiness of their provenance. I decided on central themes for both of my objects and ultimately cut out much of my research in order to focus on their tortuous histories.\r\n\r\n<strong>4. What did you learn from working in a professional museum and in conjunction with its staff?</strong>\r\nI chose one of my objects, the Beaupre Antiphonary, specifically because I had the opportunity to work with Professor Tilghman and the Walters’ rare books curator, Dr. William Noel. Collaborating with two of the top scholars in the field on an object that they knew intimately remains one of the brightest moments of my undergraduate career.\r\n\r\n<strong>5. What did this course/project and the opportunity to work with museum objects and their archival records mean to your education? your future plans? your general interests?</strong>\r\nThis course reinforced my ambition to work in the field of museums because I found the work rewarding and academically invigorating. It was meaningful and exhilarating to produce work for a class that would help enrich the presentation of the Walters’ holdings.','Dakota Devos - Commentary','This project required a diverse approach to research, including reading topical books and contemporary articles, conducting interviews with Walters conservators and curators, and making comparisons with similar objects from the period or in the artists’ oeuvres. However, an exhaustive physical examination of the objects themselves was the starting and end point for piecing together the objects’ paths of alteration, ownership, and usage. Our final product was meant to offer a new way for viewers to connect with an object and so both our maps and audio clips reinforce our findings by continually asking the viewer to look closely at the evidence right in front of them.','inherit','open','open','','1128-revision-17','','','2012-10-15 15:39:46','2012-10-15 15:39:46','',1128,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1128-revision-17/',0,'revision','',0),(3098,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','<img class=\"size-full wp-image-1193\" title=\"walters_student action photo_tkacs\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/walters_student-action-photo_tkacs.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"426\" /><span class=\"caption>Joan Tkcas (on far right, in brown) and Casket with Scenes of Romances, ivory and bone with modern iron mounts (French, 1330-1350).</caption>\r\n\r\n<strong>1. Describe the sorts of work you did in developing your Google Earth presentation on this object. (You might consider both the unique forms of research involved and modes/methods of interpretation.)</strong>\r\n\r\nI researched two objects for this project, a painted tile and an ivory casket. The Walters Art Museum had a thorough record of the objects’ provenances, so the bulk of my time was spent uncovering details about the lives and tastes of their previous owners. It was important to me to understand why they found the objects interesting enough to purchase. If the owners were art collectors, I tried finding other objects in their collections to get a sense of their taste. From there, it was a matter of organizing the object’s history into a simple and compelling narrative.\r\n\r\n<strong>2. What did you learn from this project that distinguished it from other academic courses?</strong>\r\n\r\nThe credit line that you see on the typical museum label does not do justice to the histories of these objects. For example, the ivory casket I researched was made in the fourteenth century and was probably meant to function as a jewelry box, but one of its later owners took the individual panels of the case apart and framed them. He was looking at the casket in a completely different way than we do now. I did not know this before I started the project, and the research gave me a new appreciation for just how dynamic these objects are.\r\n\r\n<strong>3. What was it like to be creating a final project that would be presented to the public?</strong>\r\n\r\nThe Google Earth project was a lesson in learning how to write concisely. After spending a semester researching the history of a given object, the temptation is to then write a long-winded report on all that you had discovered. But very few people would be interested in reading something like that, I think. It is a bit harder to boil down everything you have learned into a punchy and informative presentation.\r\n\r\n<strong>4. What did you learn from working in a professional museum and in conjunction with its staff?</strong>\r\n\r\nThe Walters’ staff was incredibly giving of their time. We met with Gary Vikan, the museum director, Robert Mintz, the curator of Asian art, and William Noel, the curator of manuscripts. We got to look at the museum’s storage, and learned about what art museums take into consideration when accessioning works of art. What I remember best was getting to meet with Amanda Kodeck, a member of the museum’s education department, and getting feedback on what we had written for the project. That kind of collaboration was incredibly helpful.\r\n\r\n<strong>5. What did this course/project and the opportunity to work with museum objects and their archival records mean to your education? your future plans? your general interests?</strong>\r\n\r\nThe Google Earth project was a first for me. In other classes I may have had to research a single object for a paper, but I had never focused solely on an object’s provenance. This project proved to be a very worthwhile experience for me. Right now I am an intern at the Georgia Museum of Art and I spend a lot of my time working with the archival materials of the museum’s Pierre Daura Study Center. I do not know if I would have had this opportunity without my experience working on the Google Earth project at the Walters.','Joan Tkacs - Commentary','I researched two objects for this project, a painted tile and an ivory casket. The Walters Art Museum had a thorough record of the objects’ provenances, so the bulk of my time was spent uncovering details about the lives and tastes of their previous owners. It was important to me to understand why they found the objects interesting enough to purchase. If the owners were art collectors, I tried finding other objects in their collections to get a sense of their taste. From there, it was a matter of organizing the object’s history into a simple and compelling narrative.','inherit','open','open','','1126-revision-12','','','2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','',1126,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1126-revision-12/',0,'revision','',0),(3099,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','<div><em><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1223\" title=\"szerba\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/szerba.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />Sczerba worked closely with the course instructors, Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman, to develop and refine the Google Earth tools and to train students in building tours.</em></div>\r\n<strong>1. Describe your role in this project. </strong>\r\nI work for a faculty support center at Johns Hopkins University called the Center for Educational Resources (CER). As the center’s multimedia developer, I aided Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman with the technical and logistical aspects of the project. This included determining a viable technology for the project tours and developing resource guides that aided students’ tour creation.\r\n\r\n<strong>2. What tasks did you perform at various stages of the project?</strong>\r\nInitially we had to find a program that would be available freely (both in access and cost) for students to use with a relatively low learning curve. We selected Google Earth because it allows tour creation with rich media and text mapped to the earth, and it is free to download on PCs and Macs. I then created a template tour, set up with pre-made placemarks as a starting point for the students, and content layout templates for the appearance of the tour’s placemarks. After those two resources were set, I needed to create a well-written and comprehensible workflow. I chose to create both a visual and textual workflow to clearly express what actions needed to happen and at what stages. The final step was to present this workflow to the students in a training workshop so that they could see how it all came together and do it themselves.\r\n\r\n<strong>3. What sorts of interactions did you have with faculty, students, and other members of the project community over the course of the project?</strong>\r\nI met with Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman initially to gather the project’s requirements, then later to introduce them to the proposed solution. One of my colleagues from the CER also joined these meetings to offer ideas. I was also available by e-mail to answer questions as they came up, especially during the process of approving the workflow, as it needed to be as simple as possible to follow. I also held a training workshop for the students with Professor Rodini. I continued to be available for questions by e-mail as the students worked on their projects.\r\n\r\n<strong>4. What particular challenges did this project present?</strong>\r\nThis project required that every placemark on a tour include images at that location. The only way to do this in Google Earth was to code it yourself. Certain aspects of using Google Earth were easy to master, but customizing the appearance of the placemarks requires HTML programming knowledge. Despite the fact that most students nowadays have grown up with the Internet, we have found that very few know how to use HTML. Our solution utilized an online HTML editor that had a prebuilt HTML template loaded in it. When the students were ready to create the content for their placemarks, they simply copied the content from a Word document and then pasted it in the HTML editor to generate the code. The students pasted that code into their Google Earth placemark, circumventing the need for them to learn HTML.\r\n\r\n<strong>5. What lessons did you learn from this project and what might you do differently in the future? </strong>\r\nA more ideal solution may have been to create an application that would generate the tours without using Google Earth. This would have taken more time and resources to build than we had, but it could have been a useful application for other courses as well. It was disappointing to realize that Google Earth did not have an HMTL editor built in, and that there was no application that could suit our needs at the time. Perhaps when this course is offered again, there will be an ideal solution available to allow students to create tours and focus on the content rather than the technology. If not, then perhaps we will have the time to build one ourselves and share it.','Reid Sczerba - Commentary','I work for a faculty support center at Johns Hopkins University called the Center for Educational Resources (CER). As the center’s multimedia developer, I aided Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman with the technical and logistical aspects of the project. This included determining a viable technology for the project tours and developing resource guides that aided students’ tour creation.','inherit','open','open','','1123-revision-17','','','2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','',1123,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1123-revision-17/',0,'revision','',0),(3100,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','','Mapping the Provenance of Museum Objects','This case study features work from <a href=\"http://thewalters.org/earth/\" target=\"_blank\">Art on the Move</a>, which was an outcome of the course “Behind the Scenes at the Walters Art Museum: Material Migrations,” offered at the Walters Art Museum through the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 2009.  Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman were co-instructors and, with the technical guidance of Reid Sczerba, Senior Programmer Analyst in the university’s Center for Educational Resources, devised and oversaw this project.  The course and project were funded by an Arts Innovation Grant from Johns Hopkins.  Students in the course researched the histories of objects in the museum’s collection and created Google Maps tracing their history.  Three students share their work in this case study.','inherit','open','open','','1121-revision-57','','','2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','',1121,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1121-revision-57/',0,'revision','',0),(3101,19,'2012-10-04 04:04:17','2012-10-04 04:04:17','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1380\" title=\"lehigh_support head shot_maserjian\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_support-head-shot_maserjian.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />I’d like to tell you a story, one about a series of experiences that changed the way I work with students and faculty at Lehigh. In fact, the story is about stories—digital storytelling, to be exact. Digital storytelling uses computer-based still and moving images, text, audio, and music to document experiences, ideas, and research.\r\n\r\nIn the fall of 2005 I had the pleasure of working with English professor Ed Gallagher in an experimental, first-year writing course, “Digital Songs, Stories, and Histories,” that offered students new ways to communicate through a variety of multi-media assignments. For one assignment the students were asked to create a video based on a research question they developed from materials they found in Lehigh’s Digital Library project, <a href=\"http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/remain/con/digwriting.html\">I Remain: A Digital Archive of Letters, Manuscripts, and Ephemera</a>. The site contains hundreds of items from the university’s Special Collections and Archives that represent five centuries of writers, explorers, scientists, philosophers, and politicians.\r\n\r\nThe students were asked to select a document from the site that piqued their curiosity, transcribe that document, formulate a historical question, develop a thesis, select materials that would support that thesis, and produce a video based on those efforts. The vast majority of the students embraced the archival and technological challenge. The results appear on the <em>I Remain</em> site.\r\n\r\nIn order to understand the content development and technological challenges our students faced, I delved into my family archives and produced a short personal video story about my father. I was amazed at the ability of this process to challenge and change my perspective on the past. Cathartic is the only way I can describe my experience. Clearly smitten with this medium, the following year I taught a course for the History Department, Digital History and Video. This class had a mix of undergraduate and graduate students who were also asked to explore the archival materials on the <em>I Remain</em> site. They had to perform many of the same assignments as the previous class did, but, as the course level dictated, they had to be even more rigorous in their research. The students wrote a footnoted essay about their document(s), and then converted their research essay into a script to include narration and accompanying visuals.\r\n\r\nOne of the Digital History students, a senior with a double major in history and education, discovered a treasure trove of primary sources when she came upon a scrapbook of memorabilia related to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The scrapbook was compiled by American boundary commissioner, Rhode Island Secretary of State, historian, and author John R. Bartlett. Using many of the images in the scrapbook, she constructed a <a href=\"http://player.vimeo.com/video/40877170\">seven-minute video about the assassination of President Lincoln</a> and the effect his death had on the country. Rather than address a scholarly audience in her production, she chose to produce a documentary with a general audience in mind. The storytelling choices she made in her narration and accompanying voice-over collaborations with faculty and fellow classmates are clearly directed toward that general audience. Though initially intimidated by the use of new technology, this student was pleased that she was able to face the challenge and learn a new skill that would help her in her career in elementary education.\r\n\r\nSince these initial forays into student-produced documentary, I am pleased to say that this form of communication is alive and well at Lehigh University. As the number of requests for video projects grew, Library and Technology Services formed the Documentary Resource Team. The Team is comprised of librarians, instructional technologists, and media specialists who help faculty and students navigate the opportunities and challenges of video production. In many of these classes, students use physical and virtual archives extensively in their research and image selection. With the opportunities of archival discovery also come the challenges of representing findings.\r\n\r\nThe materials we uncover in archives and the way we choose to use them has provoked an ongoing series of questions about copyright, research methodology, and documentary ethics. Regardless of the event (long ago or yesterday) or the individual (living or dead), the lessons our students learn about their obligations in representing the lives of others are important ones. What is at stake when, as digital storytellers, we document the experience of others? What happens when those experiences move beyond the confines of the classroom and become part of a larger audience at public screenings or on the web? The questions of authority, privacy, responsibility, and moral obligations are good ones with no easy answers. Luckily, as educators, we are not in the business of easy answers.','Julia Maserjian - Commentary','I’d like to tell you a story, one about a series of experiences that changed the way I work with students and faculty at Lehigh. In fact, the story is about stories—digital storytelling, to be exact. Digital storytelling uses computer-based still and moving images, text, audio, and music to document experiences, ideas, and research.','inherit','open','open','','1116-revision-10','','','2012-10-04 04:04:17','2012-10-04 04:04:17','',1116,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1116-revision-10/',0,'revision','',0),(3102,19,'2012-09-25 01:29:33','2012-09-25 01:29:33','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1378\" title=\"lehigh_student head shot_weber\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-head-shot_weber.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />\r\n\r\nDuring the fall 2011 semester, I was a part of Lehigh University’s Theories of Masculinity class, an upper-level English and women’s studies course. Initially, I signed up for it because it was a prerequisite for graduating with department honors. As part of this course, we created a documentary film on coeducation and its effects on men and masculinity at Lehigh, which is currently celebrating its fortieth anniversary of admitting female students. My role in this film became a challenging and ultimately very rewarding part of my education at Lehigh.\r\n\r\nCreating the film required extensive use of Lehigh University’s Special Collections. As someone unfamiliar with the process of researching in the archives, I was unaware of the extensive time and effort such an undertaking required. Yet, it was through delving into the pages and pages of yearbook photos from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and seeing headlines from that time in <em>The Brown and White</em>, Lehigh’s student newspaper, that I began to appreciate the power of the project our class was creating. This project allowed me to see the trajectory of Lehigh’s transition to a coeducational institution, a transition colored by many challenges, including sexism. These challenges are not easily visible in 2011, forty years later, so seeing the headlines and pictures in the archives literally, and in a unique way, demonstrated the hurdles women had to face at Lehigh. Some were the only girls in their classes, and all had to overcome being seen simply as weekend entertainment for the male students, as was the case for the women who were bussed in and out on Saturdays from nearby Cedar Crest College prior to coeducation. I had been taking my role as a woman on Lehigh’s campus for granted, and this process really made me consider the journey that others had taken to provide me with such an opportunity.\r\n\r\nThe archives played a major role in our documentary. The images and video clips we found provided evidence of our claims about the challenges women came up against at a conservative institution transitioning to coeducation, and in a way that our words alone could not do justice to. Simply hearing about the awkward mixers held before coeducation was implemented is not as powerful as seeing pictures of wide-eyed men groping at women, or of the huge amounts of alcohol they consumed at these parties. Lehigh’s archives are not used nearly enough. I am embarrassed to admit that as a first-semester senior English major I am just now getting my first taste of their value. It is my hope that our documentary project will serve as a positive example of the power that these resources can provide to our university. As these images fade further and further into the past, students have the chance to keep them alive in our contemporary work by using them in various classes and research projects. I hope that our documentary project can show the university, and especially other students like me who may not have known the extent of the material available, the value of these resources to the legacy of our institution and the appreciation of our education.','Kim Weber - Commentary','During the fall 2011 semester, I was a part of Lehigh University’s Theories of Masculinity class, an upper-level English and women’s studies course. Initially, I signed up for it because it was a prerequisite for graduating with department honors. As part of this course, we created a documentary film on coeducation and its effects on men and masculinity at Lehigh, which is currently celebrating its fortieth anniversary of admitting female students. My role in this film became a challenging and ultimately very rewarding part of my education at Lehigh.','inherit','open','open','','1113-revision-11','','','2012-09-25 01:29:33','2012-09-25 01:29:33','',1113,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1113-revision-11/',0,'revision','',0),(3103,19,'2012-10-04 05:04:13','2012-10-04 05:04:13','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1374\" title=\"lehigh_instructor head shot_kramp\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_instructor-head-shot_kramp.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />My fall 2011 English and Women’s Studies upper-level undergraduate class, Theories of Masculinity, was designed to coordinate with the fortieth anniversary of admitting undergraduate women to Lehigh University. A major component of this course was a student-produced documentary film that considers the effects of coeducation on men and masculinity at Lehigh. This film project provided my students with an opportunity to examine critically Lehigh’s institutional history, focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s. While it was not my initial intention, I was extremely pleased by the students’ abilities to research and study their own school’s history. They made extensive use of Lehigh’s Archives and Special Collections to collect numerous articles, documents, and perhaps most importantly, photographs, and they incorporated these materials into the different sections of the film (see Figures 1-6). Students discovered several cultural texts from the 1960s and 1970s that portrayed Lehigh as a haven for privileged masculinity, a sphere in which men appeared largely ignorant of the volatile civil rights movement and the emergent mid-century women’s movement. And yet, my students’ research also revealed that the Lehigh community of this era was also clearly cognizant of impending social changes. As my students tracked this tension between the ossification of male hegemony and the certainty of coming shifts, they developed a newfound appreciation for the importance of institutional history to the present operations of a university.\r\n\r\nThe prominence of Greek life is certainly one such feature of this legacy. Two of the four segments of the film address the role of fraternities and Greek social life, including the final section, which focuses on men and masculinity in Lehigh’s contemporary culture. The students who explored Lehigh’s mid-century Greek culture found ample textual evidence of its importance, including photographs, yearbook coverage, and film footage. When students interviewed alumni from the 1960s and 1970s, the men reported that Greek life had waned significantly in the years following coeducation. But when other students spoke with current male and female students, these individuals emphasized the enduring importance of fraternities and sororities to the culture of Lehigh. In addition, the group of filmmakers who focused on the period prior to coeducation highlighted the ways in which women were brought to campus for Saturday evening social events such as dances. My students interviewed several alumni who commented on the awkwardness of such activities, for both the men and the women. They even include a telling newspaper story in which Cedar Crest College, a small women’s college in nearby Allentown, is referenced as the bordello of Lehigh Valley (see <a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/lehigh_student-work_image1.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\">Figure 1</a>). The student filmmakers who covered the years immediately following coeducation also treated the clumsiness of men’s interactions with women; they point to challenges in managing facilities and planning building construction, developing female athletics, and integrating women into extra-curricular clubs and organizations, such as the marching band. The filmmakers who treated contemporary conceptions of masculinity within the Lehigh community explicitly referenced the enduring legacy of sexual inequality and the perceived intellectual inferiority of women. They cited recent newspaper accounts on persistent gender inequities on campus and conducted numerous interviews on the topic. While it may very well have been unintentional, these students never interviewed a male and female subject together; instead, they consistently showed pairs of male students, suggesting the extant homosocial culture of Lehigh.\r\n\r\nI wanted my students to engage the history and culture of Lehigh through film technology because it would provide them with an opportunity to artistically synthesize a variety of different kinds of texts (photos, newspaper articles, found film footage, interviews, etc.). The film medium also allowed my students to share their work in public forums, respond to questions and concerns, and discuss their own research and artistic strategies. In effect, the film project allowed my students to contribute to the very institutional history of Lehigh University that they were researching. The archival work my students completed for this film has effectively introduced them to both the depths of information housed in Lehigh’s Special Collections and the profound relevance of institutional history to their own educational experiences. As I reflect upon the experience, there is no doubt in my mind that the most important single component of this process was done long before this class started; the cataloguing and digitization of the university newspaper and annual yearbooks made such a classroom project possible. The film has allowed students, faculty, and alumni to look back into Lehigh’s past, and, while this project has undoubtedly opened some uncomfortable topics and discussions, it has also reminded current and former members of the Lehigh community of their shared history.','Michael Kramp - Commentary','My Fall 2011 English and Women’s Studies upper-level undergraduate class, “Theories of Masculinity” was designed to coordinate with the 40th anniversary of undergraduate women at Lehigh University. A major component of this course was a student-produced documentary film that considers the effects of co-education on men and masculinity at Lehigh. This film project provided my students with an opportunity to examine critically Lehigh’s institutional history, focusing on the late 1960s and early 1970s.','inherit','open','open','','1110-revision-14','','','2012-10-04 05:04:13','2012-10-04 05:04:13','',1110,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1110-revision-14/',0,'revision','',0),(3104,19,'2012-09-25 01:40:03','2012-09-25 01:40:03','','Archival Materials into Documentary Film','Students in an English and Women’s Studies undergraduate course at Lehigh University used materials from Lehigh’s Special Collections and University Archives to create a documentary film. The students used these archival resources, along with interviews and other research, to tell a chapter of their own institution’s history, focusing on issues of gender and masculinity as Lehigh went from all-male to coed in 1971.','inherit','open','open','','1108-revision-18','','','2012-09-25 01:40:03','2012-09-25 01:40:03','',1108,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1108-revision-18/',0,'revision','',0),(3105,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','In 2008 Smith took a practicum course called The Power of Place, taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss through the <a href=\"http://krieger.jhu.edu/africana\">Center for Africana Studies</a>. The students recorded oral histories of residents of Baltimore\'s Middle East neighborhood for the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH), which they later assembled into a <a href=\"http://eboh.jhu.edu/oralhistoryplayer/\">digital audio archive</a>. The course led Smith to think about how to integrate the recordings with their lengthy transcripts. In addition to the interviews he conducted for the class, Smith eventually built the player software featured on the project website. The software that he developed is open source, so anyone can use it without having to pay license or royalty fees. Smith’s company, ESDA LLC, can implement the software on a contract basis for those without the expertise to do it in-house.\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://morgue.afro.com/AfroArchon/\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1253\" title=\"jhu_project photo_afro\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_project-photo_afro.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"638\" height=\"425\" /></a> <span class=\"caption\" style=\"margin-bottom:30px\">Unprocessed boxes of archival material, Baltimore <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em>, 2008.</span>\r\n\r\nSmith’s research on practical archival problems brought him into contact with Moira Hinderer, the project manager for the <a href=\"http://magazine.jhu.edu/2011/11/unboxing-history/\">Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project</a> (DPAAP), a partnership between the Baltimore <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> and Johns Hopkins University. DPAAP focuses on organizing and preserving the archives of the <em>Afro-American Newspapers;</em> they have worked on the newspapers’ <a href=\"http://morgue.afro.com/AfroArchon/\">morgue collections</a> as well as personal papers and institutional records. Hinderer, who is also a lecturer in the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins, teaches classes in which students work directly with the <em>Afro</em>’s archives. Smith watched Hinderer\'s students and archival interns involved in the painstaking labor of flatbed scanning and wondered if this process could be made more efficient. The time and expense involved in the digitization of delicate archival materials at the <em>Afro</em> prompted Smith to invent another tool:: the <a href=\"http://projectgado.org/\">Gado scanner</a>.','Afro - Project Description','','inherit','open','open','','1064-revision-22','','','2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','',1064,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1064-revision-22/',0,'revision','',0),(3106,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1247\" title=\"jhu_teacher photo_hinderer\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_teacher-photo_hinderer.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />Over the last four years, I have worked as a lecturer teaching courses about Baltimore and African American history, and I have also served as the project manager for the Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project (DPAAP), a partnership between Johns Hopkins University and the <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These experiences have shown me that students learn best when they are not simply taught history, but when they also act as historians. Baltimore offers both possibilities and challenges for students doing historical projects. Much of the city’s history remains unwritten, and historical materials are often tucked away in small archives and private homes. Records that are not easily accessible present a special problem for students who are constrained by time and transportation. Both the East Baltimore Oral History Project and the <em>Afro</em> Archives partnership seek to address these challenges by involving students in the process of uncovering, describing, and making accessible historical records, and then encouraging students to use these resources for historical research.\r\n\r\nThe East Baltimore Oral History Project involves students in the work of preserving the memories of established members of the East Baltimore community. For students, this work addresses a major complaint about life as a Johns Hopkins undergraduate: they are too removed from the life of the city, and they are not encouraged to interact with the city and its inhabitants in meaningful ways. The interviewing process has the additional benefit of making students experts, allowing them to bring a substantive point of view and body of evidence as they critique course readings and engage in class discussions. As interviews are added to the project website, students produce an accessible community history resource that will last well beyond the usual semester-long class project.\r\n\r\nDPAAP also depends heavily on the work of student archival interns, and on the technical skills of the current and former students who form the Project Gado team, led by recent Johns Hopkins University graduate Tom Smith. Archival interns have been involved in every step of uncovering the archives, from labeling boxes and shelves, to entering information into our archival database, to writing essays for our database website. This work has given interns a perspective on African American history usually reserved for history professionals. With materials pertaining to almost every local, national, and international aspect of Black history, interns are often asked to describe the central themes and narratives of this diverse archive. This challenge requires them to address the problem of twentieth-century information overload familiar to both historians and archivists. The Project Gado team offers a different set of solutions to the problem of preserving and making accessible vast amounts of archival materials. The members of Project Gado are involved in innovative work in the digital humanities as they create low-cost options for large-scale digitization. The work of Tom Smith and Project Gado suggests another possibility for hands-on coursework in history, courses that would integrate technical skills and the creation of hardware and software into a rigorous humanities education to prepare students to be twenty-first-century humanities scholars.','Moira Hinderer - Commentary','Over the last four years, I have worked as a lecturer teaching courses about Baltimore and African American history, and I have also served as the project manager for the Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project (DPAAP), a partnership between Johns Hopkins University and the Afro-American Newspapers funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These experiences have shown me that students learn best when they are not simply taught history, but when they also act as historians. Baltimore offers both possibilities and challenges for students doing historical projects. Much of the city’s history remains unwritten, and historical materials are often tucked away in small archives and private homes. Records that are not easily accessible present a special problem for students who are constrained by time and transportation. Both the East Baltimore Oral History Project and the Afro Archives partnership seek to address these challenges by involving students in the process of uncovering, describing, and making accessible historical records, and then encouraging students to use these resources for historical research. ','inherit','open','open','','1062-revision-17','','','2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','',1062,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1062-revision-17/',0,'revision','',0),(3107,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1244\" title=\"jhu_student photo_smith\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_student-photo_smith.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />When people think of Johns Hopkins University they think of medicine, and rightly so. JHU prepares people for medical school better than any college in the world. The medical attitude, however, extends beyond the bounded world of pre-meds. Hopkins often values the reductionism of the scientific method and the cleanliness of the lab over holism and real-world, big-picture thinking. In looking for classes during my sophomore year at JHU, then, I was surprised to find The Power of Place taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss. The course was a practicum, and all participants would conduct oral histories as part of the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH). This was a rare chance to get out of the infamous “Hopkins Bubble.” I signed up.\r\n\r\nDuring Power of Place I helped produce several oral histories. As interviews flowed in, however, I began to see a problem. Each interview was around two hours long and included a full transcript. From my class alone, the project would amass nearly thirty hours of audio and several hundred pages of text. Making use of those materials would be tough. As a software developer, I saw a solution. I imagined a tool that could link transcripts with audio, allow people to tag important areas within interviews, and make all the EBOH materials searchable. With support from the university, I spent the next year working with Professor Shell-Weiss to make my idea into a working web application.\r\n\r\nWhile working on EBOH, I started visiting archives. I could find few digital images of East Baltimore, and I wanted to know why. On a trip to the <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> with Moira Hinderer, I found a plethora of visual materials. Very few, however, had been digitized. The main factor was cost; resources to manually digitize the <em>Afro</em> collection simply were not available. Again, I saw a technical solution: I would build a robot. I proposed creating an automatic scanner that could lift and digitize the <em>Afro</em>’s sensitive artifacts, all for less than $500. No one at JHU thought it would happen. Luckily, Professor Shell-Weiss managed to raise some funds, and I spent a summer prototyping. The result was the Gado 1, a proof-of-concept that would later scan over 1,000 images at the <em>Afro</em>. The price tag was $496.\r\n\r\nAfter graduating from JHU in May 2011, I wanted to continue refining my technology. With support from the JHU Sheridan Libraries and the Abell Foundation (a regional grantsmaker), I secured enough funding to work on my project full time. In December 2011, I completed the Gado 2, a second-generation machine that dramatically outpaces the original. Since testing began, my machine has digitized over 3,000 artifacts at the <em>Afro</em>, at a tiny fraction of the cost of manual scanning. In February 2012, we made these images available to the general public and launched GadoImages.com to distribute them to paying licensors. I believe Gado has the potential to dramatically alter the economics of archival digitization. I would never be at this point without that first push to step outside the classroom and start thinking in broader terms.','Tom Smith - Commentary','When people think of Johns Hopkins University they think of medicine, and rightly so. JHU prepares people for medical school better than any college in the world. The medical attitude, however, extends beyond the bounded world of pre-meds. Hopkins often values the reductionism of the scientific method and the cleanliness of the lab over holism and real-world, big-picture thinking. In looking for classes during my sophomore year at JHU, then, I was surprised to find The Power of Place taught by Melanie Shell-Weiss. The course was a practicum, and all participants would conduct oral histories as part of the East Baltimore Oral History Project (EBOH). This was a rare chance to get out of the infamous “Hopkins Bubble.” I signed up.','inherit','open','open','','1059-revision-18','','','2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','',1059,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1059-revision-18/',0,'revision','',0),(3108,19,'2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','<a href=\"http://projectgado.org/\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1258\" title=\"jhu_student project photo 1_gado\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/jhu_student-project-photo-1_gado.jpg\" alt=\"The Gado 2 Robotic Scanner scanning photos at the Afro-American Newspapers archive.\" width=\"638\" height=\"478\" /></a> <span class=\"caption\">The Gado 2 Robotic Scanner scanning photos at the <em>Afro-American Newspapers</em> archive.</span>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://eboh.jhu.edu/oralhistoryplayer\"><img class=\" wp-image-2451\" style=\"margin-top: 30px;\" title=\"jhu_student project photo 2_eboh\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/jhu_student-project-photo-2_eboh.jpg\" alt=\"The East Baltimore Oral History Player showing the index entry for a resident whose story Tom Smith helped to document and record.\" width=\"630\" /></a> <span class=\"caption\">The East Baltimore Oral History Player showing the index entry for a resident whose story Tom Smith helped to document and record.</span>','Student-Built Archival Tools','This case study focuses on two archival tools designed by Tom Smith, a Cognitive Science and Anthropology major who graduated in 2011: a web application for an oral history archive and a low-cost robotic scanner for paper-based materials.','inherit','open','open','','1057-revision-40','','','2012-10-15 15:39:47','2012-10-15 15:39:47','',1057,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1057-revision-40/',0,'revision','',0),(3109,19,'2012-09-25 01:54:29','2012-09-25 01:54:29','As an undergraduate English major with a concentration in creative writing, I had always regarded books as a portal into the world of fiction, a place where I could study plots and themes, setting and syntax. I had never stopped to consider books as historical objects until my first class in English 241: Archeology of Text. The assignment for the final research paper seemed simple: use what we learned during the semester to explore, analyze, and describe a document of interest from Goucher’s Special Collections.\r\n\r\nI knew from the start that I was intrigued by Goucher’s prolific collection of Jane Austen materials, but needed something specific to spark my interest. Walking around the small Special Collections room in the Julia Rogers Library, my gaze landed on a blue box behind a glass case. I soon learned that inside that box lay the first American edition of <em>Emma</em> (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816).  Nancy Magnuson, college librarian, told me all about Alberta Burke’s letters and thought that they might contain clues for my research. I have always been fascinated with letters (both reading and writing them), and the process of tracking a specific book through personal correspondences captivated me. I chose to study the 1816 first American edition of <em>Emma</em> and explore the letters that track how it found a home in Goucher’s library.\r\n\r\n<div id=\"attachment_1273\" class=\"alignright right\" style=\"width:320px; margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom:20px;\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-1273\" title=\"goucher_student action photo_kendall\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-action-photo_kendall.jpg\" alt=\"Sarah Kendall working with the Burke copy of the American first edition of Austen\'s Emma\" width=\"320\" height=\"375\" /> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sarah Kendall working with the Burke copy of the American first edition of Austen\'s <em>Emma</em> (Philadelphia: M. Carey; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816).in the former Rare Book Collection Seminar Room (December 2007).</span></div>\r\n\r\nI remain baffled by the amount of information and detailed history I discovered while writing a descriptive bibliography. I wrote detailed accounts of the letters from Alberta Burke and David Gilson, the letters between David Gilson and Henry Burke, and the 1816 first edition of <em>Emma</em>. After seeing the interest that both Alberta Burke and David Gilson had in the first American edition of <em>Emma</em>, I knew that perusing the pages and studying the tome in detail would be essential to revealing the book’s history. Sifting through dozens of letters hoping to find mention of <em>Emma</em> thrilled me to no end. Reading different letters from various sources also illuminated how various people valued the first edition and why they wanted it in their possession. The circuit of corresponding materials proved equally intriguing and helpful for tracking down how the book traveled from Philadelphia to Goucher’s library.\r\n\r\nI learned that by latching on to a specific topic, I could follow a steady thread of conversation about <em>Emma</em>. The experience made me feel like a genuine historian instead of an undergraduate student simply researching journal articles or internet resources. It felt very special and intellectually stimulating to handle history with my own hands! I even discovered two additional letters hidden between the inside cover and the title page of the first volume. Unearthing these two letters felt very encouraging and proved that there is always the possibility of finding something new within the archives.','Sarah Kendall - Commentary','As an undergraduate English major with a concentration in Creative Writing, I had always regarded books as a portal into the world of fiction; a place where I could study plots and themes, setting and syntax. I had never stopped to consider books as historical objects until my first class in English 241: Archeology of Text. The assignment for the final research paper seemed simple: use what we learned during the semester to explore, analyze, and describe a document of interest from Goucher’s Special Collections.','inherit','open','open','','1053-revision-16','','','2012-09-25 01:54:29','2012-09-25 01:54:29','',1053,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1053-revision-16/',0,'revision','',0),(3110,19,'2012-09-25 01:44:36','2012-09-25 01:44:36','When I heard about English 241: Archeology of Text, I was immediately excited. I had been working in Special Collections and Archives at Goucher College for about a year, and I knew the class would give me a chance to learn more about books and archives in a setting that would encourage discussions with my peers. When it came time to pick a collection for my final project, I decided to work with archival materials rather than books so that I could challenge myself.\r\n\r\nWhile working in Special Collections, I had often walked by large blue boxes containing scrapbooks, but I had yet to look through them. When I began leafing through them, I found that I learned as much about Goucher College as I did about the women who put the scrapbooks together. Many of the scrapbooks had things in common, including Valentines, pressed flowers, calling cards, and photographs. But what intrigued me most were the dance cards. I had never before encountered dance cards, or even heard of them, even though I had been dancing all my life. Many of the dance cards were from the U.S. Naval Academy, a nearby all-male school in need of women with whom to dance. Goucher girls would often travel to Annapolis for the weekend dances and bring back dance cards as souvenirs.\r\n\r\n<div id=\"attachment_1275\" align=\"alignnone\" style=\"width:510px; margin-bottom: 20px;\"><img class=\" wp-image-1275\" title=\"goucher_student action photo_brand\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_student-action-photo_brand.jpg\" alt=\"Cassie Brand working in the former Rare Book Collection Seminar Room \" width=\"510\" height=\"382\" /> <span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Cassie Brand working in the former Rare Book Collection Seminar Room (December 2007) with an early Chaucer edition from Special Collections (Ed. John Urry, London: Printed for Bernard Lintot, 1721).</span></div>\r\n\r\nWhen I began researching these cards, I found very little information. I went to all of the reference librarians I could find, but even they had difficulties because very few secondary sources were available. I looked through all the etiquette books I could get my hands on and even asked people to tell me what they knew about dance cards. Those who knew of them provided me with the basic information I needed to study the cards.\r\n\r\nI contacted the U.S. Naval Academy Archives, and with the help of Nancy Magnuson, Goucher College Librarian, I made an appointment to see their collection. There I found an almost complete run of dance cards from the Farewell Ball, which was held every year after graduation. Some were blank, some were filled in, some contained photographs, and some still had their tiny pencils attached. Looking through the cards, I found that they could be studied in several ways. One could examine print history, dance history, social history, or even one woman’s history of dance partners. The first and last dance cards were so drastically different that I chose to look at how the cards changed over the years. I found that the cards’ modifications reflected the changes in social dances.\r\n\r\nThough I have not yet returned to the dance card collections to study them further, they have never been far from my mind. I am still trying to convince people that dance cards are brilliant and should be reinstated for social events. Dance cards remain an interest of mine, and I would love to eventually write their complete history.','Cassie Brand - Commentary','When I heard about English 241: Archeology of Text, I was immediately excited. I had been working in Special Collections and Archives at Goucher College for about a year and I knew the class would give me a chance to learn more about books and archives in a setting that would encourage discussions with my peers. When it came time to pick a collection for my final project, I decided to work with archival materials rather than books so that I could challenge myself.','inherit','open','open','','1051-revision-15','','','2012-09-25 01:44:36','2012-09-25 01:44:36','',1051,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1051-revision-15/',0,'revision','',0),(3111,19,'2012-09-25 01:41:38','2012-09-25 01:41:38','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1279\" title=\"goucher_instructor image_sanders\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/goucher_instructor-image_sanders.jpg\" alt=\"Sanders\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />Students prepare for English 241: Archeology of Text research projects in twelve weeks of readings and laboratory experiences, which introduce the skills necessary to work with early printed books and archival documents. (For the text of the assignment, see <a href=\"http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng241/241_individual_research_projects_F09.htm\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>). The goal of these projects is to enable each student to pursue a self-designed creative or descriptive study of books, manuscripts, and other artifacts from Special Collections and Archives. Because the course is interdisciplinary and students come from many majors, it is hard to predict where students’ curiosities will take them. The best way to encourage active student engagement is to prepare students for the widest range of book- and document-related work. Successful projects can lead to further research supported by Goucher’s Peirce Center fellowships.\r\n\r\nBeginning with the study of how a digital document is constructed and the history of the Internet’s “cloud” library, students practice searching online scholarly sites such as the <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em> (OED), WorldCat, <em>English Short-Title Catalog</em> (ESTC), and the continental library collections accessible through the University of Karlsruhe’s online catalog. They also explore using search engines and databases to identify and locate people, places, and things. Those skills provide interpretive context for hand-press books in the course’s next segment. After three weeks of studying typography, format, bindings, and hand-made paper and its manufacture, students have learned the most basic descriptive bibliography skills. This enables them to describe the edition-specific and copy-specific details of their “cadaver books,” a set of early printed books they handle each week to encourage safe and intelligent treatment of early paper and bindings. Finally, paper and parchment manuscript laboratories teach students to decipher secretary and scribal hands from the nineteenth through the thirteenth centuries. This enables them to interpret marginalia in early printed books, including owners’ inscriptions and other provenance and use evidence.\r\n\r\nSarah Kendall’s study of the Burke Austen Collection’s copy of the two-volume American first edition of Jane Austen’s <em>Emma</em> (Philadelphia: M. Carey, ; for sale by Wells &amp; Lilly, Boston, 1816) represents a creative response to traditional rare-book provenance study, resulting in her discovery of a significant trove of correspondence in the book’s archival container. Before Alberta Burke brought the book to Baltimore, it had passed through the hands of Christina Broun Dalhousie (the Countess Dalhousie); a prominent collector, Frank J. Hogan; and a poet, Siegfried Sassoon. Kendall’s study demonstrates the way a book’s value changes as it moves from owner to owner, becoming as attractive for its associations and rarity as it is for its text. An archives-based approach to using the course’s analytical tools is represented by Cassie Brand’s study of U.S. Naval Academy dance cards found in the scrapbook kept by Goucher student Mary Lee Keith (Class of 1924), augmented by research at The Nimitz Library in Annapolis. Brand showed how the cards could be used to study crucial changes in American courtship conventions as women took control of their relations with potential suitors.\r\n\r\nThese two projects represent the course’s goal: to enable original, undergraduate, hands-on archival research using interdisciplinary skills:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>See images from <a href=\"http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng241/cassie_brand_IRP_imaging_Fall%202007.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Brand’s dance card project</a>.</li>\r\n	<li>See a portfolio of images of the <a href=\"http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng241/English_241_IRP_Images_F07.htm\" target=\"_blank\">2007 class researching final projects</a>.</li>\r\n</ul>','Arnold Sanders - Commentary','Students prepare for English 241, “Archeology of Text,” research projects in twelve weeks of readings and laboratory experiences which introduce skills necessary to work with early printed books and archival documents. (For the text of the assignment, see\r\nhere). The goal of these projects is to enable each student to pursue a self-designed creative or descriptive study of books, manuscripts, and other artifacts from Special Collections and Archives. Because the course is interdisciplinary and students come from many majors, it is hard to predict where students’ curiosities will take them. The best way to encourage active student engagement is prepare students for the widest range of book and document related work. Successful projects can lead to further research supported by Goucher’s Peirce Center fellowships.','inherit','open','open','','1049-revision-14','','','2012-09-25 01:41:38','2012-09-25 01:41:38','',1049,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1049-revision-14/',0,'revision','',0),(3112,19,'2012-09-25 01:41:16','2012-09-25 01:41:16','','Hands-On Research with Rare Books and Ephemera ','This case study features work that two students completed in an English class at Goucher College. The course, The Archeology of Text, offers students an understanding of the social and historical frameworks for the production and consumption of text, beginning with the digital age and moving backwards in time. Students are also trained in bibliographic research skills, which they apply to objects in Goucher’s Special Collections library. These objects then become the subjects of a research paper that serves as the final course project.','inherit','open','open','','1047-revision-36','','','2012-09-25 01:41:16','2012-09-25 01:41:16','',1047,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1047-revision-36/',0,'revision','',0),(3113,19,'2012-09-25 03:47:49','2012-09-25 03:47:49','<div id=\"attachment_1367\" class=\"alignright right\" style=\"width: 333px; margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom:20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/cscc_student-action-photo_saunders.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-1367 \" title=\"cscc_student action photo_saunders\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/cscc_student-action-photo_saunders-333x250.jpg\" alt=\"Matthew Saunders exploring the Ramsey Family Papers at the Cleveland Bradley County Library History Branch.\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a><span class=\"wp-caption-text\">Matthew Saunders exploring the Ramsey Family Papers at the Cleveland Bradley County Library History Branch (CPLHB). Photo credit: Sarah Copeland.</span></div>\r\nI was one of the first students to take the History Laboratory class at Cleveland State Community College (CSCC). My previous experience during an extra-credit activity in a traditional history course initially sparked my interest. During an American history survey course, Mr. Reed, the CSCC instructor who founded the Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive (SETDA), offered students a chance to digitize historical photographs. He demonstrated how to research a photograph\'s history, starting with the limited information written on the back and clues within the picture itself. I was eager to enroll in a course that was dedicated to digitizing historical photographs.\r\n\r\nFew history majors would turn down the opportunity to go beyond lecture courses and work directly with historical documents, but I never expected a two-year college to offer me this opportunity. The History Laboratory allowed me to gain hands-on experience preserving important records of local history. Moreover, the History Lab transformed how I research. I had to learn to use a library because the most relevant research material was not accessible online. It took a while to get into the groove of picking up a book and reading through the text as opposed to using a search engine to gather information. Using physical books to research is an invaluable experience that I will take with me throughout my future courses and career.\r\n\r\nAnother new experience was the archiving section of the class, in which we digitized photographs and organized the research in a way that would be coherent on the SETDA website. As students, we are accustomed to elaborating and expanding upon our research to produce an essay. The archiving section of the course, instead, forced me to condense my findings into a few concise sentences. The term “metadata” was foreign to me before this class, so working my research into that format was not the easiest task. Entering metadata into ContentDM was a challenge. Nevertheless, this exercise has helped me to convey my thoughts more clearly in other classes.\r\n\r\nOverall, the History Laboratory was a great experience. I had wanted to add some constructive criticism, but after reflecting on my experience I cannot think of any suggestions. The instructors were terrific and the course of study was refreshing. I would recommend this course to history students or any student who is searching for an experience that goes beyond a classroom lecture.','Matthew E. Saunders - Commentary','I was one of the first students to take the History Laboratory at Cleveland State Community College. My previous experience during an extra credit activity in a traditional history course initially sparked my interest. During an American History survey course Mr. Reed, the CSCC instructor who founded the Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive, offered students a chance to digitize historical photographs. He demonstrated how to research a photograph\'s history, starting with the limited information written on the back and clues within the picture itself. I was eager to enroll in a course that was dedicated to digitizing historical photographs.','inherit','open','open','','1040-revision-19','','','2012-09-25 03:47:49','2012-09-25 03:47:49','',1040,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1040-revision-19/',0,'revision','',0),(3114,19,'2012-09-25 03:47:29','2012-09-25 03:47:29','<center><strong>HIST 2802 – HISTORY LABORATORY</strong>\r\nSpring 2011\r\n1 semester-hour credit\r\nIndependent Study/Service-Learning Experience</center>&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<strong>INSTRUCTORS</strong>\r\n\r\nSarah Copeland, Records Catalog Coordinator\r\nBryan Reed, Associate Professor of History\r\n\r\n<strong>COURSE DESCRIPTION</strong>\r\n\r\nThis course allows students to be involved in a service learning experience at an area museum, archive, historical society, or other historical collection. The course is designed to expose students to the practice of researching, digitizing, and preserving historical artifacts. Students will complete 20 hours of service during the semester. (Co-requisite: HIST 2010, 2020, or 2030)\r\n\r\n<strong>LEARNING OUTCOMES</strong>\r\n<ol>\r\n	<li>demonstrate appropriate handling of unique historical materials</li>\r\n	<li>describe the public role of institutions charged with preserving historical materials</li>\r\n	<li>create digital versions of historical documents using best practices</li>\r\n	<li>describe digitized documents using the Dublin Core metadata scheme</li>\r\n	<li>publish newly digitized materials to the Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive (SETDA) using CONTENTdm, a tool for managing digital collections and publishing them on the world wide web</li>\r\n	<li>demonstrate critical thinking and reasoning</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n<strong>REFERENCED READINGS/RESOURCES</strong>\r\n<ol>\r\n	<li>“Digital Imaging Tutorial,” Cornell University Library, http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/tutorial/contents.html</li>\r\n	<li>“Digital Preservation Management Tutorial,” Cornell University and the National Endowment for the Humanities, http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/dpm/dpm-eng/eng_index.html</li>\r\n	<li>“Digital Best Practices,” Washington State Library, http://digitalwa.statelib.wa.gov/newsite/best.htm</li>\r\n</ol>\r\n<strong>WHAT COUNTS TOWARD MY 20 “SERVICE LEARNING” HOURS?</strong>\r\n\r\nThere are four tasks that you will undertake in this course: (1) scanning documents, (2) researching the background of those documents, (3) turning your research into “description,” and (4) uploading your documents and description to the CONTENTdm database. Tasks 1 and 2 will count toward your 20 service learning hours. Tasks 3 and 4 are your homework.\r\n\r\n<strong>ASSESSMENTS</strong>\r\n\r\nLearning outcomes will be assessed through the following tools:\r\nStudent’s notebook (journal/log) = 100 points\r\nInstructor’s evaluation of research = 100 points\r\nOn-site supervisor’s evaluation = 100 points\r\nDigital submissions to SETDA = 100 points\r\n\r\nThere are 400 points possible in this course based upon the assessment tools. The grading scale is\r\nA = 360-400 points\r\nB = 320-359 points\r\nC = 280-319 points\r\nD = 240-279 points\r\nF = below 240 points\r\n\r\n<strong>JOURNAL/LOG</strong>\r\n\r\nStudents are required to maintain a notebook where they will log their scanning and research sessions and reflect on their service-learning experience. The notebook should also be used to keep research notes. Notebooks must be brought to every service learning session; entries must be recorded for the session attended. Each entry should include the date and time of both arrival and departure, followed by a thoughtful reflection of your experience. The following questions can help guide your journaling:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>How does what you are doing compare to your prior expectations?</li>\r\n	<li>What is the historical significance of the artifacts processed? How are they useful in our understanding of the past?</li>\r\n	<li>How does your work contribute to the institution where you are completing your service-learning hours? How does your work impact the community?</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nNotebooks will be collected for examination periodically during the semester. Students may elect to produce a blog with approval of the instructor at the beginning of the course.\r\n\r\n<strong>ON-SITE SUPERVISOR EVALUATION</strong>\r\n\r\nYour supervisor at the institution where you complete your service learning hours will submit an evaluation at the end of the semester. This evaluation will measure your performance in the following areas: professional conduct, quality of work, and contributive effort.\r\n\r\n<strong>DIGITAL SUBMISSIONS</strong>\r\n\r\nStudents will submit digitized images and descriptive metadata for publication in the Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive. These will be evaluated by the instructors before publication online, and students will receive feedback throughout the course as they contribute digital items. Students will identify the five digital submissions that represent their best work. Ms. Copeland will assess these five submissions according to the archival standards and preservation procedures covered in this class. (The same 5 submissions will be reviewed by Professor Reed for the quality of background research, as described below.) Each digital submission is worth 20 points and will be evaluated for digitization quality, descriptive accuracy, correct application of the tools in CONTENTdm, spelling and grammar.\r\n\r\n<strong>INSTRUCTOR EVALUATION</strong>\r\n\r\nProfessor Reed will evaluate the quality of your research at the end of the semester. This evaluation will be based on the five digital submissions that represent your best work. (The same 5 submissions will be reviewed by Ms. Copeland, as described above.) Each digital submission is worth 20 points and will be evaluated for quality and integration of source material, historical interpretation, descriptive accuracy, and spelling/grammar.\r\n\r\n<strong>ATTENDANCE</strong>\r\n\r\nEach student is expected to attend and be on time for each training and service learning session. Because of the nature of this course, attendance is critical toward preparing for and executing the service learning. More than one unexcused absence from a scheduled training of service learning session will have a significant adverse effect on your evaluation. Failure to complete the obligations of your service learning assignment in a timely and professional manner will cause substantial deductions from your overall grade. If a scheduled session cannot be met you must notify the institution and instructor(s) in advance. You are also responsible for rescheduling your missed session in consultation with your on-site supervisor.','CSCC - Project Syllabus','','inherit','open','open','','1031-revision-16','','','2012-09-25 03:47:29','2012-09-25 03:47:29','',1031,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1031-revision-16/',0,'revision','',0),(3115,19,'2012-09-25 03:41:30','2012-09-25 03:41:30','Cleveland State Community College (CSCC), a small two-year college in southeast Tennessee, offers freshman and sophomore students a service-learning course as an introduction to research in archives. In this course, the History Laboratory students assist local cultural heritage institutions with digitizing collections and publishing them on the web. As of spring 2012, students have completed service-learning hours at the Cleveland Bradley County Public Library History Branch, the Museum Center at 5ive Points, and the Polk County Historical and Genealogical Society Library. These local archives and museums benefit from increased access to their collections, while CSCC history students gain experience with handling and researching primary sources.\r\n\r\nSeveral developments led the Department of History and the Library to collaborate on the creation of the History Laboratory. The college’s administrators recently encouraged instructors of every discipline, including the humanities, to develop content-appropriate service-learning courses to promote student engagement. Moreover, the history curriculum at CSCC emphasizes the central role of primary sources in historical analysis, even in research projects assigned in introductory courses. A history instructor, Bryan Reed, realized that his students could access a rich learning experience if they contributed to a regional digitization project, the <a href=\" http://www.clevelandstatecc.edu/setda/\">Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive</a>. Thus, Reed and I developed a service-learning history course where students assist local archives, museums, and historical societies that lack staff to digitize their collections.\r\n\r\nAs the primary instructor, I oversee the classroom content of the course, which is informed by my training in both history and information science (MA, History; MS, Information Science). The historian’s need to understand primary sources, where they are found, and how they are curated shapes the goal of the course. Information science, including the philosophy of archives, digitization, and creating metadata, shapes the course activities. Reed serves as the local history expert, assisting students with research in obscure local publications.\r\n\r\nBecause the History Laboratory’s target audience is freshman and sophomore history majors, the course is very basic. The primary goal is to expose students to the cultural heritage institution’s role as curator of artifacts. At the archive I introduce students to the archivist, collections, finding aids, and additional tools for discovering information about a collection. After this introduction to cultural heritage institutions, we discuss the historian’s role as interpreter of artifacts. This discussion is often the students’ initiation to the “historian’s craft”: assembling a narrative, interpreting facts, and determining significance.\r\n\r\nThe learning outcomes for the History Laboratory are similarly basic. By the end of the course, we expect students to demonstrate appropriate handling of unique historical materials, to create digital surrogates of assigned primary documents, to research these primary documents using relevant resources (in paper and electronic formats), and to organize and present their findings in the Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive (SETDA) using a simple content management system (CONTENTdm). The last learning outcome, creating and entering metadata, may seem out of place in a history course. Nevertheless, we felt it was essential for students to complete this step; it gives them the opportunity to digest their research, consider their audience, and share their findings. This process empowers students to take on the role of expert.\r\n\r\nAfter two pilot semesters, the History Laboratory is now an officially sanctioned course in the history curriculum at Cleveland State Community College. Former students have indicated that the course was a valuable first introduction to archives and their importance to historical research. In the future, we look forward to requiring this service-learning experience for all CSCC history majors. Although we believe that the History Laboratory offers an unparalleled initiation to archival research, we look forward to hearing whether our graduates’ experiences remain relevant as they continue their academic careers.','Sarah Shippy Copeland - Commentary','Cleveland State Community College (CSCC), a small two-year college in southeast Tennessee, offers freshman and sophomore students a service-learning course as an introduction to research in archives. In this course, the History Laboratory students assist local cultural heritage institutions with digitizing collections and publishing them on the web. As of spring 2012, students have completed service-learning hours at the Cleveland Bradley County Public Library History Branch, the Museum Center at 5ive Points, and the Polk County Historical and Genealogical Society Library. These local archives and museums benefit from increased access to their collections, while CSCC history students gain experience with handling and researching primary sources.','inherit','open','open','','1027-revision-13','','','2012-09-25 03:41:30','2012-09-25 03:41:30','',1027,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1027-revision-13/',0,'revision','',0),(3116,19,'2012-09-25 03:44:09','2012-09-25 03:44:09','<ol>\r\n  <li><strong>How many students worked at the History Branch and Archives of the Cleveland Bradley County Library?</strong>Two students worked at the History Branch one evening a week for a set number of weeks.</li>\r\n  <li><strong>Will you work with History Lab students again?</strong><br />\r\n    Certainly. The students were polite, reliable, diligent in their work, and followed directions with little supervision.</li>\r\n  <li><strong>What did you find most productive or enjoyable about the process of working with the students?</strong><br />\r\n    It was rewarding to see the students’ progress from novice researchers to becoming confident in their work. Along the way their project changed from a class assignment to one of discovery. They became excited and interested in their subject and wanted to expand the scope of their work through additional research.</li>\r\n  <li><strong>How has the students’ work impacted the History Branch and its collections?</strong>\r\n    <ul>\r\n      <li>The additional research done by the students will be available to all of the library’s patrons.</li>\r\n      <li>Students have given presentations on their research to the Bradley County Historical and Genealogical Society.</li>\r\n      <li>Observing the students as they worked with the photograph collection helped me to be more aware of the type of material that captures a new researcher’s attention.</li>\r\n    </ul>\r\n  </li>\r\n</ol>\r\n','Barbara Fagen - Commentary','','inherit','open','open','','1020-revision-14','','','2012-09-25 03:44:09','2012-09-25 03:44:09','',1020,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1020-revision-14/',0,'revision','',0),(3117,19,'2012-09-28 17:25:33','2012-09-28 17:25:33','<h4>Saunders worked on this image for the Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive (SETDA).<h4>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-1368\" title=\"cscc_student work_sample material\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/cscc_student-work_sample-material.jpg\" alt=\"Image of James A. Bible (c. 1860) from the Ramsey Family Papers (MS 81).\" width=\"386\" height=\"640\" />\r\n<span class=\"caption\">Image of James A. Bible (c. 1860) from the Ramsey Family Papers (MS 81). Used by permission of Cleveland Public Library.</span>','History Lab: Combining Service Learning, Research Methods, and Digital Archives ','This case study features the work of a student who took History Lab, an introductory history and service-learning course at Cleveland State Community College (CSCC). He researched individual items from a local cultural heritage organization that were then digitized, described, and published online in the <a href=\"http://www.clevelandstatecc.edu/setda/\" target=\"_blank\">Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive</a> (SETDA). Matthew Saunders\' work ended up in the Southeast Tennessee Digital Archive. You can find the whole archive <a href=\"http://www.clevelandstatecc.edu/setda/\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>, and the items Saunders contributed <a href=\"http://csccdigital.cdmhost.com/cdm/singleitem/collection/p4024coll8/id/216\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.','inherit','open','open','','1018-revision-36','','','2012-09-28 17:25:33','2012-09-28 17:25:33','',1018,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1018-revision-36/',0,'revision','',0),(3118,19,'2012-09-25 04:28:56','2012-09-25 04:28:56','<p>Jimmy Barnett was hired as a student digital imaging technician for the Carrère and Hastings Project. Jimmy worked an average of 10-20 hours per week for on this project for one year, 2010-2011.</p>\r\n<p>The student worker description for Jimmy’s position is below.</p>\r\n<p><strong style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Student Assistant – Large Format Digital Imaging Technician, Digital Library Center, University of Florida</strong></p>\r\n<p><strong>Job Description</strong></p>\r\n<p>Reporting to the Operations Manager, the Large Format Imaging Technician will capture pages for the Carrère and Hastings Project, perform image optimization and quality control on captured images as needed, and assist in the transportation of materials from Conservation to the Digital Library Center.</p>\r\n<p><strong>Duties and Responsibilities include:</strong></p>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Digitally capture source materials using a Betterlight Super 8K-HS Camera Back.</li>\r\n	<li>Perform quality control on files, process, optimize images as necessary for artifactual fidelity using Adobe Photoshop.</li>\r\n	<li>Monitor work flow history in coordination with Digital Library Center and Conservation staff.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<p><strong>Preferred Qualifications</strong></p>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Experience with DSLR and other sophisticated cameras with knowledge of photography. \r\nExperience with Adobe Photoshop.</li>\r\n	<li>Strong computer skills and demonstrated ability to work accurately in detail-oriented, busy production environment.</li>\r\n	<li>Excellent organizational skills, ability to set and follow a written schedule, and the ability to work independently.</li>\r\n	<li>Federal Work Study eligibility.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\n\r\n','UF - Student Job Description','','inherit','open','open','','1004-revision-14','','','2012-09-25 04:28:56','2012-09-25 04:28:56','',1004,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1004-revision-14/',0,'revision','',0),(3119,19,'2012-09-25 03:59:53','2012-09-25 03:59:53','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-977\" style=\"margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"uf_leader headshot_nemmers\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/uf_leader-headshot_nemmers.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"75\" height=\"100\" />In 2010, Flagler College and the University of Florida (UF) were awarded a <em>Save America’s Treasures</em> grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve and provide access to architectural drawings for the National Historic Landmark Hotel Ponce de Leon (1885-1887) and the Memorial Presbyterian Church (1889-1890) in St. Augustine, Florida. During this two-year project, the UF Smathers Libraries are conserving and digitizing an irreplaceable collection of the earliest architectural drawings of the Carrère &amp; Hastings firm. The drawings were created for the oil and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler beginning in the 1880s, but the majority of the drawings subsequently had been “lost” for decades. The few people who knew of their existence were unaware of their historical significance, and the drawings remained stored for years in a boiler room under high Florida temperatures and humidity, and exposed to insects and rodents.\r\n\r\nThis treasure trove remained unknown and endangered until its rediscovery in 2004 at Flagler College. To ensure that the drawings are protected and accessible to researchers, the drawings were deposited in 2005 in the UF Architecture Archives, a unit of Special &amp; Area Studies Collections. Comprised of over 260 fragile objects, the St. Augustine collection includes original drawings on cloth, silk, and paper, and a variety of blueprints, diazotypes, and other reproductions. Sizes range from eight by eight inches to over four by eight feet. Many of the drawings could not be unrolled or handled because they were literally crumbling on the shelves; it is very likely that some of these drawings had not been unrolled since they were last used in the 1890s. The grant funding has enabled UF to hire personnel and supplies to properly conserve and digitize all of the drawings.\r\n\r\nThe UF Digital Library Center (DLC) has an excellent track record employing students to digitize materials in all formats and conditions. One undergraduate student, James (Jimmy) Barnett, already had experience digitizing architectural drawings in the DLC, so we were happy to hire him as the imaging technician for this project. We knew that we could trust Jimmy to handle the items properly during imaging, which is crucial since many of the drawings are in extremely poor condition and are over eight feet long. Moreover, with his background and coursework in art we were confident that Jimmy could appreciate the drawings as cultural objects and be sensitive to the techniques and media used to produce them. Our trust was well placed, and Jimmy has been an exemplary steward of the drawings placed temporarily in his custody.\r\n\r\nIn planning for this project, there was no hesitation about employing an undergraduate student to work with fragile drawings. The archivists and curators in Special Collections have long relied on undergraduate students to assist with processing, research, and outreach activities. We offer an internship course through the History Department, and we have had great success retaining former interns as either paid employees or volunteers. We are able to maintain a pool of highly-trained, motivated assistants, and the students gain practical experience working with historical records. Several of these students have gone on to pursue archives, library, or public history master’s degrees. But regardless of their educational and career paths, we have found that many undergraduate students truly appreciate the value of cultural heritage materials, and many, such as Jimmy, can be trusted to treat them with the care they require.','John Nemmers - Commentary','In 2010, Flagler College and the University of Florida (UF) were awarded a Save America’s Treasures grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve and provide access to architectural drawings for the National Historic Landmark Hotel Ponce de Leon (1885-1887) and the Memorial Presbyterian Church (1889-1890) in St. Augustine, Florida. During this two-year project, the UF Smathers Libraries are conserving and digitizing an irreplaceable collection of the earliest architectural drawings of the Carrère & Hastings firm. The drawings were created for the oil and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler beginning in the 1880s, but the majority of the drawings subsequently had been “lost” for decades. The few people who knew of their existence were unaware of their historical significance, and the drawings remained stored for years in a boiler room under high Florida temperatures and humidity, and exposed to insects and rodents.','inherit','open','open','','976-revision-13','','','2012-09-25 03:59:53','2012-09-25 03:59:53','',976,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/976-revision-13/',0,'revision','',0),(3120,19,'2012-09-25 03:55:56','2012-09-25 03:55:56','<img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-968\" style=\"margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"James barnett\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/barnett.jpg\" alt=\"James Barnett Headshot\" width=\"120\" height=\"160\" />\r\n\r\nDigitally scanning archival objects requires not only technical know-how but also an appreciation for the subject matter. My fine-arts background gave me the knowledge and skill set to digitize architectural renderings by Carrère &amp; Hastings of historic structures in Saint Augustine, Florida. I worked on the scanning with two concerns: the drawing as an artifact and the drawing’s content, or what is being represented. The architectural renderings averaged six feet by three feet, some larger and some smaller, though all were difficult to handle. Add the paper’s age and brittleness to the immense size, and one has to have quite a bit of finesse in handling the renderings. I had to hatch a strategy to properly scan each of the uniquely sized drawings.\r\n\r\nGoing into the project, I thought my experience in printmaking would influence the way I scanned the drawings, not realizing that the reverse would happen; the scanning actually affected my art practice. In printmaking I have dealt with large paper before, but never anything quite as large as these archival renderings. My experience handling large paper for the digitization project scaled up my thinking in my own work outside of the project. Consequently, my own art work got larger. With confidence in my newly learned ability to handle paper larger than me, I started a large installation piece in which I put together staging proofs of an etching plate into a single four-by-six feet layered installation. The scale and construction would have never come to mind had I not worked with these large architectural drawings.\r\n\r\n<img class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-969\" style=\"margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"uf_student  action photo_barnett 6\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/uf_student-action-photo_barnett-6-333x222.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"222\" />\r\n\r\nWorking with the photo editing software to optimize the scanned images for online viewing has also affected my art. Most of the archival pieces were so large they had to be captured in successive scans of two or more and stitched together in a photo editing program. In the digital stitching process, layers are important in getting a seamless product. When scanning the segments, I had to figure out where the respective scans would overlap in their respective digital layers so that when I got to the stitching, they all line up correctly. This takes planning, calculating, and configuring measurements in relation to the object. This idea of smaller units constructing a whole informed my process in constructing the art installation mentioned above, and it continues to affect my work.\r\n\r\nWhile I did not realize it at the time, my artwork reflects the processes I was dealing with at work. All together, the many different renderings that are part of the Carrère &amp; Hastings project build a picture of the architects’ process. I learned to see their end result, the building itself, as not the whole story but the final step in the process that you can only see if you include the drawings. This idea influenced my own installation. I felt that my whole process had to be shown; the print proofs (the intermittent states) are just as important as the end result. I never would have come to this idea had I not worked on the Carrère &amp; Hastings project.','James Barnett - Commentary','Digitally scanning archival objects requires not only technical know-how but also an appreciation for the subject matter. My fine-arts background gave me the knowledge and skill set to digitize architectural renderings by Carrère & Hastings of historic structures in Saint Augustine, Florida. I worked on the scanning with two concerns: the drawing as an artifact and the drawing’s content, or what is being represented. The architectural renderings averaged six feet by three feet, some larger and some smaller, though all were difficult to handle. Add the paper’s age and brittleness to the immense size, and one has to have quite a bit of finesse in handling the renderings. I had to hatch a strategy to properly scan each of the uniquely sized drawings.','inherit','open','open','','967-revision-15','','','2012-09-25 03:55:56','2012-09-25 03:55:56','',967,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/967-revision-15/',0,'revision','',0),(3121,19,'2012-10-02 01:03:34','2012-10-02 01:03:34','<h4>The images above are a small fraction of the materials made available through the project and Jimmy\'s work. The full range can be seen in the <a href=\"http://ufdc.ufl.edu/caha/all\" target=\"_blank\">Carrère &amp; Hastings Digital Collection</a>, part of the University of Florida Digital Collections. You can read more at the project blog: <a href=\"http://flaglerdrawings.wordpress.com/\" target=\"_blank\">flaglerdrawings.wordpress.com</a>.</h4>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<img class=\"size-large wp-image-957\" style=\"width: 638;\" title=\"uf_student  action photo_barnett 3\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/uf_student-action-photo_barnett-3-1024x682.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00082657/00001\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-959\" style=\"width: 638;\" title=\"Ground Plan, Presbyterian Church\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/uf_student-work_image-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></a>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00089836/00001\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-958\" style=\"width: 638;\" title=\"Part Plan of Fourth Floor\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/uf_student-work_image-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></a>','Digitizing Large-Format Architectural Plans','This case study showcases an undergraduate’s work as the lead digital scanner of architectural drawings for the Carrère & Hastings Digital Collection, a collaborative project between the University of Florida (UF) and Flagler College to conserve and digitally preserve the large and fragile drawings. For years the drawings were stored in a basement boiler room and suffered from exposure to high Florida temperatures, humidity, insects, and rodents. The collection is now under the care of a team of faculty, staff, and students from the UF’s Special Collections, Conservation Unit, and Digital Library Center.','inherit','open','open','','946-revision-48','','','2012-10-02 01:03:34','2012-10-02 01:03:34','',946,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/946-revision-48/',0,'revision','',0),(3122,19,'2012-10-01 23:42:18','2012-10-01 23:42:18','A publication of interest to Archive<em> readers: </em><a href=\"http://www.arl.org/news/pr/spec326-6dec11.shtml\">http://www.arl.org/news/pr/spec326-6dec11.shtml</a>\r\n\r\nDescription from the press release: \"The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published <em>Digital Humanities</em>, SPEC Kit 326, which provides a snapshot of research library experiences with digital scholarship centers or services that support the humanities (e.g., history, art, music, film, literature, philosophy, religion, etc.) and the benefits and challenges of hosting them. The survey asked ARL libraries about the organization of these services, how they are staffed and funded, what services they offer and to whom, what technical infrastructure is provided, whether the library manages or archives the digital resources produced, and how services are assessed, among other questions.\"','ARL on DH','','inherit','open','open','','2216-revision-7','','','2012-10-01 23:42:18','2012-10-01 23:42:18','',2216,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/2216-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(3123,19,'2012-10-01 23:42:18','2012-10-01 23:42:18','Policies and Practices in Access to Digital Archives: Towards a New\r\nResearch and Policy Agenda\r\n\r\nThe Central European University invite applicants for an intensive\r\none-week summer session in Budapest from 2 July-6 July, 2012.\r\n\r\nThis course has been developed to meet the specific needs of\r\nestablished professionals looking to deepen their impact on policy\r\nissues related to digitital archives. The creation of a diverse\r\ncoalition of experts is an envisioned goal of the course.\r\nPractitioners from the field of archives, research, law and policy\r\nmaking are encouraged to apply.\r\n\r\nThe course deals with the contemporary complexities of accessibility\r\nand the long-term preservation of archival material within\r\ninstitutional settings. It will explore the driving/prohibitive role\r\nof IPR and various implications of the regulation of digital material:\r\nWill access to primary sources become the luxury of the few under a\r\nnew type of digital divide? Do we have evidential data of the market\r\nvalue of digitised archival collections? What kind of policy agenda\r\nwill ensure the future availability of cultural heritage content? What\r\nkind of strategy will guarantee that archives within the digital\r\nEuropean single market are sustainable? The course will consist of\r\nintensive teaching sessions and participants will be expected to\r\nprepare a paper in advance for presentation purposes.\r\n\r\nPlease note that places are limited to 30 participants and offered on\r\na competitive basis. This summer course is able to offer a limited\r\namount of grants. Applicants will be asked to explain what their\r\nengagement with archival material is and what particular\r\npolicy-related issues they consider most challenging. The deadline for\r\napplication is February 15, 2012.\r\n\r\nFor further information and to apply, please visit the CEU Summer\r\nUniversity website: http://www.summer.ceu.hu/node/350','Digital Archives Course','','inherit','open','open','','2221-revision-3','','','2012-10-01 23:42:18','2012-10-01 23:42:18','',2221,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/2221-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3124,19,'2012-10-01 23:42:18','2012-10-01 23:42:18','(From AAS): American Antiquarian Society Visiting Academic Fellowships, 2012-2013\r\n\r\nThe American Antiquarian Society (AAS) invites applications for its 2012-13 visiting academic fellowships. At least three AAS-National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships will be awarded for periods extending from four to twelve months. Long-term fellowships are intended for scholars beyond the doctorate; senior and mid-career scholars are particularly encouraged to apply. Over thirty short-term fellowships will be awarded for one to three months.\r\n\r\nThe short-term grants are available for scholars holding the Ph.D. and for doctoral candidates engaged in dissertation research, and offer a stipend of $1850/month. Special short-term fellowships support scholars working in the history of the book in American culture, in the American eighteenth century, and in American literary studies, as well as in studies that draw upon the Society\'s preeminent collections of graphic arts, newspapers, and periodicals. Accommodations are available for visiting fellows in housing owned by AAS.\r\n\r\nThe deadline for applications is January 15, 2012. For further details about the fellowships, as well as application materials, please consult our website &lt;http://www.americanantiquarian.org/fellowships.htm&gt;\r\n\r\nThe AAS is a research library whose collections focus on American history, literature, and culture from the colonial era through 1876. The Society\'s collections are national in scope, and include manuscripts, printed works of all kinds, newspapers and periodicals, photographs, lithographs, broadsides, sheet music, children\'s literature, maps, games, and a wide range of ephemera. For detailed descriptions of the collections, please consult our guidebook, Under Its Generous Dome, available online at &lt;http://www.americanantiquarian.org/collections.htm&gt;','AAS Fellowships','','inherit','open','open','','2212-revision-5','','','2012-10-01 23:42:18','2012-10-01 23:42:18','',2212,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/2212-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(3125,19,'2012-10-01 23:42:18','2012-10-01 23:42:18','A new issue of <a href=\"http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/\">DHQ </a>just came out, on the \"Future of Digital Studies.\"','Reading List','','inherit','open','open','','2210-revision-3','','','2012-10-01 23:42:18','2012-10-01 23:42:18','',2210,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/2210-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(3126,19,'2012-10-01 23:42:18','2012-10-01 23:42:18','For readers of the round table on <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, here\'s another interesting analysis: Emily Monks-Leeson, \"Archives on the Internet: Representing Contexts and Provenance from Repository to Website.\" <em>The American Archivist</em>. Vol. 74 (Spring/Summer 2011): 38-57.','More on the Walt Whitman Archive','','inherit','open','open','','2206-revision-6','','','2012-10-01 23:42:18','2012-10-01 23:42:18','',2206,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/2206-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(3128,19,'2011-11-07 22:53:51','2011-11-07 22:53:51','','Academy of American Franciscan History (Berkeley)','','inherit','open','open','','911-revision','','','2011-11-07 22:53:51','2011-11-07 22:53:51','',911,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/911-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(3129,19,'2011-10-31 17:20:57','2011-10-31 17:20:57','','Alaska Historical Library','','inherit','open','open','','910-revision','','','2011-10-31 17:20:57','2011-10-31 17:20:57','',910,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/910-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(3130,19,'2011-09-08 19:22:20','2011-09-08 19:22:20','Presented to USC by Warner Communications in 1977, the USC Warner Bros. Archives is the largest single studio collection in the world. It is the only collection to bring production, distribution and exhibition records together to document the activities of a vertically integrated studio. The making of many classic films such as The Jazz Singer, Casablanca and Rebel without a Cause is documented from story purchase through theatrical release and chronicled down to the daily contributions of writers, directors, producers and actors.\r\n\r\nThe USC Warner Bros. Archives contains the records of Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. and its motion picture-related subsidiaries (including First National and Vitagraph). The records document the period from 1918 (the release of the brothers’ first major feature film) through 1968 (the sale of the studio to Seven Arts). Also included are extensive production records for Warner Bros. television series from 1955-1968.','Warner Bros. Archives','','inherit','open','open','','815-revision-2','','','2011-09-08 19:22:20','2011-09-08 19:22:20','',815,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/815-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(3131,19,'2011-09-08 19:41:57','2011-09-08 19:41:57','The George Peabody Library is a remarkable research library housed in a remarkable building. The goal of the Peabody Library’s first librarian was to build a library that contained the best and latest literature in all branches of knowledge except law and medicine.</p>\r\n<p>Begun in 1860, the library collection contains over 300,000 volumes largely from the 18th and 19th centuries. Notable collection strengths are archaeology, British art and architecture, British and American history, biography, English and American literature, Romance languages and literature, Greek and Latin classics, history of science, geography, and exploration and travel including a large map collection.  The collection also includes some bound manuscripts.  View more information on the history of the Peabody Library.</p>\r\n<p>The George Peabody Library is part of the Sheridan Libraries Special Collections. A portion of the collection is represented on-line in the JHU Catalog. The most complete access to the collection is contained in the library’s pioneering printed catalog, Catalog of the Library of the Peabody Institute. Issued in 1883 and 1896, these detailed dictionary catalogs described books as well as articles within journals held by the library. Copies are available on site and in many research libraries.  An overview of the Peabody Library strengths is contained in the Collections and Holdings page.','George Peabody Library','','inherit','open','open','','810-revision-26','','','2011-09-08 19:41:57','2011-09-08 19:41:57','',810,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/810-revision-26/',0,'revision','',0),(3132,19,'2011-10-31 03:30:12','2011-10-31 03:30:12','Very strong in American literature and history collections.','Harry Ransom Center','','inherit','open','open','','812-revision-8','','','2011-10-31 03:30:12','2011-10-31 03:30:12','',812,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/812-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(3133,19,'2012-10-15 22:04:10','2012-10-15 22:04:10','In this issue, five contributors critique and analyze <em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/\" target=\"_blank\">The Walt Whitman Archive</a></em> by answering four questions about this digital archive. We invite you to read through the roundtable by question or by author.','The Walt Whitman Archive','','inherit','open','open','','336-revision-26','','','2012-10-15 22:04:10','2012-10-15 22:04:10','',336,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/336-revision-26/',0,'revision','',0),(3135,19,'2012-10-15 17:52:25','2012-10-15 17:52:25','<p>The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room. A researcher sits at her table, inert. An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes. (Can we get a close-up of a box, please, to show the label with the long call number? [note type=\'figure\' number=\'1\']<br />\r\n[youtube width=333 height=250]5ykY6moIaDE[/youtube]<br />\r\nA staged archival encounter.[/note]) The archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back. The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt. She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading. (Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.) Now she is reading, and now she truly comes alive; she bends towards the papers, taps her forehead in thought. A sheaf of blank paper and a pencil appear on her table, and she begins taking notes. Her fingers fly—and soon, so do the pages she is writing upon. Caught up in eddies of excitement, they swoop to the ceiling and around the room and down to the floor, where they fall together into perfect piles. Bindings sprout from the outer strata; the pages sew themselves into bright, tight, hard-cover books. These the archivist gathers up and places on the shelves that line the room, next to other books and gray boxes.</p>\r\n<p>I may have it backwards: in other versions of the fantasy, it is the archive that is first animated by the presence of the researcher, a Dr. Coppelius who waves a pencil and sets the dusty boxes to dancing. But either way, the archival imaginary posits a symbiotic relationship between researcher and source, a photogenic pas de deux that leads to a finished scholarly product. This work, in turn, enters the archive for the next generation of researchers; it might even be taken apart again so that its secret ingredients (notes, drafts, letters) can themselves be served up in a series of boxes. Such a strangely private form of publication it creates, the coupling of researcher and source.</p>\r\n<p>What Freudian trauma results from witnessing this sight? Only the harm that myth inflicts. This primal scene is a fiction, a dream of perfect union between researcher and source that ignores, first of all, the full cast of characters. What about the archivist, who is rendered invisible? What about all those within and without the archive, upon whose labor—acquiring, preserving, organizing, reading, cataloging, describing, interpreting, analyzing, debating, teaching, writing, editing, digitizing, referencing and publishing—the current project depends? More a barn dance than a pas de deux: an archival encounter is an enactment of social authorship long before the researcher enters the room. [note number=\'1\']See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) on the idea of social authorship, which could be described as “the dialectic between the historically located individual author and the historically developed institutions of literary production” that help create a work, eg, printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).[/note]</p>\r\n<p>But even a barn dance is much too mannered a metaphor. The sketch above misleads us more generally about the experience on the ground. Doing time in an archive is often tedious, uncomfortable and bewildering. For librarians, there is the struggle to promote and simultaneously protect what you have; the difficulty of fitting unruly materials into arrangements and workflows; and worries about space and time—where to put it all, how to address your backlog. For researchers, there is the struggle to locate the archives you need and what matters to you inside them; the uncertainty created by unruly data; and worries about time and space— how to access what you need during your research trip, how to record and organize the information you gather. At both ends, the archival encounter is counter-cinematic and erratic, days of monotonous sifting and dead-ends punctuated by one or two, or maybe zero, hidden moments of vivid, peculiar joy.</p>\r\n<p>So archival research does not fulfill its ideal outline. So what? Who cares? Why dredge up the fantasy? Because the fantasy continues to structure our archival encounters—what we expect and undertake in the reading room, what we allow it to mean. Twenty years ago, Alice Kaplan observed that “conventional academic discourse requires that when you write up the results of your archival work, you tell a story about what you found, but not about how you found it. The less the seams of your findings show, the better your discoveries lend themselves to use by others… tell[ing] these stories breaks their spell and violates the spirit of the archives.” [note number=\'2\']Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.[/note] With a few word changes, the same could be said about what counts as professional archivist discourse: the impersonal, neutral genre of the finding aid, for example, should say what is in a collection, but should not discuss what is confusing or missing in it, or the problems it posed in processing. [note number=\'3\']See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).[/note] Despite the growing recognition that this sequestration is never completely possible—that the material conditions and social relations of the archive shape the work we do in it—that work continues to be represented in professional and scholarly publications as if it is. Despite the recent call to move to the fore “the backstage of the archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated” in order to support historiography “not merely [as] a project of fact-retrieval” but as “a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention,” the “backstage” stays in the background. [note number=\'4\']Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7-8.[/note] Antoinette Burton may be correct that “many if not most historians operate under the assumption that history is a highly interpretive act,” but this belief is not yet reflected in the archival encounter: the ways that researchers (not just historians) and librarians report their experiences with primary sources; the ways that librarians and researchers work together; the ways librarians and researchers regard the involvement of “non specialists.” [note number=\'5\']Burton, 8. Burton notes that “whether historians concede or fully countenance the impact of such contingencies on their work is another question. They rarely speak of them, and even more rarely do they do so in print” (8). Her books recuperates some of those archive stories but this effort, I’ll suggest below, is hampered by other kinds of obligations.[/note] While the advent of digitization and electronic resource sharing has revolutionized the research landscape, making primary sources public in unprecedented ways, there remains in the archive a habitus of secret knowledge—the “spell” that Kaplan is loathe to break. This is not necessarily intentional. It is rather the effect of layering recent shifts in technology, theory and professional definition onto older foundations: petrified conditions, relations, expectations and systems that continue to operate in part through the enduring power of fantasies about research. What we have in the archive is a stratified groundwork that still governs our archival encounters.</p>\r\n<p>But, you will object, the archive has already changed. Now we have the “archival turn”—the scholarly interest in the archive not just as a source of evidence but as an epistemological mode. Surely, this attention to the constructedness of the archive has led to a revealing reconsideration of what actually goes on inside an archive; surely, as a result, those archaic fantasies have diminished. Have they? In what follows, I begin by unearthing one stratum of the archival turn, the decade of the 1990s, as represented by three texts: Kaplan’s essay mentioned above, “Working in the Archives” (1990) [note type=\'figure\' number=\'2\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-369\" title=\"fig 2 kaplan\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photocopy of Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s “Working in the Archives.”[/note]; Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994/95) [note type=\'figure\' number=\'3\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-372\" title=\"fig 3 Derrida\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.[/note]; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'4\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-373\" title=\"fig 4 steedman\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust.[/note] [note number=\'6\']Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).[/note] A cross-examination of these three texts reveals a pattern of interests, a set of efforts to defy customary practices—but only, it turns out, “in theory.” While certain practices are challenged in these texts, they leave mostly intact the older strata of archival research fantasies and conventions. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman do not dislodge the forces that organize the actual archival encounter.</p>\r\n<p>How does this happen? Why is practice so stubborn? We need another take on archival practice: not practice in theory, but practice in action; not the 1990s, but now; not in terms of textual patterns, but in terms that suit the subject: the terms of the archival encounter itself, and the eccentric, anachronistic and even monotonous experience it generates. My second look at practice will take the form of a series of vignettes about a real-life archive, the George Peabody Library in Baltimore. While this narrative structure may seem to recreate the division of labor between theory and practice, my hope is that—by giving practice the last word—we’ll be in a better position to synthesize the two.</p>\r\n<p><!--nextpage--></p>\r\n<p><strong>I. “The library doubles as a detective’s office.” [note number=\'7\']Kaplan, 114.[/note]</strong></p>\r\n<p>The archival turn could be dated to the founding of “scientific” history in the mid-nineteenth century, or to the development a century later of the quantitative methods of the Annales School, or to other evidence-based movements in the history of history, but what is generally meant by this phrase corresponds with the formation of cultural studies and the use of the archive as a conceptual category. That is, the archival turn has to do with the notion of the “figuration” of the archive, a parallel decline in its empirical authority and a related expansion of its relevance within domains that are not exclusively historiographic, like art, literary criticism, textual studies, media studies and information studies. [note number=\'8\']See the use of the term in, for example, Carolyn Hamilton et al, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). This turn is partially construed as a “move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject,” but also by the earlier metaphorical interest in “the archive” that goes back to the 1980s (Stoler, 44-45) and by Foucauldian descriptions of archives as “‘monuments to particular configurations of power” (Hamilton, qtd. in Burton, 6).[/note] But it is not irrelevant that a devotion to archival methods precedes by many decades contemporary theories of the archive; if the archival turn lacks a precise origin, this (we will see) is completely in keeping with its own preoccupations.</p>\r\n<p>Kaplan therefore represents in some ways an arbitrary beginning for this cross-examination—clearly the archive as a conceptual category predates 1990—but her article does initiate something new: the recognition that there is something called an “archive story” that must remain hidden in order for the official “results” to function authoritatively. In admitting this bit of professional legerdemain, and in telling her own archive story in a prestigious scholarly journal, Kaplan not only commits the violation she prohibits but also contradicts it. Through its publication, Kaplan’s own archive story is elevated to the status of “results”—a kind of research that shadows conventional academic discourse. Indeed, Kaplan notes, such “fables” of research “can be analyzed like a text,” a “mixed up genre” that combines the “redemptive detective fiction” with the epic and the dime novel. [note number=\'9\']Kaplan, 106, 107.[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Kaplan’s archive story thus marks a distinctive moment in the archival turn—one which gained its most prominent authorization in 1994, with a paper that Jacques Derrida delivered (in English) to a conference sponsored by the Freud Museum, the Courtauld Institute and the Société International d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychoanalyse. Called initially “The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression,” the lecture was revised and published in 1995 as Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title Archive Fever. As Carolyn Steedman points out in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, however, this work that has been assigned a seminal status in archival studies “for the main part… is not about archives at all, but is rather a sustained contemplation of a work of history, of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991),” itself a sustained contemplation of Moses and Monotheism—which (according to Steedman) Yerushalmi examines through Freud’s description of the work as a “‘historical novel,’ or a kind of historical story,” undertaken “in order to understand the period of baroque anti-semitism through which he was living.” [note number=\'10\']Steedman, 3.[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Dizzy yet? Let’s undertake a more careful reading of this splatter pattern of intra-references—or, to stick with the archaeological metaphor, let’s call them groups of potsherds buried in the 1990s layer of the “archival turn.” Digging down to reassemble them reveals a set of interests with special implications for archival practice.</p>\r\n<p>The most prominent group of sherds to note are the fragments of disciplinarity: the inter-, multi- or perhaps simply anti-disciplinarity of the texts, authors and audiences caught up in these three archival addresses. Kaplan, an American scholar of French literature, calls the post-theory exchange between literature and history a “cross-pollination of desire between historians and literary critics” undertaken “with the curiosity and energetic passion of collectors.” [note number=\'11\']Kaplan, 107-108.[/note] Steedman, a British historian, performs this cross-pollinating process without comment: her epigraph to Dust is from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, one chapter treats George Eliot’s Middlemarch in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. [note number=\'12\']Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.[/note] Derrida, a French philosopher, produced a work that has been exceptionally mobile across disciplines, forms, languages and professional domains. He gave his initial talk to an audience drawing on three different kinds of institutions; Mal d’Archive was published in book form in both French and English, but also made an intermediate appearance as an essay in the journal diacritics. All of these texts, it seems, respond to the provocations of the archive—to the materials and circumstances of discovery—rather than to the disciplinary distinctions that arguably divide the archive from itself.</p>\r\n<p>Archive Fever has become a founding document even though, as Steedman notes in the very beginning of her book, many in Derrida’s audience “knew the ‘archival turn’ to be [already] well underway” at the time of his talk. [note number=\'13\']Steedman, 2.[/note] As it happens—and this is the second group of sherds I see—these three essays have in common an investment in or a problem with origins, especially with the failure of origins. Derrida, for example, defines archive fever as a kind of Freudian death drive—a drive to fix and preserve which at the same time “works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own ‘proper’ traces… [it] is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic… the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.” [note number=\'14\']Derrida, 14. [/note] If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. [note number=\'15\']The disorder of origins makes frequent appearances in the essay but one example will make the point—in the “Preamble” where he recounts how he titled the talk that he had not yet written and was to give at the Freud Museum. The “Preamble” starts with his reflections on the word “impression,” which has several simultaneous registers of meaning for him. One of these is the “scriptural or typographic” register: that of the graphic impression that marks a substrate. In English, “impression” is phonetically related to “repression” and “suppression,” key words in the Freudian vocabulary, translated respectively from the German Verdrängung and Unterdrückung. English, that is, retains the rhyming relationship of the two German terms, and “impression” in this company comes to have a vaguely Freudian meaning as well. But in French, Verdrängung is “refoulement,” which means something more like expulsion, a driving away. The Freudian sense of the French word “répression” has been reserved for Unterdrückung. So English “repression” defines a phenomenon that must be distinguished from the French “répression.” These translational shifts “directly concern the structures of archivization,” Derrida says, “because they touch on the topic differences and thus on the location of the substrates of traces\" (Derrida, 23). In other words, how do you classify concepts whose meanings shift across languages? Where do you store them in a disciplinary grammar—or in an archive? How do these asymmetrical linguistic structures shape the establishment and extension of a new science? For Derrida, the difference between “repression” and “répression” is “enough to disrupt the tranquil landscape of all historical knowledge, of all historiography, and even of all self-consistent ‘scholarship’” (Derrida, 23).[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Origin failure appears both as deliberate performance and as unintentional oversight in these essays. Derrida stages his own inability to get past “go”; with an introductory section, and subsequent sections sub-titled “Exergue,” “Preamble,” “Foreword,” his essay functions, Steedman notes, like a “primer offering instruction in the principle of deferral.” [note number=\'16\']A short notice called “Priere d’inserer,” published only in the French book version, carried the bulk of an argument for which there was no room in the lecture. Steedman, 7.[/note] For all her insight into Derrida’s titling adventures, however, Steedman’s title is marked by its own origin aporia. While her first chapter is devoted to Archive Fever—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, Dust, seems more indebted to the last sentence of Kaplan’s essay, published five years before Derrida’s: “Usually there is no mother lode, no original manuscript to be retrieved—the gold is all in the dust.” [note number=\'17\']Kaplan, 116.[/note] Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. [note number=\'18\']Kaplan also begins her essay with a brief consideration of the “arche,” the Greek and Latin term for the public records office, which is a major starting point for Derrida. Is he borrowing from her, or is she borrowing from him, given that this sort of etymological investigation was an established signature of Deconstruction?[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Kaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” [note number=\'19\']Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.[/note] These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” [note number=\'20\']Kaplan, 103.[/note] Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” [note number=\'21\']Kaplan, 104.[/note] Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'5\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/note] It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”</p>\r\n<p>While Kaplan’s research mystery resolves neatly, the truth about archives is that they are full of gaps, mistakes and excesses: in the words of one of the CDJC librarians, “‘ici on trouve tout’—there’s some of everything here”—but not, one could add, all of anything. [note number=\'22\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] Kaplan’s essay ends by nullifying both her detective story success and her “dry archival report,” by recognizing the disorder on which both of these narratives are unsteadily perched: “The archive is constituted by these errors, these pieces out of place, which are then reintegrated into a story of some kind.” [note number=\'23\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] “A story of some kind”? So much for “results.”</p>\r\n<p>Kaplan sets us up to perceive one final potsherd pattern common to these three essays. If origin-less disorder is the order of the archive, it is a disorder that is generated out of human loss—a disorder that joins the body and the material world. The archive is always predicated on historical violence of some sort, whatever is censored, erased, excluded, trumped up, used up, misplaced, conquered, killed. Moreover, the archival categories that mark both the visible victories and hidden defeats do not stay within their walls; the archive is both a repository of existing schemas and a means of perpetuating them in the world beyond. While we might usually think of this disciplinary activity as a pact between the archive and its political authors, Steedman makes it clear that the dilemmas of order shape the archival body in many ways. For example, she takes literally the provocation of Derrida’s title Archive Fever to investigate the illness that researchers contract on the penultimate day of their trip to the archive: prompted by the anxiety of the task that remains unfinished, they end their research with night-sweats and head-aches. But what seems like a strangely specific malady is transformed by Steedman into a far-reaching social symptom: by relating the researcher’s “archive fever” to the terrible diseases suffered by tanners, skinners and other workers in the trades associated with paper and leather, Steedman expands our sense of who is in the archive—the bodies whose specialized labors populate our libraries with books, the many kinds of expertise the archive consumes.</p>\r\n<p>For Derrida, the relation between the material archive and its human architects focuses on one kind of “graphic mark,” a particular “private inscription”: circumcision as the archival signature that is also the signature of patrimoine, with Freud’s relationship to his father as his main example. [note number=\'24\']Derrida, 19.[/note] It is perhaps not a coincidence that the body in question in both Kaplan’s and Derrida’s archive is Jewish, for that is a body that has come to symbolize the destructive power of classificatory regimes. Despite her contention that the private passions motivating research must be kept secret, Kaplan is fascinated by the “missing person stories” at the CDJC: by the “quantity of people who are there for personal reasons,” the survivors of occupation or deportation or camps, or their descendants, quietly looking up their lost ones or noisily dropping off their memoirs. [note number=\'25\']Kaplan, 113.[/note] This disorganized crowd of dead and living bodies tries to meet up with an equally disorganized crowd of materials—individual letters, trial transcripts, pamphlets, newspapers, first-person accounts, books, photographs, lists. The monumental task of match-making, the librarians’ work, is never complete. More papers are always generated or declassified or discovered, different human questions and needs emerge. The tidy choreography of the research fantasy, where the detective always finds her man, is not so much in evidence; what we have instead is corpora in excess of existing categories.</p>\r\n<p><!--nextpage--></p>\r\n<p>Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman open up the archival body. They show us how paper meets the press of flesh; they make us feel just how intimate it is. [note number=\'26\']This interest in the corporeal dimensions and effects of order, its human and non-human components, has in common with their other gestures—an experimental attitude towards conventional disciplinarity and attention to the priority of disorder—the circumstances of the academic humanities in the 1990s. Since the archival turn came out of the ascent of cultural studies and allied intrigues in the 1970s and ‘80s, the circles in the Venn diagram of these ventures will necessarily overlap. We could also say that the archive took off when it did precisely because it made a clever new container for these preoccupations, thick in the humanities atmosphere at the time, where they were distilled and united. [/note] But for all their revelations about the limits of discipline and the multiplicities of disorder in the archive, these texts do not disclose the specific methods of engagement that led to their existence. While Kaplan offers up her own archival victory and outlines several other such stories, she still insists on their marginalization. [note number=\'27\']“Were the story of how you got the story really to be told inside the book, it would interrupt or complicate the narrative so much that no results could be understood or even perceived. Every story of success in the archives is emotionally charged, for only the most extreme emotions can drive people to the drudgery, to the discomfort, of sitting and sifting through dog-eared documents, manuscripts, microfilms. To reveal those emotions would not only gum up the narrative, it would threaten its credibility, by showing on what thin strands of coincidence, accident, or on what unfair forms of friendship, ownership, geographical proximity, the discoveries were based” (Kaplan, 104).[/note] If these texts are not concerned with actual practices in the archive or changes in its methodologies, what do they tell us?</p>\r\n<p>First, they suggest one reason for the perpetuation of myths about the archive. While Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are eager to show how archival materials do not conform to disciplinary distinctions—an enthusiasm related to other disruptive tendencies in late twentieth-century humanist scholarship –they seem less cognizant of a related phenomenon: the archive does not obey strict professional divisions, either. In Kaplan’s library-as-detective’s-office metaphor, the scholar is the detective, but does the “Eureka” moment belong only to the scholar who pieces together a narrative? What about the people who prepared those pieces? The archivist is still missing in action. Likewise, these essays do not dwell on missing boxes, illegible papers, neglected citations. There are no descriptions of archival slogging, no admissions that some materials failed to be relevant. And of course, there are no prescriptions for a different order. It is not the main aim of Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman to effect an evolution of practice; archival turnistas are not interested in disorder in order to re-order. But it is worth remembering that it is not in their professional interest as scholars to make their practices more transparent.</p>\r\n<p>Secondly, along the same lines, these texts inform us of the duplicity of speculative practices that reveal but cannot live out the instability of their archival mandates. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are put into the position of saying, “Yes, the archive is biased, idiosyncratic and treacherous—but the observations I draw from it are flawless.” [note number=\'28\']Derrida, unlike Kaplan and Steedman, makes no claims to work inside an actual archive, unless we consider Yerushalmi’s book as a kind of archive. But the fact that the essay was written self-consciously for presentation at the Freud Museum suggests that it was made out of an archive indirectly—in its construction, if not in its contents. [/note]</p>\r\n<p>Finally, these texts suggest why archival studies that attempt to be explicit about the messy nature of the archive have become instead “archive studies.” In more recent works like Refiguring the Archive (2002), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (2005) and Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), the archive appears as a subject in its own right. Although the archival scenarios that are put into play in each of these books incorporate different disciplines—art, history, anthropology, literature, post-colonial studies—they have essentially created a new discipline. “Archive studies” is something we might, in the taxonomy of disciplines, see as the love-child of cultural studies, history and archival methodology. Moreover, this new discipline has in common with other humanities disciplines a complete blindness about its professional investments; it does not register much awareness of the professional investments of librarians, archivists, curators and “non-specialists,” or invite insights from those perspectives. Perhaps this is inevitably what happens when academics must give legitimacy to something new, which in turn reflects the pressures of scholarly communication: a topic must be delineated in conventional terms in order to merit publication. [note number=\'29\']Perhaps this is also the moment to ask why we—I—have been using the term “archive” all along, with its statist resonances, rather than the term “collection,” which has institutional but also personal resonances. Does “archive” bring us closer to recognizably “serious scholarship”?[/note] But it is also true that in these more recent books, which openly investigate the archive’s power-politics, the disorderly drift of the archive and its hybrid corporeality have mostly been bent towards a particular narrative about the archive as an agent of history rather than as a set of ongoing practices. It is as if the historical archive has been assembled in ways that reflect and reiterate power relations, but the contemporary archive has not; it is as if the researcher’s own research travails remain a transparent layer over the body of work that it constructs. [note number=\'30\']Of course, this is precisely what Derrida meant about the “death drive” of the archival impulse. Archive Stories is something of an exception; researchers speak openly here about themselves as researchers. It is interesting, however, that this book—like Steedman’s—doesn’t cite Kaplan’s essay as a precursor text despite the clear titular link.[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Perhaps it would also be fair to note that, if archival studies are now being formulated as an interdisciplinary discipline called “archive studies,” this might be just another stage in the turn. It might be that what comes next reconfigures the premise of disciplinarity and the promise of disorder, with a different approach to the human/non-human interactions that the archive documents and realizes: a more diffuse and multi-vocal set of practices in place of a new field. One way to imagine this approach would be to fully embrace Kaplan’s idea of the archive story as an account of what one hoped for, looked for and found, what one did and did not do, in the archive—an account loosed from the quarantine she advocates. Some very basic genre precedents for the archive story do exist; the bibliographic essay and the methodology statement, for example, have played an important role in many disciplines in the past and still do in some. Instead of a para-textual nod towards that archive story (in Kaplan’s sense), why not create a parallel text written collaboratively by the researcher(s) and the librarian(s), or by one person acting in both professional capacities, that runs alongside the official “results”? Or in a set of expanded notes that address not just the “what” and “where” but the “how” and “why” of sources, which are lifted from their small-type, bottom-of-page basement up into the light? Or—to add yet another layer—parallel texts that also offer room for exchange with other researchers, archivists and even interested “non specialists,” like collectors, bibliophiles and fans?</p>\r\n<p>If it is hasn’t been clear already that I have scrupulously avoided so far the other kind of archive, the digital archive, it will be now. What I am imagining would be far too complicated to produce or consult in print, but would not be at all difficult to organize as a digital object—as an archive in its own right. By avoiding the digital archive up to this point, I have also finessed the fact that our current archival research methods are completely reliant on the digital archive, along with the development of online research tools and electronic instruments of data discovery and organization. Those conditions probably bear the most responsibility for making the archive visible as something that warranted a “turn” in the first place. Even Derrida refers in each version of Archive Fever to the computer on which he is currently composing, predicting that email will not only totally transform the archive as he knows it, but will make his own essay obsolete.</p>\r\n<p>In short, we already have in place both the theory and the media that will make it possible to enact a radical new archival practice. We have in place what we need to integrate the archive story into the archive itself, while making it visible as a new form of “results.”</p>\r\n<p><!--nextpage--></p>\r\n<p><strong>II. The library doubles as a librarian’s office.</strong></p>\r\n<p>I could end here, with a triumphant firing of the starter pistol and a rousing cheer. But that would be a bit disingenuous, given that the starter pistol for both the archival turn and the academic use of the internet actually went off decades ago. So the question remains, what stands in the way of the practical enactment of the archival turn’s speculative insights? I’d like to engage this question by following Kaplan’s example (but not her main claim): through some archive story-telling about the George Peabody Library. These three vignettes, identified as “typical” through conversations with my colleague Paul Espinosa, illustrate the intractable formations that present-day archival encounters come up against.</p>\r\n<p><strong>1. The Perils of Description.</strong></p>\r\n<blockquote><p>A group of Russian speakers visits the Peabody Library. The dozen men and women sit down around the screen that Paul has set up. He narrates a brief slide-show about the Peabody’s history, then leads them to a table where a dozen books from the collection have been laid out in cradles. He tells them about each book: what it is, why it is interesting. Each phrase of his presentation is painstakingly translated by the group’s leader into Russian.</p></blockquote>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When academic and community groups visit the Peabody, my colleagues and I draw upon a standard tour-guide’s repertoire to describe it. We explain that George Peabody was a tradesman cum financier cum philanthropist who decided in 1857 that Baltimore needed a cultural institution to support the arts and learning. We talk about the evolution of the Peabody Institute, the four-part athenaeum that resulted, with its art gallery, lecture series, conservatory and free, public, non-circulating library. We discuss the model of philanthropy that George Peabody initiated and its wide-ranging influence. We point out the signal features of the awe-inspiring architecture of the current library, built to accommodate a rapidly growing collection in 1878. But when it comes to the library itself, as a collection, it is hard to know what to say. How to accurately translate the library’s holdings into a succinct and memorable statement that conveys an appropriate level of detail to different audiences? While it poses specific challenges, the Peabody also exemplifies more general problems of collection description.</p>\r\n<p>We do not lack evidence for the evolving contents of the Peabody. We have the two-volume printed list of “desiderata” drawn up by the Peabody’s first librarian, John G. Morris. [note number=\'31\']Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'6\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-6-alpha-index-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-395\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-395\" title=\"fig 6 alpha index\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"484\" /></a>Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).[/note] We have the collections register for several decades’-worth of acquisitions, recording bibliographic information and accession numbers that can still be found on the inside front end papers of many of the books in the collection. We have the librarians’ annual reports to the library trustees. [note number=\'32\']The Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore: The Founder’s Letters and the Papers Relating to its Dedication and History, Up to the 1st January, 1868 (Baltimore: William K. Boyle, 1868); and subsequent Annual Reports, 1869, etc.[/note] We have the library’s first printed catalogue, an unsurpassed achievement when first published in 1883, which listed 100,000 volumes by author and title. [note number=\'33\']Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'7\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-7-print-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-396\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-396\" title=\"fig 7 print cat\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/note] We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'8\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-8-card-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-397\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-397\" title=\"fig 8 card cat\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/note] Now, of course, the library’s collections are represented in an online catalogue that integrates them with other collections in the Hopkins library system.</p>\r\n<p>These markers of the collection, however, fail to satisfy some contemporary research queries for reasons that are both practical and philosophical. The transfer of the printed index, organized by author, to the Dewey decimal system, organized by topic, represented a major epistemological shift that facilitated browsing by subject category. But of course, those categories are embedded in historically-bound notions about the subjects and structures of knowledge: Dewey was invented in the 1870s, and the 22 revisions it has undergone since then cannot overcome its essential organizational distortions. For example, the literature range—the 800s—offers only 10% of its categorical space to literatures in languages other than English, Germanic and Romance languages, Greek and Latin.</p>\r\n<p>In the case of the Peabody, the Dewey arrangements overlay even older systems of knowledge hierarchy. Should we continue to offer, for example, a description of the Peabody’s “voyages and travels” books? This category represents a Renaissance schematic that was still in service in the mid-nineteenth century; while actual “voyages and travels” were extended by colonial ventures, the category was eventually disbanded. Dewey combined it with geography to make a sub-category of “history.” In keeping active the old-fashioned phrase “voyages and travels,” we are participating in a centuries-long project of euphemism about the material aims and actual activities of colonialism; we are privileging an early phase of the Peabody’s evolution over later phases; we may even be confusing modern researchers. And yet, as one of the topics in Morris’s “desiderata,” a considerable portion of the Peabody’s collection was acquired with the aim of fleshing out that descriptor. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'9\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-9-index-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-398\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-398\" title=\"fig 9 index detail\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"274\" /></a>Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Yet another classificatory dilemma is expressed by George Peabody’s original statement of the library’s purpose: that it “be furnished in every department of knowledge, with the most approved literature… It should consist on the best works on every subject… to satisfy the researches of students who may be engaged in the pursuit of knowledge not ordinarily attainable in the private libraries of the country.” [note number=\'34\']“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.[/note] The Peabody was founded as a cultural institution for the people of Baltimore, but from the first, this democratic ambition was in conflict with the intellectual aspirations of the first librarians and their desire to facilitate civic “self-improvement.” Morris (a doctor of divinity), his successor Nathaniel Holmes Morison (a schoolmaster and poet), and Morison’s assistant and successor Philip Uhler (who had trained as an entomologist) were all devoted to the nineteenth-century idea of the scholar-librarian. Morison wrote in one annual report that “Education always proceeds from the above downward, from the best to the common minds, from the leaders of the people to the people themselves. Furnish... the foundations of intelligence and thought, and they will... stimulate and improve the whole community.\" [note number=\'35\']Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in George Peabody (1795-1869): A-Z Handbook of the Massachusetts-Born Merchant in the South, London-Based Banker, and Philanthropist\'s Life, Influence, and Related People, Places, Events, and Institutions. . 11 Mar. 2011.[/note] When the Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 in close proximity to the Peabody—in large part to take advantage of the library—the tendency of the librarians to address scholarly needs and “approved literature” over popular desires was given additional momentum. In keeping with these ideas, the Peabody’s librarians kept careful track of their readers’ choices, noting with special caution the numbers of novels that were requested. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'10\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-10-annual-report-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-399\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-399\" title=\"fig 10 annual report detail\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"452\" /></a>Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/note] This schism at the heart of the library’s collecting paradigm was not unique to the Peabody; the question of reading matter—should it offer leisure for the masses or the means of social uplift?—was central to the public library movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. [note number=\'36\']See, for example, Alexis McCrossen, “’One Cathedral More’ or ‘Mere Lounging Places for Bummers’? The Cultural Politics of Leisure and the Public Library in Gilded Age America,” Libraries &amp; Culture 41.2 (2006): 169-188; Paul Sturges, “The Public Library and Reading by the Masses: Historical Perspectives on the USA and Britain 1850-1900,”; Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, Upon the Objects to be Attained by the Establishment of a Public Library, 12 Dec. 2010.[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Finally, the Peabody’s “desiderata” acquisitions and librarians’ selections were supplemented by book donations from local elites—bibliophiles with extensive private collections that included incunabula, classical authors in Renaissance editions, expensive illustrated atlases. At the same time, book donations came in from more plebian sources. The Peabody’s growth overlapped with the decline of the local social libraries, and it eventually absorbed some of the books from the Library Company of Baltimore, Robinson’s Circulating Library and several small professional and mechanics’ libraries. And I haven’t even touched on the Peabody’s twentieth-century fate.</p>\r\n<p>The variety of philanthropic impulses, resource streams and classification philosophies that have fed the Peabody over the 150 years of its existence has led to a collection that does not so much map the nineteenth-century mind as signal its odd amalgam of popular and scholarly investments. The Peabody’s collection effectively evades succinct description—at least, any kind of description that pretends to be coherent, that is not perforated by its stakes in local history, library history, book history. But more importantly, it suggests the degree to which accident and opportunity and prejudice and wealth and the changing winds of cataloguing rules shape any archive. Description, which should be the most fundamental tool of communication between librarians and researchers, turns out to be utterly elusive. Yet we do not know what to replace them with, these inadequate descriptions, these exercises in stilted and partial translation.</p>\r\n<p><!--nextpage--></p>\r\n<p><strong>2. The Researcher’s Progress.</strong></p>\r\n<blockquote><p>I am preparing for my class about women and nineteenth-century print culture, which meets in the Peabody; we have reached the part of the syllabus where we look at gift books and annuals. I want students to examine several examples of these literary miscellanies, offering some illustration of their variety, and I have a list of such items that I have used in the past. But since I also want to show the students new acquisitions, I need to refresh my list. I will start with “gift book” as a keyword in the online catalogue.</p></blockquote>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In place of perfect and commensurate description—not possible—what we have are cataloguing systems that indexically represent collections through data and metadata that are, as I have already suggested, historically marked and inevitably inconsistent. In the case of the Peabody, these records are further compromised: Dewey cards developed from a nineteenth-century print index do not offer Library of Congress subject terms or detailed tables of contents; they also frequently lack other kinds of information. [note number=\'37\']Many of the electronic records for Peabody books have been copy-cataloged, that is, developed from records for identical books in other libraries. But these records might also be incomplete or inconsistent, given that many are quite old. The expense of original cataloging prevents our staff from creating full, new records for every item in the Peabody’s collection of over 300,000 titles.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'11\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-11-ddc-cards/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-400\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-400\" title=\"fig 11 ddc cards\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/note] My search for “gift book” will turn up bequests—the term “gift book” is often attached to these donations—and it will miss many of the nineteenth-century gift books and annuals in our collection whose records lack subject classifications, or whose subject classifications reference the book’s contents, not its format. For example, the 1848 Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” [note number=\'38\']Rough and Ready Annual (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).[/note]</p>\r\n<p>The problem of finding is perhaps only a sub-set of the problem of description, but I want to give it special attention because it introduces another variable: the physical space of the object. My search for gift books in the Peabody also entails the privilege of retrieving the books from the stacks. There are two search processes, the intellectual and the physical, that I must navigate. The intellectual search in this case requires a variety of keyword/date range combinations, and ultimately, recourse to my prepared bibliography—a holdover from pre-catalogue research methods. Now the second search begins.</p>\r\n<p>The Rough and Ready Annual is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'12\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-12-rr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-401\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-401\" title=\"fig 12 r&amp;r\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/note] This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them, edited by the temperance writer T. S. Arthur and published in London, has been given the call number 813 A7910 duodecimo—fourth floor east, in the “American literature in English, fiction” section. [note number=\'39\']Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1979), from Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. To check on this, I need Mitchell Sharpe Jr.’s A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'13\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-13-orange/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-402\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-402\" title=\"fig 13 orange\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Orange Blossoms in the stacks.[/note] Arthur shows up again as co-editor of The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” [note number=\'40\']The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).[/note] We have two copies of this very genteel little gift book, one at 808.83 B2175 (rhetoric &amp; collections of literature), and one at 810.8 C297 (American literature in English). The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. [note number=\'41\']The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'14\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-14-rbr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-403\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-403\" title=\"fig 14 rbr\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The rare book room.[/note] In this case, the book’s rarity has to do with a lovely fore-edge painting. It has been assigned to 820.8 N42017 (general books about literature). On the other end of the “rare” continuum is The Family Circle and Parlor Annual, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). [note number=\'42\']The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (New York: Comstock, 1847).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'15\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-15-parlor/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-404\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-404\" title=\"fig 15 parlor\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/note]</p>\r\n<p>I’ll fill out call slips for each book, stick the slips into red flags, and put the flags in an order that will help me chart a logical course through the stacks. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'16\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-16-slips/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-405\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-405\" title=\"fig 16 slips\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Call slips and flags.[/note] It’s easiest to start on the sixth floor and work one’s way down, picking up books along the way. Usually I find other interesting items as I go, so I carry a batch of blank call slips and extra flags. (On this occasion, for example, I find The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse; published in 1813 and inscribed by its owner in 1817, it pre-dates by several years the official beginning of the gift book phenomenon. It might be more of a “literary almanac.” [note number=\'43\']The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse (Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'17\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-17-new-reader/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-406\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-406\" title=\"fig 17 new reader\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Inscription in The New American Reader.[/note]) Usually I am also unable to locate at least one of the books I have set out to find. Most likely the book has been misshelved, so I’ll check the quartos and folios, which are shelved separately; then I’ll check the rare book room’s octavo, duodecimo and quarto shelving areas. It used to astonish me that books were still shelved by format in the Peabody, but it does save space. At the same time, this shelving system—along with the multiple distinct areas within the library where books may reside, eg the rare book room, the reference section, the genealogy books, the Limited Editions Club, and several discrete named collections—means that retrieving a few books can take quite a long time, as I traipse up and down the six floors of the library, thread through stacks, open secured doors with multiple keys, turn lights on and off, and maneuver a book truck in and out of a tiny service elevator built in the 1920s. By the end of the journey, the library and I will have exchanged dust; I’ll take on a few streaks of red rot, and the library will have taken in particles from my body as well.</p>\r\n<p>While the Peabody is unique, these conditions are not in the end very unusual. In terms of the intellectual search, the absence of “gift book” from many of the catalogue records is no less egregious than the absence of other information—the names of all the contributors; the subjects of the illustrations. The metadata is potentially infinite. The “gift book” only exists as a category because of scholars who teased out this cultural phenomenon; it would be very difficult to define its absolute borders. In terms of the physical search, the Peabody might be messier than, say, a rare book library that has assigned current LC call numbers to all its contents and houses them in compact shelving, but it exemplifies the general on-the-ground situation. As I wind my way through the Peabody stacks, I remember how much more difficult it is to gather research materials from several different institutions.</p>\r\n<p>The fact is, for scholars who rely on archives, research is something you do only after you have already undertaken a rigorous search. It is the search that provides you with the foundational sense of your subject. But the search is rarely acknowledged or accredited; even the foot-soldier craft of bibliography, the link between “librarianship” and “scholarship,” has largely lost its scholarly status.</p>\r\n<p><!--nextpage--></p>\r\n<p><strong>3. An Architecture of Disctinction.</strong></p>\r\n<blockquote><p>A non-affiliate researcher contacts the Peabody about our H. L. Mencken collections. Since she will bring a couple of graduate students with her, I set up a group work space in one of the library alcoves where the three of them can share materials and talk without disturbing other readers. I pull the requested volumes with the help of some students and set the cart up within easy reach of the alcove. When the researchers arrive, I show them the Mencken collections on the ground floor. Then I lead them to their group work space and leave them, returning to the glassed-in office behind the reading room, the vantage point that allows me to monitor the otherwise empty reading room.</p></blockquote>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” a team of Dutch sociologists investigates the library as a space that is strongly marked by situational norms—“knowledge-based beliefs about how to behave in particular situations that are shaped by social influence.” [note number=\'44\']Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84.1 (2003), 19.[/note] Their research leads them to argue, however, that such norms do not require direct social influences to be triggered; in fact, “the situation can activate mental representations of normative behaviors automatically. And once activated, these representations provide the knowledge necessary for guiding one’s own situationally appropriate behavior.” [note number=\'45\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.[/note] Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” [note number=\'46\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.[/note] Talking in a quiet voice in the library, a normative behavior, is only activated for those who plan to visit the library.</p>\r\n<p>Ten years ago, when the research for this article was conducted, the “silence of the library” was still a widespread norm. While the situation is now often reversed—in our main campus library, we must designate specific quiet areas because otherwise a sociable undergraduate din would take over—the norm of silence does continue to preside at the Peabody. Because it is off campus, the Peabody is often attractively under-populated compared to the crowded main library; it is mostly used by advanced researchers and those who seek a quiet place to study. The large central open area catches and amplifies even the smallest noises. The shelf-lined alcoves on either side of this central area offer the appearance of privacy, but in fact are little echo chambers. Visitors immediately detect these acoustics, and—except for the periodic tour groups—most spend their time in the Peabody in silence. But it is not just the physics of sound that shape behaviors here, as the Dutch researchers show; the social expectations of the space prefigure those behaviors.</p>\r\n<p>In setting up a group work space for the Mencken researchers, I have quite deliberately contravened the usual norm of silence. Clearly, I am not inviting them to shout, and by putting them in an alcove in back, I have taken measures to protect any quiet-seeking visitors who might arrive. But in accordance with new ideas about the use of library space, my colleagues and I have decided that we must accommodate group study even if it might occasionally disrupt the silence desired by others. As it happens, the Mencken researchers’ conversation is eventually interrupted by a tour group, and the two activities play out side by side.</p>\r\n<p>I must admit that at moments I have mixed feelings about the tour groups and even the study cohorts. While my pedagogical instincts tend towards cheerful hub-bub, there is a part of me that is still in awe of the sanctuary-like atmosphere of the Peabody. John Morris called the library a “cathedral of books,” and clearly that’s what architect Edmund G. Lind had in mind. The central area with its grand skylight and the alcoves on its sides is like a nave bordered with chapels. Lind didn’t need a psychological study of environment-based situational norms to tell him that he might activate different behaviors within his building. The great central space inspires reverence—your eye is drawn to the skylight the way it would be drawn to the rose windows of Chartres, and on its way up catches row upon solemn row of books stowed behind gilded railings, a testament to the accumulated wisdom of the ages. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'18\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-18-skylight/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-407\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-407\" title=\"fig 18 skylight\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/note] But step into an alcove, especially on the ground floor where each is filled with an immense wooden table, and you instantly feel something else, something no less grand but more human. The alcoves are study-sized, and once you sit down at one of those dark, gleaming, broad tables, it is like you are the master of your own private library. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'19\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-19-alcove/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-408\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-408\" title=\"fig 19 alcove\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Ironically, the Peabody’s architecture was out-dated by the time it was completed. With the professionalization of librarianship and the evolution of library science in the late nineteenth century, librarians like William Frederick Poole advocated for a functional rather than decorative design of interior library space. [note number=\'47\']See William Frederick Poole, Remarks on Library Construction (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).[/note] Moreover, the actual use of space in the Peabody in the late nineteenth century was at odds with its symbolic appeal. The main library was known as the “stack room”; readers were seated in a comparatively plain reading room on the other side of the main doors. In this arrangement, the librarians reigned inside the gorgeous “cathedral of books,” but the building’s potential to civilize the masses was lost.</p>\r\n<p>Now, of course, we do not send readers outside. Inside the “stack room,” we explicitly call visitors’ attention to its beauty to explain the connections between the library’s architecture and its collections—how both speak eloquently of Victorian values. At the same time, we who staff the library have relegated ourselves to its periphery. We work in the glassed-in room at one end that serves as a monitoring point and occasional classroom; the official “librarian’s office” in one corner—its luxurious proportions suggesting something like a sacristy and something like a robber baron’s lair—is now shared work-space stuffed with several desks and laden book trucks. There is another monitoring station near the main doors. I often do my work at the photography station, in the back of one of the alcoves [note type=\'figure\' number=\'20\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-20-station/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-409\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-409\" title=\"fig 20 station\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/note]. It offers some privacy but is close enough to the central reading tables to be accessible to readers.</p>\r\n<p>The space of the Peabody initiates other situational behaviors besides the norm of silence, and our work-station arrangements testify to this. The spatial re-centralizing of readers and marginalization of staff is not merely practical; it is a reflection of the modern office of librarianship. We are there to be of service, in a para-textual position. Consequently, our work should be out of sight; it should be separate from and secondary to the work that readers do. Our locations call upon us, in other words, to support the scholar’s effort to hide the “seams of [her] findings” by hiding the ways we contribute to that work—by the ways we sometimes do that work.</p>\r\n<p>I think about these complications as I escort the Mencken researchers to their table and walk back to the glassed-in office, where there is nothing pressing for me to do. I’d rather spend more time talking with them. I’d like to learn about their research and introduce them to some underappreciated parts of the collection. I’d like to share with them what I learned curating an exhibition of Mencken-related magazines and writing about one of those magazines. But I don’t want to get in their way; it’s likely that they are ready to get on with work that they don’t see as connected to mine. The professional norms of the archive are strong, and although I know how to talk about my research in many contexts—in presentations, interviews, hotel elevators—I haven’t figured out how to mix my scholarly role with the curatorial role I am supposed to play here, in the Peabody. In the end, I say nothing. Professional segregation is another kind of silence in the library.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>We cannot change the archaeological record beneath our feet, but we can rearrange the fossils we dig up to create new narratives. We can tell different kinds of archive stories, including the story of what research in the archive was and is. Is it too idealistic to expect that dissolving the entrenched fantasies about archival research will make room for new methods? Is it naïve to imagine a space that, in putting into practice the archival turn’s preliminary insights about disciplinary and disorder, can support experimentation, facilitate connection across professions and disciplines, and enable new discoveries?</p>\r\n','Disciplinarity and Disorder','The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room.  A researcher sits at her table, inert.  An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes.  (Can we get a close-up of a box, please, to show the label with the long call number?)  The archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back.  The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt.  She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading.  (Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.)','inherit','open','open','','345-revision-97','','','2012-10-15 17:52:25','2012-10-15 17:52:25','',345,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/345-revision-97/',0,'revision','',0),(3136,19,'2012-10-01 23:39:59','2012-10-01 23:39:59','Having cut my teeth on <em>From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler </em>and the Indiana Jones films as a kid<em>, </em>it comes as no surprise perhaps that my scholarly career is informed and driven by archival research. I am addicted to the smell and feel of yellowed paper, ancient vellum, and the sight of spidery, faded fountain pen inscriptions makes my heart race—yes, I suffer from an incurable case of archive fever.\r\n<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/code-letter1-810x10241.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2005 alignright\" title=\"civil-war-letter\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/code-letter1-810x10241-197x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"197\" height=\"250\" /></a> In grad school my interest in archives led me to Britain (thank you, University of Florida!) where, beneath the blue and gold and white dome of the <a href=\"http://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/history_and_the_building/reading_room.aspx\">old British Library</a>, I fancied I could still almost hear the whispered wishes for enlightenment that scholars and revolutionaries and historians had prayed for. Later, in the <a href=\"http://www.bronte.org.uk/\">Brontë parsonage museum</a> on the edge of the moors, I sat in a research room off the Brontës’ kitchen, reading their juvenilia <em>in situ. </em>In the <a href=\"http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/baldwin/baldwin.html\">Baldwin archive</a> at UF I encountered E.R.’s <em>Geography and History by a Lady for the Use of her own Children </em>(1790), the book that changed my life by opening up an entire forgotten genre of writing by middle-class women who sought to participate in the imperial project through socially sanctioned writing for children. This taught me that archives still hold so many stories and secrets; their potential sleeps very patiently.\r\n\r\nThe lesson helped me during my postdoc at Lehigh when, in the process of cataloguing over 400 miscellaneous letters for the <a href=\"http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/remain/\">“I remain…”</a> project, I ran across a document whose garbled syntax at first suggested too long a day, but then thrillingly emerged as a coded Civil War letter. All that year I researched the letter, talking about it to computer scientists who tried to develop an algorithm to break the Stager Cipher, discussing it with historians, presenting it to local fourth graders who eagerly peppered me with questions, and even corresponding with the NSA cryptology center to track down one of the few remaining code books about the ciphers. Though I never managed to crack it, the mystery was sustaining, engaging, and a great conversation starter wherever I went. I carried its story with me, imagined its content, and marveled at its survival. It came from the smoke of the battlefield, from the anxious hands of a telegraph operator who hurriedly crossed out mistakes and scrawled incorrect calculations in the margins on the eve of the second battle of Bull Run when so many lives and the military career of the writer hung in the balance. With the Digital Library Team, we scanned the letter, sketched its history, and <a href=\"http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/cdm4/remain_viewer.php?DMTHUMB=1&amp;cat=Civil%20War&amp;ptr=124&amp;CISOSTART=21\">put it online</a> so that others could enjoy the mystery. This year, it was gratifying when special collections librarian Ilhan Citak forwarded me an article by computer scientists Ali Assarpour and Kent D. Boklan detailing how they broke the 148-year old code. In the end, the story of the letter goes on and so many of us have yoked our own stories to it. It seems that Derrida was right when he said that the archive opens out of and into the future, gathering associations, richness, devotees, and memories as it glides past us into the future. The past becomes a present in every sense.','Cracking a Civil War Code','Having cut my teeth on From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler and the Indiana Jones films as a kid, it comes as no surprise perhaps that my scholarly career is informed and driven by archival research. I am addicted to the smell and feel of yellowed paper, ancient vellum, and the sight of spidery, faded fountain pen inscriptions makes my heart race—yes, I suffer from an incurable case of archive fever.','inherit','open','open','','235-revision-43','','','2012-10-01 23:39:59','2012-10-01 23:39:59','',235,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/235-revision-43/',0,'revision','',0),(3137,19,'2012-09-24 21:02:00','2012-09-24 21:02:00','<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/castle-book1.png\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-2008 clear\" title=\"Castle Book\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/castle-book1.png\" alt=\"Castle Book\" width=\"526\" height=\"357\" /></a><span class=\"caption\">Castle Book of Hours #2, use of Rouen. Manuscript, written and illustrated in Rouen, France, mid-15th century. Bryn Mawr College Library.</span>\r\n\r\nThe encounter of the person with the object: that is the object of this journal and the focus of this first issue.   This particular object, the <em>Castle Book of Hours #2</em>, a gift to the Bryn Mawr College Library, has been in my hands several times and is now part of an exhibition of objects from the College’s Special Collections.  All of the objects in the exhibition have been in the hands of students and faculty over the years, encountered in classrooms, used in assignments, touched.\r\n\r\nHow do people encounter the <em>Castle Book of Hours #2</em>? We get some answer to this question in <a href=\"http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/exhibitions.html\" target=\"_blank\">“Worlds to Discover”</a>, an exhibit in honor of the 125<sup>th</sup> anniversary of Bryn Mawr College. The exhibit features objects that are set off by statements from students and faculty about how the object matters.  With this <em>Book of Hours</em>, faculty member Martha Easton remarks that instead of one page – out of context – when one has this manuscript in one’s hands, one gets a better sense of how this object “might have been used and consumed.” The encounters for Anne Harding, a student at Bryn Mawr, seem to be moving her towards a career that will keep her in touch with objects like these.\r\n\r\n<!--[if IE]><object width=\"545\" height=\"349\" id=\"viddlerOuter-ab2b7739\" classid=\"clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"//www.viddler.com/player/ab2b7739/0/\"><param name=\"allowScriptAccess\" value=\"always\"><param name=\"allowNetworking\" value=\"all\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><param name=\"flashVars\" value=\"f=1&autoplay=f&disablebranding=f\"><object id=\"viddlerInner-ab2b7739\"><video id=\"viddlerVideo-ab2b7739\" src=\"//www.viddler.com/file/ab2b7739/html5mobile/\" type=\"video/mp4\" width=\"545\" height=\"307\" poster=\"//www.viddler.com/thumbnail/ab2b7739/\" controls=\"controls\" x-webkit-airplay=\"allow\"></video></object></object><![endif]--> <!--[if !IE]> <!--> <object width=\"545\" height=\"349\" id=\"viddlerOuter-ab2b7739\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" data=\"//www.viddler.com/player/ab2b7739/0/\"> <param name=\"movie\" value=\"//www.viddler.com/player/ab2b7739/0/\"> <param name=\"allowScriptAccess\" value=\"always\"><param name=\"allowNetworking\" value=\"all\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><param name=\"flashVars\" value=\"f=1&autoplay=f&disablebranding=f\"><object id=\"viddlerInner-ab2b7739\"> <video id=\"viddlerVideo-ab2b7739\" src=\"//www.viddler.com/file/ab2b7739/html5mobile/\" type=\"video/mp4\" width=\"545\" height=\"307\" poster=\"//www.viddler.com/thumbnail/ab2b7739/\" controls=\"controls\" x-webkit-airplay=\"allow\"></video> </object></object> <!--<![endif]-->\r\n\r\nI want to point to another encounter with this same object.  The teacher of a fifth grade art class, teaching the students to create their own illuminated manuscripts, asked that I bring in examples of illuminated manuscripts, and this was one of two that I brought along.  The fascination to the students was two-fold:  one, was the value of the object – how much was it worth?  This is something that college students ask too, so I say something like – well, as much as maybe a house is worth.  But that fascination was replaced quickly by the issue at hand:  the students had work to do; they were creating their own illumination and they wanted to use and consume this manuscript themselves.  Each of them had an initial letter, the first letter in their first name, to create for their own manuscript.  So the hunt was on, and luckily for them and for me, each of those letters could be found in the pages of this manuscript. Unlike Easton and Harding, the fifth graders themselves consumed the manuscripts, as opposed to getting the sense of how the manuscript was consumed.  They served as a reminder of the many ways that objects now in special collections speak to those who encounter them, from the first users of the Castle Book of Hours #2 to 21st-century students of all ages.','Same Object, Different Audiences','The encounter of the person with the object: that is the object of this journal and the focus of this first issue.   This particular object, the Castle Book of Hours #2, a gift to the Bryn Mawr College Library, has been in my hands several times and is now part of an exhibition of objects from the College’s Special Collections.  All of the objects in the exhibition have been in the hands of students and faculty over the years, encountered in classrooms, used in assignments, touched.','inherit','open','open','','222-revision-46','','','2012-09-24 21:02:00','2012-09-24 21:02:00','',222,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/222-revision-46/',0,'revision','',0),(3138,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:29','2012-10-15 23:06:29','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery tool for exploring what he calls “the wild and unpredictable intersections of the data that the interface allows us to generate.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1609-10.[/ref] The prospect of having the Archive uncover meaningful relationships between texts is, indeed, an exciting one. As Jonathan Freedman notes, the “ability to link heterogeneous subjects and find once-occulted connections and interconnections makes scholarship invigoratingly fun.”[ref]Jonathan Freedman, “Whitman, Database, Information Culture,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1597.[/ref] As a frequent user of the Whitman Archive, I’ve experienced this “invigorating fun” first-hand, and I look forward to the Archive including more texts by and about Whitman, and incorporating more discovery tools like Brian Pytlik Zillig’s <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/resources/tools/index.html\">TokenX</a>.\r\n\r\nAs someone working on digital humanities projects of my own, however, I’m as interested in understanding what it takes to create such tools for discovery as I am the end-user experience of having digital tools make “unpredictable” and “invigorating” discoveries on my behalf. For the remainder of this essay, I’m going to share some thoughts on what has to happen on the back end of a digital project in order to make an otherwise rigorously structured digital artifact feel “wild and unpredictable” to its users. I’ll start with Kenneth M. Price’s description of the necessary labor that goes into structuring data such that it will yield surprising results for end users: \"A database is not an undifferentiated sea of information out of which structure emerges,” Price writes. “Argument is always there from the beginning in how those constructing a database choose to categorize information.\"[ref]Price, “Edition.”[/ref] To an end user who searches a database and finds an interesting juxtaposition between a handful of the hundreds (or thousands) of total documents on that database, it can seem as if those documents have emerged out of “an undifferentiated sea of information.” The reality, however, is far different.\r\n\r\nWhen Price alludes to the process that the creators of a database go through as they decide how to “categorize information,” he makes it clear that whenever a user generates a surprising set of juxtapositions between documents it is because someone, somewhere, at some point, has meticulously categorized those documents in such a way that a search engine (or other text analysis tool) will be able to process those documents in a meaningful way. Jerome McGann, who has also commented on the rigorous process of structuring data that is required to create a digital archive, writes that “databases and all digital instruments require the most severe kinds of categorical forms. The power of database—of digital instruments in general—rests in its ability to draw sharp, disambiguated distinctions.”[ref]Jerome McGann, “Database, Interface, and Archival Fever,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1590.[/ref] As both Price and McGann indicate, what can feel like a surprising juxtaposition for the end user has, to a certain extent, already been determined in advance through a time- and labor-intensive process of marking-up, encoding, or otherwise categorizing data.\r\n\r\nThis is not to say that those who structure the data for a digital archive have already anticipated every possible search string that users could ever imagine. On the contrary, what interests me as both the user and the creator of digital archives is the effect by which this “sharp, disambiguated” structuring of data can, indeed, produce juxtapositions that archivists could never have predicted. The fundamental preconditions for cultivating such serendipitous discoveries, it seems to me, are a large enough data set and a sufficiently intelligent schema for categorizing that data (not to mention the time, money, software, hardware, human resources, and expertise required to process and categorize the data in the first place).\r\n\r\nAllow me to cite an example from outside the realm of digital archiving to illustrate what’s involved in structuring data that yields serendipitous juxtapositions. Pandora Radio is an Internet music service whose goal is to create customized, online radio stations for its users. This customization is based on the work of the Music Genome Project, which has categorized the musical attributes of thousands of different songs. Taking into consideration “everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and . . . singing and vocal harmony,” the Music Genome Project assigns anywhere between 150 and 400 different descriptors to a single song. These descriptors are based on both objective criteria such as the types of instruments used in the song or whether the song is in a major or a minor key, as well as more subjective criteria such as whether or not a song features “Acoustic Sonority,” “Prevalent Use of Groove,” or a “Wet Recording Sound.\"[ref]“The Music Genome Project,” Pandora Radio, accessed December 2, 2010 <a href=\"http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml\">http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml</a>.[/ref] (These descriptors are referred to as musical “genes,” but they could just as easily be called metadata or tags.) Visitors to Pandora Radio type in the name of a song that they like, and then based on the attributes that have been pre-assigned to that song, Pandora will play other songs with similar attributes. The promise of Pandora is that once a database of songs is categorized according to a controlled vocabulary capable of being processed by a computer, listeners will be pleasantly surprised to discover songs that they never knew they already liked. (These songs are, of course, available for purchase so that no serendipitous discovery goes un-capitalized.)\r\n\r\nI cite this example within the context of the Whitman Archive not necessarily because Pandora Radio provides a model for digital scholarship of nineteenth-century literature, but because the process of categorizing songs for the Music Genome Project is remarkably similar to the archivist’s effort of structuring data in such a way that it can produce surprising results for the end user. For both Pandora and the Whitman Archive, then, the goal is to reach the tipping point where methodical structuring becomes unexpected discovery, where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and structured data takes on forms that the structure-ers never quite imagined. I like to think that this tipping point where structure yields serendipity is similar to the moment in a fractal pattern where geometry becomes art, the moment where a rigorous, mathematically defined structure takes on an aesthetic quality that was never explicitly intended by the mathematical code that undergirds it, but that is nevertheless absolutely dependent upon that code for its very existence.\r\n\r\nMy hope as both the user and creator of digital archives is that we can come to a better understanding of the processes of classification and naming that are involved in these efforts structure data in meaningful ways. Scholars of literature are already comfortable thinking about the power of language to represent—and even create—the world around us. We already have at our disposal a variety of theoretical apparatuses for thinking about the power of language to name and define the world, from the formalism of the New Critics to the semiotics of the Post-Structuralists and even the focus on the materiality of language in Book History scholarship. What we need to add to this list of theories and methodologies is a more sophisticated understanding of taxonomy and categorization. This will not only require an interdisciplinary rendezvous with librarians and scholars of information architecture, but it will also demand that we do the cultural history of such seemingly mundane phenomena as filing cabinets and accounting ledgers. Compared to the work being done by digital humanities scholars in the areas of data visualization, text mining, social networking, and geo-spatial analysis, studying the history of cataloging, sorting, and organizing seems to be the intellectual equivalent of a trip to Target to buy hard-plastic storage bins when you’d rather be at the Apple Store picking up an iPad. Nevertheless, everything that we want digital technology to do to help us better understand literary texts depends upon our ability to properly name, sort, and categorize the information that we put into a computer. We do ourselves a disservice to ignore or even minimize this crucial stage of the process.\r\n\r\nOne of the most frequently quoted statements about the future of digital scholarship in the humanities comes from Jerome McGann, who wrote that “the digital technology used by humanities scholars has focused almost exclusively on methods of sorting, accessing, and disseminating large bodies of materials. In this respect the work has not engaged the central questions and concerns of the [humanities, which is] . . . . the exploration and explanation of aesthetic works.”[ref]Jerome McGann, <em>Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web</em> (New York: Palgrave, 2001), xi-xii.[/ref] I don’t want to make a straw-man out of McGann’s powerful insight, but I can’t help but take issue with his claim that the “sorting” of texts will not aid us in our goal of using digital technology to explore and explain aesthetic works. Before a digital tool of any kind can work with a text in any way, the elements of that text must be sorted, classified, and categorized according to a schema that the computer will understand. This is not to say that scholars in the digital humanities should put aside their text visualization projects and their geo-spatial analyses in order to do the Dewey Decimal system one better, but rather that the foundational tasks of organizing and classifying should more completely theorized and more intimately woven into the fabric of digital scholarship.\r\n\r\nBy attending to the tedium of taxonomy we may begin to feel like nineteenth-century scriveners rather than twenty-first century techies. Like those scriveners of old, we may prefer not to spend our time with such mundane things. Nevertheless, if we wish to generate the kinds of “wild and unpredictable intersections of . . . data” that “makes scholarship invigoratingly fun” we should embrace what actually promises to be a fascinating conversation about the history of taxonomy, structure, classification, and form. This conversation will take us through the Library of Alexandria, the Great Chain of Being, medieval bestiaries, Wunderkammer, the Mundaneum, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, cryptography, tarot cards, and Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Every time we tag, code, or classify a text for a digital archive, we are participating in the long history of human classification systems. The better able we are to understand that history and to situate ourselves within it, the better understanding we will have of our digital archives and what they can do.','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  4','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery to...','inherit','open','open','','144-revision-38','','','2012-10-15 23:06:29','2012-10-15 23:06:29','',144,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/144-revision-38/',0,'revision','',0),(3139,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','Archive co-director Ed Folsom once noted that printed editions of Whitman’s works have had the unfortunate tendency of becoming irrelevant the moment that scholars unearth a new letter, manuscript, or biographical fact about the poet. The Whitman Archive, however, has the benefit of being able to change and adapt as often as new discoveries are brought to the attention of the directors. In such an environment, Folsom writes, “All users are potential co-editors.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Projecting Whitman: The Evolution and Remediation of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman,” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed December 2, 2010 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00003.html.[/ref] I love the notion that everyone is a “potential co-editor” of the Whitman Archive, and I\'d like to consider how the Archive could make better use of its digital form as a way to more fully realize this potential. I would never advocate for crowd-sourcing the Archive on the model of sites like Wikipedia, but I would like the Archive directors to take more seriously the implication that “All users are potential co-editors.”\r\n\r\nI have a tremendous amount of respect for how the Archive directors have responded to public criticisms from other scholars. In a 2007 <em>PMLA</em> forum on the Whitman Archive, for example, Meredith McGill took the Archive to task for decontextualizing the poems that Whitman had published in newspapers and magazines by clipping the poems from their original sources and excluding all the other articles, poems, and advertisements that appeared alongside Whitman’s poems.[ref]Meredith L. McGill, “Remediating Whitman,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007):1594.[/ref] The Archive promptly responded to this criticism by including the entire page of the periodical where a Whitman poem appeared. But not every user of the Whitman Archive can get the attention of the Archive directors in the pages of <em>PMLA</em>. And even those fortunate enough to do so don\'t have a mechanism for providing additional feedback to the Archive directors regarding their response to suggestions for improvement. I wonder, does McGill think it was sufficient to include the complete newspaper page where a Whitman poem appeared, or would she rather that the Archive include the rest of the issue is well? Or would she even prefer a link to some external site that hosts the entire run of the paper?\r\n\r\nThe Archive could make better use of its digital form by providing “user accounts or other community-hosting capabilities,” as Matt Cohen has recently suggested.[ref]Cohen, “Design and Politics,” 241.[/ref]Integrating Web 2.0 components such as user accounts and a comment section to the Whitman Archive would have considerable implications for the Archive: while a comments section would give scholars such as McGill a much more dynamic venue for engaging with the Archive\'s directors, it would also make the Archive feel less like a scholarly edition of Whitman\'s works and more like a Facebook fan page. Nevertheless, Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has already said that “scholarly edition” doesn\'t necessarily describe what the Whitman Archive actually is. Instead, Price has characterized the Archive as something more like a workshop, or, as he puts it, a “group of people who are now joined together for a common purpose.”[ref]Kenneth M. Price, \"Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What\'s in a Name?\" <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed December 2, 2010 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00346.html.[/ref] If that group of people could also include the hundreds (if not thousands) of scholars, students, and non-academic readers who visit the Archive every day, it would not only make better use of the digital medium, but it would also go some distance toward fulfilling Folsom\'s claim that “All users are potential co-editors.”','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  3','Archive co-director Ed Folsom once noted that printed editions of Whitman’s works have had the unfortunate tendency of becoming irrelevant the moment that scholars unearth a new letter, manuscript, or biographical fact about the poet. The Whitman Archive, however, has the benefit of being able to change and adapt as often as new discoveries are brought to the attention of the directors.','inherit','open','open','','142-revision-30','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',142,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/142-revision-30/',0,'revision','',0),(3140,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','I would like to see the Whitman Archive make more transparent the choices that go into deciding how texts are marked-up and encoded. Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has written that the “ongoing decision-making” regarding the mark-up of texts on the Archive is “interpretive rather than mechanical,” and that this interpretive coding “adds intelligence to an electronic text . . . mak[ing] it robust and illuminating as a tool for analysis.”[ref]Kenneth M. Price,\"\'Debris,\' Creative Scatter, and the Challenges of Editing Whitman,\" in <em>Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present</em>, ed. David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 67.[/ref] I admire Price’s forthright admission that marking-up a text for the digital medium is not merely a change in format, but an act of interpretation. As someone who visits the Whitman Archive on a regular basis, I’d like to have a clearer sense of what kinds of decisions—and, therefore, interpretations—are being made as texts are digitally encoded, and, specifically, what those decisions reveal about the textual condition of Whitman’s works.\r\n\r\nThis request is not based in a suspicion of any kind that the Archive directors are placing a biased interpretation onto Whitman’s poetry as they encode it for presentation on the Archive; rather, my request is based in a desire to following along on the process of discovery that Matt Cohen describes as an integral part of digital encoding: “As a student in the 1990s, doing transcription and basic encoding of Whitman documents, I learned a lot about textual structures that I had not encountered in seminars; when discussing these observations with the project directors, sometimes new areas of concern or future development would emerge.”[ref]Matt Cohen, “Design and Politics in Electronic American Literary Archives,” in <em>The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age</em>, ed. Amy Earhart and Andrew Jewell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 233.[/ref] The Archive is already a valuable resource for gaining access to Whitman’s works; it can also be a resource for learning about how Whitman constructed his texts in manuscript and in print by eavesdropping on the process by which these texts are reconstructed for the digital medium.\r\n\r\nDirectors and editors at the Archive have already begun to provide the kind of running commentary on the encoding process that I would like to see more of. Brett Barney, the Senior Associate Editor of the Archive, has written an insightful essay about his encoding the 1867 edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> that is available on the Archive, and both Price and Folsom have published, in a number of different venues, provocative essays that detail the lessons about textuality that they have learned from preparing texts for the Archive.[ref]Brett Barney, \"‘Each Part and Tag of Me is a Miracle: Reflections after Tagging the 1867 Leaves of Grass,” <em>The <em>Walt Whitman Archive, </em></em><em>accessed December 2, 2010 </em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html</a>. Additional essay by Folsom and Price are also available at http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/index.html.[/ref] Currently, the Whitman Archive makes available the TEI-encoded XML source files for the major texts on the Archive as well as the Archive’s encoding guidelines and related DTD files. As much as I value this peek into the inner workings of the Archive, the process by which these XML files are created—the “ongoing decision-making” Price refers to—is as important as the product itself. The Archive could benefit from more self-reflexive commentaries on the encoding process, perhaps using Barney’s essay as a model. The recently added <a href=\"http://wwa-changelog.blogspot.com/\">WWA-Changelog</a>—a blog connected to the Archive that details the changes that editors make to files once they are posted online—could provide a model for how such commentaries could be more fully integrated into the experience of working with the Archive.','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley 2','I would like to see the Whitman Archive make more transparent the choices that go into deciding how texts are marked-up and encoded. Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has written that the “ongoing decision-making” regarding the mark-up of texts on the Archive is “interpretive rather than mechanical,” and that this interpretive coding...','inherit','open','open','','140-revision-26','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',140,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/140-revision-26/',0,'revision','',0),(3141,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','From my perspective as a scholar, the greatest strength of the Whitman Archive is that it provides free and open access to the essential texts for studying the life and work of Walt Whitman. I’ve consulted the Whitman Archive every time I’ve ever written about Whitman, whether it’s to check the precise wording of a text, to follow the life cycle of a poem as it moves from manuscript to print and on through the various editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, to identify the location of a primary document in a brick-and-mortar archive, to read nineteenth-century reviews of Whitman’s writing, or to search the Archive’s exhaustive database of Whitman scholarship. Using the Whitman Archive is like having immediate access to shelves and shelves worth of valuable (and often expensive) books.\r\n\r\nWhen I was a graduate student I burned through a toner cartridge printing out page images of the antebellum editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> from the Whitman Archive. The poems in these early editions went through radical revisions from one edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> to the next, and I really needed to get to know these poems in order to make the argument I was making in my dissertation about Whitman’s antebellum period. Being able to access these poems in various states gave me a much better sense of Whitman’s pre-Civil War career than the variorum of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>—with its decontextualized snippets from the antebellum editions—was able to give me.\r\n\r\nI’ve also recently learned that the Whitman Archive is more than just a repository of raw materials that scholars can mine for the resources we need to tell our stories about Whitman’s life and work; rather, the Archive is a storyteller in its own right. Here’s an example: <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden,</em> the multi-volume collection of Whitman’s conversations with his friend Horace Trauble, was not yet available on the Archive when I was writing an essay a few years ago about Elizabeth Porter Gould, the editor of a gift-book edition of Whitman’s poems called <em>Gems from Walt Whitman</em> (1889). Without the benefit of a searchable, digital edition of <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em> I had to find references to Gould the old-fashioned way: cribbing from Ed Folsom’s footnotes—and, of course, slogging through the poorly indexed volumes themselves. Since I published the essay, however, I’ve had the opportunity to search for Gould in the Archive’s edition of <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em>, and the effect of having the Archive’s search engine generate a list of these references had a remarkable impact on me. The essay that I had written demanded a certain amount of focus in order to make the argument about gender and authorship that I wanted to make, and I was always left with a touch of regret that I never had the chance to unfold the fascinating relationship between Whitman and Gould as fully as I would have liked. Opening up different tabs in my browser to read each of these references on the Whitman Archive, however, allowed me to track the progress of their relationship as they negotiated their competing goals for what <em>Gems from Walt Whitman </em>should be. I’m proud of the story that I was able to tell about Whitman and Gould, but I’m also glad to know that the Whitman Archive can tell that story another way.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Whitley  1','From my perspective as a scholar, the greatest strength of the Whitman Archive is that it provides free and open access to the essential texts for studying the life and work of Walt Whitman. I’ve consulted the Whitman Archive every time I’ve ever written about Whitman, whether it’s to check the precise wording of a text, to follow the life cycle of a poem...','inherit','open','open','','138-revision-28','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',138,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/138-revision-28/',0,'revision','',0),(3142,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','In the Digital Humanist’s tool belt, the database is the trusty stand-by. Robust and indispensable, it has become a basic tool of modern academic research. One of the primary endeavors of the Digital Humanities, however, is to re-focus the perspective on the tools we use, and perhaps to redefine the term “tool” in the process. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a thing … with which some operation is performed; a means of effecting something.”[ref]<em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed., s.v. “Tool.”[/ref] This definition points plainly toward outcome, the tool’s utility at accomplishing “some operation,” as if it were an extension of the user’s will as a wrench is an extension of his or her hand. But by emphasizing results only, the dictionary neglects a tool’s significant influence over process.\r\n\r\nTools define process as much as they do outcome. When one searches a database, its individual design mediates the experience, filters it, frames it. A sleek database makes the act of use nearly imperceptible—it stays out of the way, as it were, by anticipating the needs and intuitions of the general user in its design. However, the specific user will always be limited by these presuppositions. It is tempting to imagine a database as a neutral container, a kind of Tupperware 2.0, while in fact the tool guides the searches that one can make, the items that they will return, and which will appear prominent. Facets of the design guide what sorts of orderings of information, or narratives, the researcher will construct out of the raw data, such that the database itself can form a subtle argument or narrative claim.\r\n\r\nAcknowledging the skewed nature of any tool that presents information, <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> co-editor Ed Folsom describes his approach to structuring the database: “Initially, [co-editor Kenneth] Price and I had ideas of how we would control the material in the database, and we knew the narratives we wanted to tell, the frames we wanted to construct. But the details of the database quickly exceeded any narrative we might try to frame the data with. Little roots shot out everywhere and attached to particulars we could not have imagined. Only if we insulated the narrative from the database could the narrative persist.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: the Epic Transformation of Archives,”<em> The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed November 2010,<em> </em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html</a>.[/ref] To me, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is rife with narrative paths for the user. Some of these are micro-narratives, unavoidably emerging from details of the interface. Because the left-hand navigation menu is more visually prominent than the search bar, the user is more strongly guided into a browsing mode of exploration, which encourages him or her to consider Whitman through a compartmentalized view of his life and works. By featuring a simple search bar without advanced specifications or filtration[ref]A notice on the site informs the user that this feature is soon slated to undergo an enhancement, which will include the development of faceted search capabilities.[/ref], the database allows the user to cast a virtual fishing line for an assortment of items but makes it more difficult to conduct a narrowly directed search—thus, one is likely to encounter information that seems scattered rather than tight and contextual.\r\n\r\nApart from these micro-narratives, the database also cradles a deep narrative claim pertaining to Whitman’s corpus: throughout the database there is an open discussion examining the suggestive congruity between Whitman’s work and the digital medium in which it is takes form. The documentation of this resonance begins with observations about Whitman’s language and works, which seem to share characteristics of digital structure. For example, Ed Folsom to the organic networks present in Whitman’s language, an intertextual and burgeoning web of words. He compares this quality to the dense entanglement of leaves and roots that adorn the lettering on the first edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, recalling the rhizome[ref]Defined as “an elongated, usually horizontal, subterranean stem which sends out roots and leafy shoots at intervals along its length.” <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 3rd ed., s.v. \"Rhizome.\"[/ref]—“that subterranean stem that grows every which way and represents the nomadic multiplicity of identity—no central root but an intertwined web of roots.”[ref]Folsom, “Database as Genre.<em>”</em>[/ref] Databases, too, are rhizomorphous, he argues—and this accordance between Whitman’s work and its digital format allows the two to reflect through and off of one another, revealing new permutations of form and language.\r\n\r\nIn a proleptic twist, Whitman’s work predates its own ideal medium. A common observation in the various articles about the database is the fact that the work is perhaps better displayed in digital form that it ever was in print: the digital medium is better equipped to represent the shapes and forms of the Whitman corpus, and flexible enough to accommodate the complex relationship between the many iterations of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>. The database does not privilege one edition over any other, and treats them as autonomous but entwined works rather than pieces of a distinct whole or drafts leading up to a definitive version. The sheer multiplicity of his writing is betrayed by the rigidity of print mediums. “Whitman’s work was always being revised, was always in flux, and fixed forms of print do not adequately capture his incessant revisions,” argues Price.[ref]Kenneth M. Price, “About the <em>Archive</em>: History,” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed November 2010, http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/history.html.[/ref] Whitman himself advocated methods of reading and taking meaning from his texts that today seem almost designed for digital tools. A line from <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, first appearing in the 1881-82 edition, reads “the words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing.”[ref]Walt Whitman, <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, (Washington, D.C, 1881-82), http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1871/whole.html.[/ref] Taking long-view of literature, Whitman’s remark resonates with the current practice of distant reading, in which vast quantities of text can be analyzed as an entity using statistical information and visualizations. Predating this practice, Whitman draws the reader away from the individual minutiae of his poetry and towards impressionistic views. If any text was written for a database, this one was.\r\n\r\nThus, the <em>Archive</em> attempts not only to exhibit its contents, but to carry out a vision that Whitman may have offered in the original work. This narrative is present throughout the site primarily via the apparent compatibility between the content and form. The claim is so elegant, so fluid and simple, that the argument almost makes itself.\r\n\r\nThe <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is able to transcend its (considerable) utility as a research tool, performing simultaneously as a critical analysis, a new edition of Whitman, and independent artistic work. I imagine four theoretical levels at which a format can manage a text, with increasing involvement: presentation, description, criticism, and artistic response. The sophistication of this particular database is in how it blurs the lines between those acts, seeming to realize all at once and none predominantly, and, further, how it reveals the fact that this multiplicity of function must be true of all databases, however subtly, however unintentionally.\r\n\r\nThis remarkable plurality within a single tool (if tool is still an adequate term) is both fitting, in the context of Whitman, and disruptive to the user’s relationship with the technology. It remains to be addressed how, or whether, the user should adjust his or her approach to such a complex mechanism. At the recent undergraduate digital humanities symposium Re: Humanities, keynote speaker Amanda French advocated for the “rehumaniz[ation of] the inhuman mass of data.”[ref]Amanda French, “Humanities Research Methods from 1860 to 2060” (presentation at Re:Humanities, Haverford, PA, November 11-12, 2010).[/ref] She suggests that scholars who favor distant reading may be losing track of a meaningful element of the text. Rather than conducting interpretive based on massive aggregates of information, why not reacquaint ourselves with an affection for individual pieces of data, find “datum love” among the mass of details? The two methods appear to be mutually exclusive. However, by reconceiving the practice of data mining, it is arguably possible to find personal touches in the thrill of broad claims as well as the nuance of the particular.\r\n\r\nIf each database frames its contents in an array of narrative claims, then each one is specific, disputable, and limited. Rather than markers of failure, however, we might use these idiosyncracies to reawaken us to the particular experience that that tool offers. We could use the fact that a database mediates actively to inject an element of personal interaction into the task of digital research. In the course of achieving proficiency with any tool, one gains an understanding of its particular advantages and limitations through repeated contact and experimentation, returning to the interactive original meaning of “interface.”[ref]Defined as “a means or place of interaction between two systems, organizations, etc.; a meeting-point or common ground between two parties, systems, or disciplines; also, interaction, liaison, dialogue.” <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 2nd ed., s.v. \"Interface.\"[/ref] Here is an opportunity to find a better alternative to the impersonal database experience, an escape from hard vocabulary statistics untempered by readerly love.\r\n\r\nThe management of scale is a challenge that each database must address by determining how the user will navigate between detail and distance. Due to Whitman’s distinctive engagement with matters of scale, especially the fluidity between the individual and the masses, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> may be uniquely able to offer a distant reading that is paradoxically intimate in its connection to the philosophy of the poet. How can a distant reading cheat the humanist if it scrutinizes the work of the man who wrote, exhilarated, “Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses?”[ref]Walt Whitman, <em>Leaves of Grass: 150<sup>th</sup> Anniversary Edition</em>, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), iii.[/ref] Ed Folsom describes Whitman’s “poetic project” as an endeavor “to move from a particular person, period, or place toward an absorptive embrace of all people, periods, and places,”[ref]Folsom, “Database as Genre.”[/ref]emphasizing the blurred distinctions between love of the particular and love of the vast. TokenX, a textual analysis tool that is available through the database, numerically charts the uses of particular words throughout the six editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, giving a visual representation to the exponential growth and organic proliferation of certain words as the poetry burgeoned in its various iterations. Statistical tools such as these, when applied to the work of this particular author, are not reductive but in fact profoundly resonant with the tone and principles of the poetry they describe. Perhaps this is the database to wed tender devotion to individual data and multiplicity.\r\n\r\nFeatured prominently on the home page of the <em>Archive</em> is a striking engraving of Whitman’s face.[ref]William J. Linton, (1870-72), engraving, (http://whitmanarchive.org/multimedia/image044.html?sort=year&amp;order=ascending&amp;page=5).[/ref] The poet appears as if caught in motion, whipping past the viewer with his eddies of hair scattered about his face like sprouts. The beard connotes a general outward drift as it spreads from his face in swells and waves. And then, from somewhere in the profusion of hair and wrinkles emerges an arresting pair of dark eyes: Whitman’s eyes simultaneously confront and confide in the viewer, imparting a personal moment amidst a storm of minutiae.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 4','In the Digital Humanist’s tool belt, the database is the trusty stand-by. Robust and indispensable, it has become a basic tool of modern academic research. One of the primary endeavors of the Digital Humanities, however, is to re-focus the perspective on the tools we use, and perhaps to redefine the term “tool” in the process. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a thing … with which some operation is performed; a means of effecting something.\"','inherit','open','open','','136-revision-34','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',136,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/136-revision-34/',0,'revision','',0),(3143,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','As the <em>Archive</em> is very aware, the Whitman corpus presents a particular set of linguistic challenges to the reader that seem to appeal for a more open and flexible form than what is offered by their original editions of print. Digital forms often work well for such challenging texts because they provide a-linear approaches of exploration and analysis, but in my opinion the <em>Archive </em>has not yet developed into a format that takes full advantage of this possibility. Though I was able to navigate around the site easily from any point with the aid of the menu across the top of the page and the breadcrumb links, my general experience of the Whitman archive was that it remains limited by linear arrangements of data. The structure of the database, which is dominated by a hierarchical folder system, can make it difficult to stir up new configurations of information: the volume of the repository is still impressive, but in this case a physical archive might allow better non-linear entry.\r\n\r\nAnd yet, the hierarchical folders and the linear browsing process they suggest also garnered my praised in an earlier question, due to their “clean” and “intuitive” qualities. While limiting to the agile Whitman scholar, these features are very advantageous in one’s initial foray into the <em>Archive</em> because they present easier options and clear delineations.\r\n\r\nPhysical archives fit well into folder systems while maintaining an element of the random and a-linear because each page is a potential entry-point. Web pages, however, favor top-view and selection rather than the act of flipping through or diving in at a random point. The <em>Walt Whitman Archive </em>has moved past the limitations of print in many ways already; if there was a way to reincorporate some of the random browsability of the physical archive, without sacrificing the intuitive appearance, the experience might benefit. This might be accomplished by exposing more metadata on the surface of the site in order to cut new cross-sections through the repository; for example, making it possible to browse by year rather than type and title of work, or organizing clusters of data by theme or biographical reference. If the editors can find a way to take the information out of its silos across the site, their users might enjoy an even more fluid and organic approach to the text.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 3','As the Archive is very aware, the Whitman corpus presents a particular set of linguistic challenges to the reader that seem to appeal for a more open and flexible form than what is offered by their original editions of print. Digital forms often work well for such challenging texts because they provide a-linear approaches of exploration and analysis, but in my opinion the Archive has not yet developed...','inherit','open','open','','134-revision-33','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',134,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/134-revision-33/',0,'revision','',0),(3144,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','While I found the basic navigability of the site to be well-designed, I wish that it was easier to discover new things in the database. The obvious place to begin would be the search tool, which is very limited. While more robust features are promised for the future (according to a notice at the top of the page), the current tool falls short of expectations for a database of this size and quality. Discovery of new material depends upon the possibility of encountering random bits of data and the ability to arrange information in new permutations such that new synchronies arise; currently, the <em>Archive </em>is not well configured for such active contact between the reader and the raw data. In addition to random data, an improved search tool would also better allow the user to conduct specific paths of inquiry. For a hypothetical student with an assignment to follow, it can be important to view thematic cross sections rather than vertical stacks of data under folders.\r\n\r\nThe addition of tagging would help to increase the fluidity of the site. In order to maintain the rigor of its editorship, the <em>Archive</em> might prefer to use tags that are curated by a team rather than a ‘folksonomy’ approach that opens up tag authorship to all users and lets the system grow on its own, minimally governed. The functionality of the search tool might improve, also, by responding to terms that have demonstrated relevance to users rather than random syntax in content.\r\n\r\nNavigation between pages on the <em>Archive </em>is smooth and intuitive; however, it could benefit form the implementation of same-page navigation tools. Many of the pages on the site feature very long texts, which require excessive scrolling and are difficult to read in a non-linear fashion. A hyperlinked table of contents at the top might be a first step, but many of the long critical articles do not have obvious breaking points and would not divide naturally into a table. Eventually, it would be good to see a more sophisticated tool for navigating through content on the same page—as it is, a database that deliberately embraces the fluidity of digital forms traps the reader in a format that is ironically dependent upon rigid sequence and imitated print forms. Reducing this rigidity would greatly improve the user experience.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 2','While I found the basic navigability of the site to be well-designed, I wish that it was easier to discover new things in the database. The obvious place to begin would be the search tool, which is very limited. While more robust features are promised for the future (according to a notice at the top of the page), the current tool falls short of expectations for a database of this size and quality.','inherit','open','open','','132-revision-27','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',132,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/132-revision-27/',0,'revision','',0),(3145,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','Though the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> seems well designed for researchers at all levels of expertise, it strikes me as particularly well-suited for students or for others who may enter the site with limited knowledge about the author and his works. A significant advantage is the clean and inviting appearance of the layout at all levels of the database. The interface is wonderfully uncluttered, making exploration simple and unintimidating. On the homepage left-hand navigation menu, I found the categories to be intuitive and well-organized. I clarified this assessment with an experiment, in which I browsed manually for items that I already knew existed in the archive. In all cases, I was able to locate the target items with little or no backtracking.\r\n\r\nI found the most valuable feature of the site for the non-expert visitor to be the contextual information that was present on many of the pages in the database. For example, when clicking on any of the major links under the “published works” tab, I was given a short blurb that generally included a preface to the contents of the page, its status of development and coming additions, and any important contextual knowledge that would help me situate it in culture or among Whitman’s other works. It was also extremely helpful to find each of Whitman’s published books (excluding the foreign editions) furnished with a detailed and thoughtful “About” page, which provided enough background and compelling analysis to give me, the student and non-expert, a firm grasp of the material I was about to browse.\r\n\r\nI would feel confident and comfortable investigating a specific topic, browsing for research material, or exploring new content out of curiosity on the <em>Archive</em>. More than a repository, it is well-developed as a learning tool for those who are new to Whitman scholarship.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 1','Though the Walt Whitman Archive seems well designed for researchers at all levels of expertise, it strikes me as particularly well-suited for students or for others who may enter the site with limited knowledge about the author and his works. A significant advantage is the clean and inviting appearance of the layout at all levels of the database. The interface is wonderfully uncluttered, making exploration simple and unintimidating.','inherit','open','open','','130-revision-31','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',130,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/130-revision-31/',0,'revision','',0),(3146,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','In the following section I would like to reflect on some questions about the nature of digital resources, humanities scholarship and the uses to which such material may be put. One of these is the still-contentious issue of whether the creation of such resources is regarded as scholarship in itself or as a way of facilitating the work of other scholars. Even the most recent studies indicate that opinions still remain sharply divided about whether the creation of digital resources such as the Whitman archive is considered to be scholarship and worthy of being rewarded us such by promotion, tenure or in the UK Research Assessment Exercise.[ref]D. Harley, S.K. Acord, S. Earl-Novell, S. Lawrence, and C.J. King, “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines” (UC Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2010).[/ref] There is an understandable tendency in digital humanities to regard this as an outrageous undervaluation of what we do, and to wish to advocate for our work to be better understood. Yet if we can resist this temptation, the question at issue is an important one. The argument against granting digital resources scholarly status equivalent to a journal article, monograph or critical edition must surely be that such resources are performing a service, akin to that provided by an archive or library in the analogue world: that of bringing together useful materials for other scholars to use.\r\n\r\nIt has long been the case that as Melissa Terras has argued so eloquently, in order for our digital work to be valued we must publish in traditional media.[ref]M. Terras, “Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon Digital Humanities” (plenary presented at Digital Humanities 2010 Conference, Kings College London, 2010). http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/2010/07/dh2010-plenary-present-not-voting.html[/ref] However, this is about to change, at least for some of us. In the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework in the UK, digital resources will be assessed in all subject areas as a comparable output to print. This is a vitally important change, carrying with it the implication of a re-evaluation of the scholarly value of the digital; but it places ever more emphasis on the need for us to consider in a rational, not evangelistic, fashion what may distinguish a digital scholarly work from that which renders a service.\r\n\r\nIn this context, nomenclature is not a useful guide. The Whitman project’s creators chose to call their creation an archive, perhaps because like the Rosetti Archive or Valley of the Shadow it contains a collection of various different types of material. However, McGann himself describes Rosetti as a digital edition.[ref]Jerome McGann, “Electronic Archives and Critical Editing,” <em>Literature Compass</em> 7:10 (2010): 37-42.[/ref] While I do not mean to imply that creating and curating an archive in the analogue world is not an intellectual exercise, it is not in itself something for which scholars gain credit. Thus the metaphor would hold that if scholarship done as the result of the use or creation of a physical archive as opposed to in its curation is recognised, then it should be similar in the digital sphere. But is this really appropriate, and does the name ‘archive’ under value the complex nature of what is being achieved in digital resources such as this? Conversely, why is it then that creating a critical edition, whether print or digital form is considered to be a scholarly activity worthy of credit in its own right?\r\n\r\nIt may be because in the print world editors are called upon to make selections and decisions about the best possible copy text, and which textual variants to include. Yet as Gabler argues, as digital technology progresses, digital editions increasingly try to make as many different texts and variants available to readers as possible, to the point that while we may choose to read a literary text in print, the digital medium is most appropriate for complex comparison and study of variants.[ref]H. W. Gabler “Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition,” <em>Literature Compass</em> 7:10 (2010): 43–56.[/ref] The theory of social editions also suggests that the literary text should be presented with reference to its broader social and intellectual milieu.[ref]Jerome McGann, <em>A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism</em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and D. F. McKenzie, <em>Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts</em>(London: The British Library, 1986).[/ref]\r\n\r\nThe Whitman archive provides page images and transcriptions of all six printed editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, as well as manuscript material and newspaper copy. It calls itself an archive, yet could as easily be considered an excellent example of the digital social edition, where users are encouraged to become part of the scholarly process by comparing transcribed manuscripts with the page images or making judgements about which version of a given poem to use. So this is this, an edition (scholarly product) or an archive (service for others)? I would argue that this distinction is no longer meaningful in the digital sphere where boundaries between what we consider to be editions and archives have become blurred.\r\n\r\nEven if we assert that this is a resource for others to use, that could as easily describe a scholarly edition. It is also arguable that the value of such a resource as a scholarly product in its own right is in the choices made about what types of different materials should be brought together, and how contextual material about Whitman’s life, work and even disciples should be presented. Once again, these are just the kind of decisions that editors of scholarly editions also make. As all digital humanists are aware, the act of marking up text is in itself one of scholarly interpretation, which is why it is so vital that the full marked up texts are presented here. This, like the decision to present page images alongside transcription is an act of intellectual openness: it allows other scholars to understand, and if necessary question the decisions that have been made in their presentation. Far from being a sub-scholarly process, digital resources such as Whitman achieve a lustration of the decision making processes that are the silent underpinning of the task of editors or literary scholars in general. In this sense, digital humanities is ahead of many other fields. Science is only beginning to discover the potential of using digital technologies to link experimental data to articles written as a result of its analysis, so that other scholars may use such data to replicate the experiments that are reported on.[ref]C. Bizer, T. Heath, and T. Berners-Lee, “Linked Data - The Story So Far,” <em>International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems</em> (IJSWIS), Special Issue on Linked Data, ed. T. Heath, M. Hepp, and C. Bizer, (forthcoming). http://linkeddata.org/docs/ijswis-special-issue[/ref] Yet resources such as the Whitman archive have been providing this kind of functionality for some time. Texts are the primary data of literary scholars after all.\r\n\r\nThere is, it appears, a good case to be made for the scholarly robustness of digital resources, even those which modestly refer to themselves as an archive. The other question we must address, however, in making the case for our discipline is not just whether such resources constitute scholarly activity, but what kind of new types of research they make possible which would not have been achievable in an analogue world. This is surely the main criterion by which digital humanities must be judged. At present this is much less clear.\r\n\r\nWe know that the digital medium presents many new possibilities for editors and resource creators themselves, but we still know too little about whether research and scholarship themselves are changing as a result of their use. Vanhoutte, for example, has argued that most users simply require a reading text despite the fact that digital resources make a deeper kind of scholarly engagement possible.[ref]E. Vanhoutte, “Every Reader His Own Bibliographer – An Absurdity?” in <em>Text Editing, Print and the Digital World</em>, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (London: Ashgate, 2002): 99-112.[/ref] Even the most recent study of humanities users of digital resources[ref]C. Madsen, “Communities, Innovation, and Critical Mass: Understanding the Impact of Digitization on Scholarship in the Humanities through the Case of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies” (PhD diss, Oxford University, 2010): Chapters 6-7.[/ref] suggests they still make relatively simple uses of digital resources, which they value as a way to access greater amounts of primary texts without the need to travel, to search them faster, and ultimately, overwhelmingly, to read them. Digital humanists may be using computational analysis or visualisation techniques on huge data sets, (for example Dan Cohen’s recent studies of Google Books[ref]Patricia Cohen, “Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers,” <em>New York Times</em>, December 3, 2010, <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/books/04victorian.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all\">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/books/04victorian.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all</a>[/ref]) but it appears that resources such as the Whitman archive may be more transformative of scholarship from the point of view of their creators than of most of their users. Digital Humanities has have moved on from writing evangelising articles and prescribing more training to writing use cases that, arguably, only the converted digital humanists ever read (for example a recent paper on the Monk project[ref]C. Plaisant, T. Clement, R. Vuillemot, S. Steger, and K. Uszkalo, “Use Cases Driving the Tool Development in the MONK project” (paper presented at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, University of Maryland, USA, June 22-25, 2009).[/ref]) Yet the results appear the same, such excellent resources as Whitman may find that only a few expert users make best use of the potential of what they are being offered.\r\n\r\nThis may seem rather a depressing vision, but social networking theory may offer a more positive interpretation of this. We know that in most online communities only 10% of the participants post, the others may read, enjoy, but not take part.[ref]B. Nonnecke and J. Preece, “Lurker Demographics: Counting the Silent” in <em>Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems</em> (Proceedings of the SIGCHI, 2000): 73-80. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=332040.332409&amp;type=series [/ref] It is also an often repeated law of software development that 80% of users make use of 20% of a given application’s features. Thus if we apply such metrics to digital humanities it seems perverse that we somehow feel we have failed unless all users are making the most extensive use of every last piece of potential a resource has to offer. This is why it is important that, as I argued above, digital resources should be accessible for the interested amateur as well as the academic expert and why we should not be disappointed if most people search for quotations for their college assignments or print out poems to use to teach a class, or to read when writing an article. Digital resources have different types of user, and to expect them all to be expert is a kind of techie arrogance of the worst kind.\r\n\r\nSocial networking is also relevant in another context when consider digital resources. The possibilities of a very different kind of social edition are only beginning to be explored by projects such as UCL’s own Transcribe Bentham project. Yet the popularity of crowd sourcing has been proven in science, and we know that users will support, explore and exploit more fully resources that they help to create.[ref]Claire Warwick, M. Terras and C. Fisher, “iTrench: A Study of User Reactions to the Use of IT in Field Archaeology” (paper presented at Digital Humanities 2008 conference, University of Oulu, Finland, June 25-29 2008).[/ref] Thus it may be that an alternative way of involving users in digital humanities is not only to consult them about what they would like to do, design resources so that they can do it as well as possible, or suggest ways in which a resources might be used, but also to encourage them to take part in their creation.\r\n\r\nIt can be seen therefore that the metaphysics wrought by the digital transformations inherent in the Whitman archives take us well beyond the limitations of books. We can appreciate the new potential inherent in digital production for the scholars who produce such resources, but further work remains to be done on exactly how such editions or archives may transform the lives of their users. Part of this work will be undertaken in the coming year by researchers from the INKE project, when we will consider digital scholarly editions. However, in a more general sense it will be fascinating to see whether and how far any kind of crowd sourced content may be integrated into serious scholarly resources such as Whitman. Until that experiment is tried in earnest, we are still some way from utilising the potential of the truly social edition.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 4','In the following section I would like to reflect on some questions about the nature of digital resources, humanities scholarship and the uses to which such material may be put. One of these is the still-contentious issue of whether the creation of such resources is regarded as scholarship in itself or as a way of facilitating the work of other scholars. Even the most recent studies indicate that opinions still remain sharply divided...','inherit','open','open','','127-revision-26','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',127,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/127-revision-26/',0,'revision','',0),(3147,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','It is difficult for me to answer the final question because most of the scholarly material that I need are now available in digital form. As a digital humanist, rather than a literary scholar I have very little need to use original manuscripts or early printed books in my own work. What we know about the research practices of humanity scholars, however, suggests that this resource is extremely well designed for their needs. It does not assume that the digital will replace the need to use physical books and indeed it makes this easier by the inclusion of complex bibliographic data especially about Whitman\'s manuscripts and their whereabouts. It also follows good practice in digital resource creation in that it provides scanned page images of the books and manuscripts thus allowing users to compare the transcriptions provided in digital form to those images of the original analogue text.\r\n\r\nIt is notable that the website provides links to press material and interviews that scholars involved in it have given. This is especially welcome, since we have found that the strongest single correlation between the use of a digital resource and things that its creators do is effective disseminate of information about the project.[ref]Warwick et al., “The Master Builders.”[/ref] The presence of these transcribed interviews shows that its creators have been doing precisely this.\r\n\r\nAnother intriguing potential of the digital medium which the Whitman Archive makes use of is the ability to record the way that a resource has changed and grown. Books of course may have later editions, but few of us compare them in detail in printed form. This resource gives us clear information about its past as well as the way it is changing, since it not only archives two previous versions of the project, but provides a detailed change log, which tells users in detail what has been altered and when. For those of us interested in digital resources, this is an unusual insight into their evolution; for regular users of the material it gives instant information about what has changed since their last visit. Both are very much to be welcomed.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 3','It is difficult for me to answer the final question because most to the scholarly material that I need are now available in digital form. As a digital humanist, rather than a literary scholar I have very little need to use original manuscripts or early printed books in my own work. What we know about the research practices of humanity scholars, however...','inherit','open','open','','125-revision-27','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',125,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/125-revision-27/',0,'revision','',0),(3148,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','It is genuinely difficult to identify serious weaknesses of the Whitman archive. I might suggest a few relatively minor changes to site design. Some of the content is nested quite deeply within the site and requires several clicks to access it. For example in the Disciples section the user is three clicks away from accessing individual poems. Web log analysis suggests that the more clicks a users is required to make, the less likely they are to use that part of a site.[ref]P. Huntington, D. Nicholas, P. Williams and B. Gunter “Characterising the Health Information Consumer: an Examination of the Health Information Sources used by Digital Television Users,” <em>Libri</em> 52:1 (2002): 16-27[/ref] Thus I would suggest that if at all possible some of the intermediate levels of nesting are removed to allow better access to material.\r\n\r\nI also found it difficult to access the newspaper content, since the page images took a very long time to load, on an average home broadband connection. This will not cause problems for academics using the site on fast campus networks. However it might limit its usefulness and usability of these newspapers for members of the public to high school students who might be accessing them on a slower connection.\r\n\r\nI also had some problems using the search function, or rather understanding the results returned. I typed the words ‘metaphysics’ and ‘books’ into the search box as someone searching for the exact origin of a quotation might do. I would have hoped that the first hit in any general search of the archive might have referred me to published works, but instead it took me to instances of the words in criticism, but it was not clear why this happened, and would, I think be counter intuitive for most users. I then clicked on the top hit of published works, and when I clicked on it, this did indeed take me to Leaves of Grass, but only to the title page. Again this would not be intuitive for users accustomed for example to the functionality of commercial resources such as EEBO who would expect to be taken to the exact hit without a need to use the search function in Firefox to locate it.\r\n\r\nThese are technical problems which should be relatively easily corrected. However, I would also like to point out something which while not exactly being a weakness may more correctly be thought of as an opportunity that has not yet been exploited: that is the possibility of involving users more extensively in the Archive’s activities. At present, apart from leaving comments, it is difficult to see how academic users or members of the public interested in Whitman might be able to get involved in the project.\r\n\r\nThe current model for the Archive seems very much that of conventional publishing whereby the team produces content for its users, in a one-to-many fashion. It may be that this is a deliberate decision on the part of the editors: involving users is not appropriate for every digital project. However, if further content is to be created in future, the Whitman archive may consider taking part in some kind of crowd sourcing project. This is still a somewhat unusual method, but is being used by projects such as Transcribe Bentham at UCL to access crowd sourced transcriptions of page images of manuscripts. The use of crowd sourcing and social networking by memory institutions such as museums, has demonstrated that those outside academia are interested in participating in projects about their heritage and history and it may be that there is a potential new way for the Archive to engage with its user community, and to add further content while doing so.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 2','It is genuinely difficult to identify serious weaknesses of the Whitman archive.  I might suggest a few relatively minor changes to site design. Some of the content is nested quite deeply within the site and requires several clicks to access it.For example in the Disciples section the user is three clicks away from accessing individual poems.  Web log analysis suggests...','inherit','open','open','','122-revision-26','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',122,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/122-revision-26/',0,'revision','',0),(3149,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','The Whitman archive is an example of excellent practice in the creation of digital scholarly resources. Its layout is simple, clear and easy to understand and navigate. It is obvious to a user where she is in the site, how to return to where she started from and what its various contents are. This might seem basic, but many resources, perhaps particularly those designed by and for academics tend not to pay enough attention to the basics of good design and usability, and can, as a result be confusing and frustrating for users. Since we make decisions about web pages in fractions of a second[ref]G. Lindgaard, C. Dudek, F. Fernandes, and J. Brown, “Attention Web Designers: You Have 50 Milliseconds to Make a Good First Impression,” <em>Behaviour &amp; Information Technology</em> 25 (2005): 115-126.[/ref] and humanities users, in particular, are easily deterred from using a resource that seems untrustworthy to them[ref]Claire Warwick, M. Terras, P. Huntington, and N. Pappa, “If You Build It Will They Come? The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying the Use of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data,” <em>Literary and Linguistic Computing</em> 23:1 (2008): 85-102.[/ref] it is vital that such simple considerations as the look and functionality of the site should instantly seem comprehensible and comfortable for users.[ref]Dana Wheeles, “Accessibility, Usability and the New Face of NINES” <em>Literary and Linguistic Computing</em> 25:4 (2010). Forthcoming.[/ref]\r\n\r\nOne of the most impressive things about the Whitman archive is that it can be addressed in different ways depending on the level of expertise the user may have: this is by no means common in scholarly digital resources. As someone who was once worked on English, but not American, literature and who now regards herself as a full time Digital Humanist, I know relatively little about Walt Whitman\'s life and career. As a result of using the archive, however, I was able to find a considerable amount of information at an appropriate level. In other words, this was content of a level well beyond the introductory but which was not simply directed at other Whitman scholars and other expert users. This is a surprisingly difficult balance to achieve in any medium but seems especially challenging in the digital one. Many digital scholarly resources tend to assume that their users will be experts in the subject matter. This is not necessarily the case and as a result non-expert users may easily be confused or lose interest.[ref]Warwick et al., “If You Build It.”[/ref] This seems particularly perverse, since digital resources are an excellent way for scholars to engage with those outside academia who share their interests and to encourage those with an interest to become to sufficiently intrigued that they become the experts of the future. If the non-expert user is deterred, how will they make progress to expertise? This is an opportunity that the Whitman archive has fully understood.\r\n\r\nThis does not mean that expert users are neglected, however. The archive has evidently been designed with the needs of its academic users in mind. For example, scholars interested in the language of poetry who may want to run linguistic analysis software on these texts will be particularly please that the full TEI marked up texts are available for downloading from the archive as well as being presented on line. The fact that such texts and detailed markup guidelines are available is an example of excellent practice and also rather unusual. Even some of the best TEI practitioners can seem somewhat nervous of making their markup decisions so public, and many digital humanities resources only make texts available as post-processed XHTML.\r\n\r\nThere is also a clear understanding on the part of the Archive’s creators of the way that scholars prefer to work in digital and physical environments. We know, for example, that however many resources are digitised scholars generally want to see the originals. It is now well known that the more digital resources are available the higher the demand that tends to be for original material. As a result, it is especially welcome that the archive has provided such detailed guidance as to how the original materials may be accessed with full bibliographic records. This means that scholars are able to consult manuscript images and transcriptions before they visit physical archives, which enhances, rather than disrupts their use of archival material. This is a particularly effective use of digital resources to complement physical ones.\r\n\r\nOne of the most impressive features of the Whitman Archive is that documentation about the project is so easy to access. As we recommended in the LAIRAH study[ref]Claire Warwick, I. Galina, M. Terras, P. Huntington, and N. Pappa, “The Master Builders: LAIRAH Research on Good Practice in the Construction of Digital Humanities Projects,” <em>Literary and Linguistic Computing</em> 23:3 (2008): 383-396.[/ref] there is a top level link from the title page to documentation about the project. Under this link are to be found a great variety of very useful documents telling readers and users just about anything they might want to know about the archive in terms of its scholarly principles, history, technical standards and encoding guidelines. It is also clear who its creators are their expertise and how this has been used to take decisions about the creation and direction of the archive. This excellent feature is surprisingly difficult to find in many digital archives, editions or resources. However, it is vital, since users require users require this type of contextual information about the processes used to select and interpret data. In the print medium we have evolved techniques and processes to indicate that a selection and evaluation process has taken place (the footnote, the imprimatur, the authorial biography, the bibliography) In the digital world such things are still developing and the digital still remains, for many academic users in particular, less trustworthy than print.[ref]Warwick et al., “If You Build It.”[/ref]','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 1','The Whitman archive is an example of excellent practice in the creation of digital scholarly resources. Its layout is simple, clear and easy to understand and navigate. It is obvious to a user where she is in the site, how to return to where she started from and what its various contents are. This might seem basic, but many resources, perhaps particularly those designed by and for academics...','inherit','open','open','','117-revision-26','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',117,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/117-revision-26/',0,'revision','',0),(3150,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','At the <em>Whitman Archive</em> we recently have focused on two aspects of Whitman\'s work: 1) what we call his scribal documents—the letters Whitman copied or drafted for others and the notes and summaries he drafted as a clerk in federal government offices; 2) Whitman\'s crossing of international boundaries as seen in translations and in the remaking of “Whitman” as his work is absorbed into other cultural, literary, and political traditions. In what follows I discuss these new developments to illustrate how the <em>Whitman Archive </em>continues to unfold to reveal new layers for development. After more than fifteen years, the <em>Whitman Archive </em>still intrigues me daily—whether it is Whitman’s writings, the people and processes which bring these texts to the public, the way we make them available, or what we (and others) may be able to do with them in the future. I conclude with a consideration of the long-term viability of our project and the crucial matters of funding and open access.\r\n\r\nFor the past two years I have been studying Whitman’s scribal documents and his time in Washington, DC (1863-1873) during and following the Civil War. Whitman worked for the Army Paymaster’s office, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (part of the Department of the Interior), and for the Attorney General’s office. When I first went to Washington to look for documents in Whitman’s handwriting that might have been preserved in the records of these offices, I hoped to find perhaps a half dozen items in the National Archives; seven trips later, I have found close to 3,000.[ref]This research was prompted in part by the Whitman Archive’s recent grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commissions to edit Whitman’s literary works and correspondence from the Civil War and Reconstruction era. These documents are now being transcribed and should be fully available within the next two years.[/ref] Thus far, all of the items are from the Attorney General’s Office. These scribal documents are crucial for understanding Whitman’s Washington years, his position in this particular office, and the influence of this work upon his literary development.\r\n\r\nOne document in Whitman’s handwriting, on an envelope of the Attorney General’s Office, says in its entirety:\r\n<blockquote><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Memoranda</span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">pardon</span> applicants Sept 8-9 -1865\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">also</span> the negro-suffrage\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">also position</span> of the President</blockquote>\r\nThe stationery might suggest that these are notes Whitman made to himself about work in the Attorney General’s office. But are they, and how can we know? Perhaps they are notes about issues Whitman wanted to consider as he was composing “Democratic Vistas.” After all, anyone who has worked with Whitman manuscripts knows that many of his letters and literary manuscripts were written on this type of office stationery and other repurposed pieces of paper. I draw attention to this document not because it is the most powerful of the scribal documents (if it is one[ref]It may be significant that this document was not found where most of the scribal documents have been discovered, in the National Archives, but instead in the Charles E. Feinberg collection at the Library of Congress.[/ref]). I highlight it, in fact, because of its liminal status: we can not determine whether this is a literary or a scribal document, a document written for Whitman\'s own purposes or for the purposes of others. As such, it challenges in a useful way the boundaries between literary and scribal documents.\r\n\r\nImagining a firm wall dividing these areas of life for Whitman is misleading. At times, Whitman used his office address as his literary postal address, and he worked in the office at night (the heat and lighting were important benefits). Moreover he first gained his clerkship with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who recommended him on literary and patriotic grounds.[ref]See the letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Salmon P. Chase, 10 January 1863 available at http://whitmanarchive.org/biography/correspondence/cw/tei/nar.00002.html[/ref] And it was because Whitman’s Blue Book (his personal and very heavily revised copy of the third edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>)<em> </em>was found at his government desk that he lost his job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. James Harlan, Secretary of the Interior, judged the book to be immoral, though Whitman’s allies staunchly defended it and helped him to secure a new post in the Attorney General’s office. During his Washington years, Whitman\'s literary and clerical lives regularly occurred in the same physical locations and no doubt out of related emotional and psychological circumstances.\r\n\r\nOne of the challenges in studying the scribal documents is to figure out what impact Whitman’s work in a series of low-level government positions had on his creative life. To date, critics have almost entirely ignored his ten years of labor in Washington offices. How should we understand and treat the scribal documents? In most cases Whitman acted not as author but as a conduit for the words and thoughts of others. Thus, it could be argued that these documents should not be featured in an archive centrally concerned with Whitman’s writings. If his intellectual contributions to scribal documents are unclear and likely minimal, perhaps these documents should be excluded altogether from the <em>Whitman Archive</em>, or at least not prioritized.[ref]It is not clear yet—we need more time to study this trove of documents—how exactly the Attorney General’s office functioned. Did Whitman merely transcribe a clean copy from a draft written by someone else? Did he sometimes generate the letter based on an outline of points provided by another, or based on comments made in conversation to him? Certainly some of those who supervised him recognized his intellectual capacities. James Speed, for example, sought Whitman’s aid when he prepared an oration dedicating a bust of Abraham Lincoln.[/ref] It could be further argued that we should concentrate our finite time on making available additional known Whitman-authored documents (e.g., his journalism or short stories or novel, <em>Franklin Evans</em>). On the other hand, the scribal documents are potentially more revealing to scholars than such Whitman-authored documents, both because of the quantity of information and because the scribal documents were previously altogether unknown. Scholars may lack perfect access to Whitman’s journalism, short stories, and novel, but they do have reasonably good access for the time being. The same is not true for the scribal documents, and, if the <em>Whitman Archive </em>does not work on these materials, they are likely to remain buried, unavailable to enrich future biographical and critical studies.\r\n\r\nWhitman\'s experiences in Washington offices have rich implications. In Washington, Whitman was an actor near the epicenter of government efforts to reshape the nation in the aftermath of war. [ref]Rosemary Graham mistakenly argues that “for the most part . . . Whitman spent these postwar years as an observer.” See “Attorney General’s Office, United States,” in <em>Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia</em>, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland, 1998).[/ref] In his day job as an anonymous clerk, he and others in the office of the Attorney General dealt with postwar experiments with civil rights, war crimes, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, battles over land claims in the west, and an assortment of other matters. He treated closely related matters while revising <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and drafting his probing cultural analysis “Democratic Vistas.” His network of friendships in Washington offices also shaped his ability to get government jobs and to advance his literary career. For example, Whitman sent a copy of his “Proud Music of the Sea-Storm,” published in the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> in February 1869, to an acquaintance named Julius Bing,[ref]Julius Bing (dates unknown) served as the clerk of the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment in 1867 and 1868 and ghostwrote the 1868 report “Civil Service of the United States” before being appointed diplomatic agent for Crete later that year. A major advocate for reform of the Civil Service, Bing wrote a series of articles on the civil service for the <em>North American Review </em>and <em>Putnam’s Magazine</em> in 1867-1868. For more on Bing, about whom little is known, see Art Hoogenboom, <em>Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement 1865-1883</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), especially 40-49.\r\n\r\nAlthough Whitman must have sent at least one letter to Bing, since Bing thanked Whitman for sending a copy of the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> that included Whitman’s “Proud Music of the Sea-Storm” (the poem was published in the February 1869 issue of the magazine), no additional correspondence between Bing and Whitman has been identified to date.[/ref] a clerk of the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment in 1867 and 1868. In response, Bing wrote a lengthy letter urging Whitman to write a poem about the Child Crusades. The poem was attempted by Whitman but never realized as such (Whitman’s notes on the topic and trial lines can be found in the Thomas B. Harned Collection of the Library of Congress). To the best of my knowledge, this aborted poem has not received any critical commentary, but I think it is well worth study because it is a rare instance of Whitman, in effect, collaborating on a poem, and it also shows him addressing an international issue of the remote past, but one with continuing resonance in his time and in our own.\r\n\r\nThe scribal documents also help shed light on Whitman’s increasing interest in international issues in his later writings—his work in the Attorney General’s office meant that he, quite literally, had his hand in international incidents involving Canada, Mexico, Ireland, France, Britain, Spain, China, and many other countries. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> recently has focused increasingly on international issues in more direct ways, too. Since most people in the world first encounter Whitman in a language other than English we are attempting to better serve that audience. We currently provide translations of Whitman\'s work into German, Spanish, and Russian; translations into Ukrainian, Portuguese, and Yiddish are far along in development. In addition, we are in conversation with scholars about expanding our work into Chinese, Polish, Italian and other languages soon. It is fascinating to see what happens to Whitman when he crosses linguistic and cultural borders and becomes absorbed in another milieu. This interaction often illuminates both the hosting cultural tradition as it comes to terms with Whitman as well as the ways that American audiences have interpreted Whitman\'s works.\r\n\r\nOne of the strengths of the <em>Archive</em>, related to the digital nature of our work, is the ever-evolving team that has built and continues to build the project. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> has become a training ground and laboratory for the next generation of literary scholars and digital humanists. The staff of the <em>Whitman Archive</em>—largely made up of graduate students—get hands-on experience and serve as apprentices of sorts. These graduate students serve as assistant editors and often attain positions of considerable responsibility within the project. I have been delighted by the diverse career paths our “alumni” have taken: one has gained a faculty position in a library; another works at the vice-chancellor level at a major university in an information technology role; some have gained tenure track positions at research-oriented institutions; others are employed at digital centers in various roles. Collectively they have demonstrated a range of ways to succeed professionally; their lives offer hope in a time of difficult job prospects in the humanities.\r\n\r\nAlthough the creation of the <em>Whitman Archive</em>—a vast and still rapidly growing resource—has cost a great deal of money, we are able to make it freely available. One of the strengths of the <em>Archive</em>, then, stems from success in garnering local support from several key institutions, a steady stream of grant support from four different federal agencies, and donations from various individuals and private foundations. These fundraising efforts culminated in the creation of a permanent endowment to support ongoing editorial work. We realize that this ongoing work could potentially reach far into the future, and we strive to make our work reusable for later scholars (so they can improve upon it) by documenting our practices and decisions. Having an endowment obliges us to think in longer terms than is common for scholars: we have the burden and advantage of a project that should continue well beyond the lives of anyone now working on the <em>Whitman Archive</em>.\r\n\r\nFor end users a key advantage of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is that it makes freely available what would otherwise be difficult, costly, or impossible to access. The nature and extent of our audience are changed profoundly because the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is freely available, changes that are all to the good in my view. Instead of working with a small audience of specialist scholars in mind, we now also consider our large, varied, international audience as well. The importance of open access can hardly be overestimated. For us, open access means more than making content freely available for reading and analysis; it means making content freely available for reuse and repurposing. We willingly share files and have people work with them and reuse them in projects as long as those projects also are open, and they cite the <em>Archive</em>.\r\n\r\nDespite what the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> has accomplished thus far, we recognize that some features are lacking and that other features should be improved. The current search capability of the <em>Archive </em>is fairly limited and fails to take full advantage of our encoding, a key contribution to Whitman scholarship. Upcoming developments make me optimistic about leveraging the <em>Archive</em>’s rich encoding in more sophisticated ways, however, and experiments in indexing and searching the <em>Archive</em> are ongoing. The text base we’ve developed and continue to develop will lend itself to experimentation—by us and others, and we have rightly spent fifteen years developing the corpus so that it can be read, researched, and used by a variety of audiences employing a range of technologies and methodologies. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> also provides for the study of a new scholarly form, thanks to our documentation including encoding guidelines, history, and essays about the <em>Archive</em>. What seems clear is that the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is one of a group of projects that are demonstrating how the print-based monumental scholarly edition can be reimagined and advanced in the form of an electronic archive.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 4','At the Whitman Archive we recently have focused on two aspects of Whitman\'s work: 1) what we call his scribal documents—the letters Whitman copied or drafted for others and the notes and summaries he drafted as a clerk in federal government offices; 2) Whitman\'s crossing of international boundaries as seen in translations and in the remaking of “Whitman” as his work is absorbed into other cultural, literary, and political traditions.','inherit','open','open','','114-revision-29','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',114,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/114-revision-29/',0,'revision','',0),(3151,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','A comparison of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> to its print predecessor, <em>The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman</em>,[ref]When The New York University Press ceased publishing the Collected Writings in 1984, they had issued twenty-two volumes, many more than were originally projected. Despite the magnitude of what had been accomplished, many of the original objectives of the edition were not met. For example, the poetry manuscripts and periodical printings of Whitman\'s poetry were never collected, and the long-promised journalism, projected to appear in six volumes, never appeared in the NYUP edition. Peter Lang eventually published two volumes of the journalism in 1998 and 2003, though these volumes cover only the period from 1834–1848, leaving Whitman\'s innumerable contributions to periodicals in the final forty-four years of his life still to be edited. The Peter Lang volumes are produced so as to replicate the appearance of the New York University Press edition, though the editors of that series (all now deceased) did not oversee their production. Arguably, the Peter Lang volumes constitute volumes 23 and 24 of the Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, and a 25th volume, treating recently discovered correspondence, edited by Ted Genoways, was published by University of Iowa Press in 2004.[/ref] helps to clarify the advantages and disadvantages of digital and analog forms. Despite the many achievements of the print volumes in the <em>Collected Writings of Walt Whitman</em>, this editorial project ultimately became quite chaotic. Whitman\'s outgoing correspondence, for example, has been the subject of editorial treatment since the 1960s, when Edwin Haviland Miller edited five volumes of Whitman’s correspondence. Miller arranged the volumes chronologically, and with the fifth volume, he published an addendum of sixty-five letters that he uncovered even as the first four volumes appeared. Although this addendum meant that some letters would always be out of order, the complications of working with this single addition or revision were not insurmountable. Nine years later, however, a sixth volume appeared, and it included one hundred additional letters, complicating the organization further. Then, in 1991, Miller published fifty new letters in the <em>Walt Whitman Quarterly Review</em>,<em> </em>and Ted Genoways published third and fourth supplements of nearly one hundred letters in the journal<em> </em>in 2000 and 2002. In 2004, the University of Iowa Press issued a seventh volume of Whitman\'s correspondence, which included all of Whitman\'s letters found since Miller\'s sixth volume. In the end, there were nearly as many supplements as the number of Miller\'s original volumes, and over the last six years, even more letters have surfaced. This one aspect of the <em>Collected Writings</em> illustrates how print editions can devolve into disorder, even when the initial aim is to bring order to the literary record. I am confident that after the <em>Whitman Archive</em> “finishes” work on the correspondence previously unknown or lost letters will surface somewhere. It is a great strength of the digital medium that when this happens, new material can be integrated seamlessly into the collection.\r\n\r\nIn a related way, our “Integrated Guide to Walt Whitman’s Poetry Manuscripts” aggregates facsimile images of all surviving drafts of Whitman’s poems regardless of their geographical dispersion. The digital images and integrated guide bring order to the manuscripts and, for most purposes, erase the need to travel in order to study the manuscripts. (Individual repositories may have labeled an item by its first line or its working title, but we have created an overarching virtual order for all repositories, and we have labeled each individual poetry manuscript with what we call a “work” identifier based on the title of the last published version of the manuscript.) The high quality color facsimiles available on the <em>Archive</em> offer significant advantages for the study of the manuscripts; the images can be manipulated in photo-editing software to help us decipher otherwise illegible handwriting or zoom in on features of the ink, paper, and other characteristics such as pinholes, in order to offer new readings about the manuscripts and their relationships to one another.\r\n\r\nDespite the integrated guide’s utility, however, it remains an under-utilized resource. Indeed, one of our challenges has been how to make sure people find the content and tools most useful for their research questions. Perhaps a downside of bringing together so much material in one place is that doing so can inadvertently re-bury material (in some places, the organizational hierarchy of the <em>Archive</em> is fairly flat or one-dimensional, and in others, it is quite structured). It is hard to get a sense of the magnitude of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> at a glance. The more we enrich the site, the more challenging it becomes to keep the interface simple, straightforward, intuitive, and sufficiently informative.\r\n\r\nBooks are sometimes more convenient in various ways. The failure of a server does not make individual volumes of the <em>Collected Writings</em> temporarily disappear. For most practical purposes, the <em>Collected Writings</em> as a resource stays stable (and carries all the advantages and disadvantages of that condition). Print can rely on nicely developed interface and design that evolved over centuries, but digital conventions are still relatively young and therefore sometimes neither clear nor aesthetically pleasing.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 3','A comparison of the Whitman Archive to its print predecessor, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman,[ref]When The New York University Press ceased publishing the Collected Writings in 1984, they had issued twenty-two volumes, many more than were originally projected. Despite the magnitude of what had been accomplished, many of the original objectives of the edition were not met. ','inherit','open','open','','111-revision-28','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',111,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/111-revision-28/',0,'revision','',0),(3152,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','Some weaknesses of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> are a function of its stage of development. We haven’t had time to accomplish all that we have envisaged. For example, we would like to provide a good introduction to the site, so that users at various levels of knowledge—and our users <em>are</em> quite varied—can get oriented quickly when they first encounter the site. In addition, given our scope, it is not surprising that many content areas are underdeveloped: we provide all known contemporary reviews of Whitman’s writings, but a person could legitimately ask why have we not, then, provided other essays about Whitman from the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, all out of copyright, which might shed even more light on Whitman than do these reviews. Only in the last few months have we made available any of Whitman’s prose, and we have done little thus far with Whitman’s journalism. We value his journalism and have made plans for editing it, but we have not had time yet to see significant results in this area.\r\n\r\nCurrently, the <em>Whitman Archive</em> also lacks sufficient integration of material across the site. For example, if Horace Traubel mentions a specific Whitman poem in <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em>, we should offer ready access to that particular version (and possibly also other versions of the poem). We could also link the poem to commentary, including contemporary reviews, books from the University of Iowa Press Whitman series, and articles from the full run of the <em>Walt Whitman Quarterly Review</em>. Individual essays from <em>WWQR</em> currently are linked from citations in the criticism bibliography, and we hope to integrate more fully this journal of record for Whitman studies with the <em>Whitman Archive</em>. This more complete integration of content, like most of the changes I would suggest for the <em>Archive</em>, will be undertaken as time allows.\r\n\r\nWe are also currently investigating the application of Web 2.0 features and functionality for the <em>Archive</em>, in hopes of enabling collaboration and interaction with users of the <em>Archive</em>.<em> </em>Ideally, we would like to harness the enthusiasm and knowledge of our users. As a first step in this direction, <em>Archive </em>staff at the University of Texas at Austin are exploring user accounts for the <em>Archive</em>, accounts which would allow users both to contribute to the <em>Archive</em> as well as to create their own collections of materials. Early work is also under way on a database designed to track the what, when, and how of Whitman’s reading—that is, what did Whitman read, when did he read it, and how do we know that he read a particular text? We believe that our user community could help us populate the database. Similar resources could be integrated into the <em>Whitman Archive</em> and include user-generated information: accounts of Whitman appearances in films, television shows, advertisements, and novels, for example. Users might also participate in attribution studies. Whitman is known to have contributed to the <em>Armory Square Hospital Gazette </em>during the Civil War<em>. </em>No complete run of the newspaper exists, however, and no pieces bear Whitman’s signature. User-collaborators could help us track down scattered issues of this rare paper as well as generate a lively and informative debate about the authorship of unattributed essays in the paper. As a scholarly site, we must strike the right balance between openness and scholarly rigor, and a fundamental question for us is how to encourage participation while insuring that quality control checks remain in place. We also hope to allow users with accounts to work with the texts and data of the <em>Whitman Archive </em>in order to explore their own interpretations. Sophisticated users might access our XML and XSLT files in a work area where they could alter the encoding and stylesheets in order to pursue particular interpretive goals.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 2','Some weaknesses of the Whitman Archive are a function of its stage of development.  We haven’t had time to accomplish all that we have envisaged.  For example, we would like to provide a good introduction to the site, so that users at various levels of knowledge—and our users are quite varied—can get oriented quickly when they first encounter the site. In addition, given our scope, it is not surprising that many content areas...','inherit','open','open','','109-revision-26','','','2012-10-15 23:06:30','2012-10-15 23:06:30','',109,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/109-revision-26/',0,'revision','',0),(3153,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:50','2012-10-15 23:06:50','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery tool for exploring what he calls “the wild and unpredictable intersections of the data that the interface allows us to generate.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1609-10.[/ref] The prospect of having the Archive uncover meaningful relationships between texts is, indeed, an exciting one. As Jonathan Freedman notes, the “ability to link heterogeneous subjects and find once-occulted connections and interconnections makes scholarship invigoratingly fun.”[ref]Jonathan Freedman, “Whitman, Database, Information Culture,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1597.[/ref] As a frequent user of the Whitman Archive, I’ve experienced this “invigorating fun” first-hand, and I look forward to the Archive including more texts by and about Whitman, and incorporating more discovery tools like Brian Pytlik Zillig’s <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/resources/tools/index.html\">TokenX</a>.\r\n\r\nAs someone working on digital humanities projects of my own, however, I’m as interested in understanding what it takes to create such tools for discovery as I am the end-user experience of having digital tools make “unpredictable” and “invigorating” discoveries on my behalf. For the remainder of this essay, I’m going to share some thoughts on what has to happen on the back end of a digital project in order to make an otherwise rigorously structured digital artifact feel “wild and unpredictable” to its users. I’ll start with Kenneth M. Price’s description of the necessary labor that goes into structuring data such that it will yield surprising results for end users: \"A database is not an undifferentiated sea of information out of which structure emerges,” Price writes. “Argument is always there from the beginning in how those constructing a database choose to categorize information.\"[ref]Price, “Edition.”[/ref] To an end user who searches a database and finds an interesting juxtaposition between a handful of the hundreds (or thousands) of total documents on that database, it can seem as if those documents have emerged out of “an undifferentiated sea of information.” The reality, however, is far different.\r\n\r\nWhen Price alludes to the process that the creators of a database go through as they decide how to “categorize information,” he makes it clear that whenever a user generates a surprising set of juxtapositions between documents it is because someone, somewhere, at some point, has meticulously categorized those documents in such a way that a search engine (or other text analysis tool) will be able to process those documents in a meaningful way. Jerome McGann, who has also commented on the rigorous process of structuring data that is required to create a digital archive, writes that “databases and all digital instruments require the most severe kinds of categorical forms. The power of database—of digital instruments in general—rests in its ability to draw sharp, disambiguated distinctions.”[ref]Jerome McGann, “Database, Interface, and Archival Fever,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1590.[/ref] As both Price and McGann indicate, what can feel like a surprising juxtaposition for the end user has, to a certain extent, already been determined in advance through a time- and labor-intensive process of marking-up, encoding, or otherwise categorizing data.\r\n\r\nThis is not to say that those who structure the data for a digital archive have already anticipated every possible search string that users could ever imagine. On the contrary, what interests me as both the user and the creator of digital archives is the effect by which this “sharp, disambiguated” structuring of data can, indeed, produce juxtapositions that archivists could never have predicted. The fundamental preconditions for cultivating such serendipitous discoveries, it seems to me, are a large enough data set and a sufficiently intelligent schema for categorizing that data (not to mention the time, money, software, hardware, human resources, and expertise required to process and categorize the data in the first place).\r\n\r\nAllow me to cite an example from outside the realm of digital archiving to illustrate what’s involved in structuring data that yields serendipitous juxtapositions. Pandora Radio is an Internet music service whose goal is to create customized, online radio stations for its users. This customization is based on the work of the Music Genome Project, which has categorized the musical attributes of thousands of different songs. Taking into consideration “everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and . . . singing and vocal harmony,” the Music Genome Project assigns anywhere between 150 and 400 different descriptors to a single song. These descriptors are based on both objective criteria such as the types of instruments used in the song or whether the song is in a major or a minor key, as well as more subjective criteria such as whether or not a song features “Acoustic Sonority,” “Prevalent Use of Groove,” or a “Wet Recording Sound.\"[ref]“The Music Genome Project,” Pandora Radio, accessed December 2, 2010 <a href=\"http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml\">http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml</a>.[/ref] (These descriptors are referred to as musical “genes,” but they could just as easily be called metadata or tags.) Visitors to Pandora Radio type in the name of a song that they like, and then based on the attributes that have been pre-assigned to that song, Pandora will play other songs with similar attributes. The promise of Pandora is that once a database of songs is categorized according to a controlled vocabulary capable of being processed by a computer, listeners will be pleasantly surprised to discover songs that they never knew they already liked. (These songs are, of course, available for purchase so that no serendipitous discovery goes un-capitalized.)\r\n\r\nI cite this example within the context of the Whitman Archive not necessarily because Pandora Radio provides a model for digital scholarship of nineteenth-century literature, but because the process of categorizing songs for the Music Genome Project is remarkably similar to the archivist’s effort of structuring data in such a way that it can produce surprising results for the end user. For both Pandora and the Whitman Archive, then, the goal is to reach the tipping point where methodical structuring becomes unexpected discovery, where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and structured data takes on forms that the structure-ers never quite imagined. I like to think that this tipping point where structure yields serendipity is similar to the moment in a fractal pattern where geometry becomes art, the moment where a rigorous, mathematically defined structure takes on an aesthetic quality that was never explicitly intended by the mathematical code that undergirds it, but that is nevertheless absolutely dependent upon that code for its very existence.\r\n\r\nMy hope as both the user and creator of digital archives is that we can come to a better understanding of the processes of classification and naming that are involved in these efforts structure data in meaningful ways. Scholars of literature are already comfortable thinking about the power of language to represent—and even create—the world around us. We already have at our disposal a variety of theoretical apparatuses for thinking about the power of language to name and define the world, from the formalism of the New Critics to the semiotics of the Post-Structuralists and even the focus on the materiality of language in Book History scholarship. What we need to add to this list of theories and methodologies is a more sophisticated understanding of taxonomy and categorization. This will not only require an interdisciplinary rendezvous with librarians and scholars of information architecture, but it will also demand that we do the cultural history of such seemingly mundane phenomena as filing cabinets and accounting ledgers. Compared to the work being done by digital humanities scholars in the areas of data visualization, text mining, social networking, and geo-spatial analysis, studying the history of cataloging, sorting, and organizing seems to be the intellectual equivalent of a trip to Target to buy hard-plastic storage bins when you’d rather be at the Apple Store picking up an iPad. Nevertheless, everything that we want digital technology to do to help us better understand literary texts depends upon our ability to properly name, sort, and categorize the information that we put into a computer. We do ourselves a disservice to ignore or even minimize this crucial stage of the process.\r\n\r\nOne of the most frequently quoted statements about the future of digital scholarship in the humanities comes from Jerome McGann, who wrote that “the digital technology used by humanities scholars has focused almost exclusively on methods of sorting, accessing, and disseminating large bodies of materials. In this respect the work has not engaged the central questions and concerns of the [humanities, which is] . . . . the exploration and explanation of aesthetic works.”[ref]Jerome McGann, <em>Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web</em> (New York: Palgrave, 2001), xi-xii.[/ref] I don’t want to make a straw-man out of McGann’s powerful insight, but I can’t help but take issue with his claim that the “sorting” of texts will not aid us in our goal of using digital technology to explore and explain aesthetic works. Before a digital tool of any kind can work with a text in any way, the elements of that text must be sorted, classified, and categorized according to a schema that the computer will understand. This is not to say that scholars in the digital humanities should put aside their text visualization projects and their geo-spatial analyses in order to do the Dewey Decimal system one better, but rather that the foundational tasks of organizing and classifying should more completely theorized and more intimately woven into the fabric of digital scholarship.\r\n\r\nBy attending to the tedium of taxonomy we may begin to feel like nineteenth-century scriveners rather than twenty-first century techies. Like those scriveners of old, we may prefer not to spend our time with such mundane things. Nevertheless, if we wish to generate the kinds of “wild and unpredictable intersections of . . . data” that “makes scholarship invigoratingly fun” we should embrace what actually promises to be a fascinating conversation about the history of taxonomy, structure, classification, and form. This conversation will take us through the Library of Alexandria, the Great Chain of Being, medieval bestiaries, Wunderkammer, the Mundaneum, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, cryptography, tarot cards, and Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Every time we tag, code, or classify a text for a digital archive, we are participating in the long history of human classification systems. The better able we are to understand that history and to situate ourselves within it, the better understanding we will have of our digital archives and what they can do.','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  4','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery to...','inherit','open','open','','144-revision-39','','','2012-10-15 23:06:50','2012-10-15 23:06:50','',144,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/144-revision-39/',0,'revision','',0),(3154,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','Archive co-director Ed Folsom once noted that printed editions of Whitman’s works have had the unfortunate tendency of becoming irrelevant the moment that scholars unearth a new letter, manuscript, or biographical fact about the poet. The Whitman Archive, however, has the benefit of being able to change and adapt as often as new discoveries are brought to the attention of the directors. In such an environment, Folsom writes, “All users are potential co-editors.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Projecting Whitman: The Evolution and Remediation of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman,” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed December 2, 2010 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00003.html.[/ref] I love the notion that everyone is a “potential co-editor” of the Whitman Archive, and I\'d like to consider how the Archive could make better use of its digital form as a way to more fully realize this potential. I would never advocate for crowd-sourcing the Archive on the model of sites like Wikipedia, but I would like the Archive directors to take more seriously the implication that “All users are potential co-editors.”\r\n\r\nI have a tremendous amount of respect for how the Archive directors have responded to public criticisms from other scholars. In a 2007 <em>PMLA</em> forum on the Whitman Archive, for example, Meredith McGill took the Archive to task for decontextualizing the poems that Whitman had published in newspapers and magazines by clipping the poems from their original sources and excluding all the other articles, poems, and advertisements that appeared alongside Whitman’s poems.[ref]Meredith L. McGill, “Remediating Whitman,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007):1594.[/ref] The Archive promptly responded to this criticism by including the entire page of the periodical where a Whitman poem appeared. But not every user of the Whitman Archive can get the attention of the Archive directors in the pages of <em>PMLA</em>. And even those fortunate enough to do so don\'t have a mechanism for providing additional feedback to the Archive directors regarding their response to suggestions for improvement. I wonder, does McGill think it was sufficient to include the complete newspaper page where a Whitman poem appeared, or would she rather that the Archive include the rest of the issue is well? Or would she even prefer a link to some external site that hosts the entire run of the paper?\r\n\r\nThe Archive could make better use of its digital form by providing “user accounts or other community-hosting capabilities,” as Matt Cohen has recently suggested.[ref]Cohen, “Design and Politics,” 241.[/ref]Integrating Web 2.0 components such as user accounts and a comment section to the Whitman Archive would have considerable implications for the Archive: while a comments section would give scholars such as McGill a much more dynamic venue for engaging with the Archive\'s directors, it would also make the Archive feel less like a scholarly edition of Whitman\'s works and more like a Facebook fan page. Nevertheless, Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has already said that “scholarly edition” doesn\'t necessarily describe what the Whitman Archive actually is. Instead, Price has characterized the Archive as something more like a workshop, or, as he puts it, a “group of people who are now joined together for a common purpose.”[ref]Kenneth M. Price, \"Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What\'s in a Name?\" <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed December 2, 2010 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00346.html.[/ref] If that group of people could also include the hundreds (if not thousands) of scholars, students, and non-academic readers who visit the Archive every day, it would not only make better use of the digital medium, but it would also go some distance toward fulfilling Folsom\'s claim that “All users are potential co-editors.”','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  3','Archive co-director Ed Folsom once noted that printed editions of Whitman’s works have had the unfortunate tendency of becoming irrelevant the moment that scholars unearth a new letter, manuscript, or biographical fact about the poet. The Whitman Archive, however, has the benefit of being able to change and adapt as often as new discoveries are brought to the attention of the directors.','inherit','open','open','','142-revision-31','','','2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','',142,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/142-revision-31/',0,'revision','',0),(3155,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','From my perspective as a scholar, the greatest strength of the Whitman Archive is that it provides free and open access to the essential texts for studying the life and work of Walt Whitman. I’ve consulted the Whitman Archive every time I’ve ever written about Whitman, whether it’s to check the precise wording of a text, to follow the life cycle of a poem as it moves from manuscript to print and on through the various editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, to identify the location of a primary document in a brick-and-mortar archive, to read nineteenth-century reviews of Whitman’s writing, or to search the Archive’s exhaustive database of Whitman scholarship. Using the Whitman Archive is like having immediate access to shelves and shelves worth of valuable (and often expensive) books.\r\n\r\nWhen I was a graduate student I burned through a toner cartridge printing out page images of the antebellum editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> from the Whitman Archive. The poems in these early editions went through radical revisions from one edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> to the next, and I really needed to get to know these poems in order to make the argument I was making in my dissertation about Whitman’s antebellum period. Being able to access these poems in various states gave me a much better sense of Whitman’s pre-Civil War career than the variorum of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>—with its decontextualized snippets from the antebellum editions—was able to give me.\r\n\r\nI’ve also recently learned that the Whitman Archive is more than just a repository of raw materials that scholars can mine for the resources we need to tell our stories about Whitman’s life and work; rather, the Archive is a storyteller in its own right. Here’s an example: <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden,</em> the multi-volume collection of Whitman’s conversations with his friend Horace Trauble, was not yet available on the Archive when I was writing an essay a few years ago about Elizabeth Porter Gould, the editor of a gift-book edition of Whitman’s poems called <em>Gems from Walt Whitman</em> (1889). Without the benefit of a searchable, digital edition of <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em> I had to find references to Gould the old-fashioned way: cribbing from Ed Folsom’s footnotes—and, of course, slogging through the poorly indexed volumes themselves. Since I published the essay, however, I’ve had the opportunity to search for Gould in the Archive’s edition of <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em>, and the effect of having the Archive’s search engine generate a list of these references had a remarkable impact on me. The essay that I had written demanded a certain amount of focus in order to make the argument about gender and authorship that I wanted to make, and I was always left with a touch of regret that I never had the chance to unfold the fascinating relationship between Whitman and Gould as fully as I would have liked. Opening up different tabs in my browser to read each of these references on the Whitman Archive, however, allowed me to track the progress of their relationship as they negotiated their competing goals for what <em>Gems from Walt Whitman </em>should be. I’m proud of the story that I was able to tell about Whitman and Gould, but I’m also glad to know that the Whitman Archive can tell that story another way.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Whitley  1','From my perspective as a scholar, the greatest strength of the Whitman Archive is that it provides free and open access to the essential texts for studying the life and work of Walt Whitman. I’ve consulted the Whitman Archive every time I’ve ever written about Whitman, whether it’s to check the precise wording of a text, to follow the life cycle of a poem...','inherit','open','open','','138-revision-29','','','2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','',138,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/138-revision-29/',0,'revision','',0),(3156,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','I would like to see the Whitman Archive make more transparent the choices that go into deciding how texts are marked-up and encoded. Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has written that the “ongoing decision-making” regarding the mark-up of texts on the Archive is “interpretive rather than mechanical,” and that this interpretive coding “adds intelligence to an electronic text . . . mak[ing] it robust and illuminating as a tool for analysis.”[ref]Kenneth M. Price,\"\'Debris,\' Creative Scatter, and the Challenges of Editing Whitman,\" in <em>Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present</em>, ed. David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 67.[/ref] I admire Price’s forthright admission that marking-up a text for the digital medium is not merely a change in format, but an act of interpretation. As someone who visits the Whitman Archive on a regular basis, I’d like to have a clearer sense of what kinds of decisions—and, therefore, interpretations—are being made as texts are digitally encoded, and, specifically, what those decisions reveal about the textual condition of Whitman’s works.\r\n\r\nThis request is not based in a suspicion of any kind that the Archive directors are placing a biased interpretation onto Whitman’s poetry as they encode it for presentation on the Archive; rather, my request is based in a desire to following along on the process of discovery that Matt Cohen describes as an integral part of digital encoding: “As a student in the 1990s, doing transcription and basic encoding of Whitman documents, I learned a lot about textual structures that I had not encountered in seminars; when discussing these observations with the project directors, sometimes new areas of concern or future development would emerge.”[ref]Matt Cohen, “Design and Politics in Electronic American Literary Archives,” in <em>The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age</em>, ed. Amy Earhart and Andrew Jewell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 233.[/ref] The Archive is already a valuable resource for gaining access to Whitman’s works; it can also be a resource for learning about how Whitman constructed his texts in manuscript and in print by eavesdropping on the process by which these texts are reconstructed for the digital medium.\r\n\r\nDirectors and editors at the Archive have already begun to provide the kind of running commentary on the encoding process that I would like to see more of. Brett Barney, the Senior Associate Editor of the Archive, has written an insightful essay about his encoding the 1867 edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> that is available on the Archive, and both Price and Folsom have published, in a number of different venues, provocative essays that detail the lessons about textuality that they have learned from preparing texts for the Archive.[ref]Brett Barney, \"‘Each Part and Tag of Me is a Miracle: Reflections after Tagging the 1867 Leaves of Grass,” <em>The <em>Walt Whitman Archive, </em></em><em>accessed December 2, 2010 </em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html</a>. Additional essay by Folsom and Price are also available at http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/index.html.[/ref] Currently, the Whitman Archive makes available the TEI-encoded XML source files for the major texts on the Archive as well as the Archive’s encoding guidelines and related DTD files. As much as I value this peek into the inner workings of the Archive, the process by which these XML files are created—the “ongoing decision-making” Price refers to—is as important as the product itself. The Archive could benefit from more self-reflexive commentaries on the encoding process, perhaps using Barney’s essay as a model. The recently added <a href=\"http://wwa-changelog.blogspot.com/\">WWA-Changelog</a>—a blog connected to the Archive that details the changes that editors make to files once they are posted online—could provide a model for how such commentaries could be more fully integrated into the experience of working with the Archive.','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley 2','I would like to see the Whitman Archive make more transparent the choices that go into deciding how texts are marked-up and encoded. Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has written that the “ongoing decision-making” regarding the mark-up of texts on the Archive is “interpretive rather than mechanical,” and that this interpretive coding...','inherit','open','open','','140-revision-27','','','2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','',140,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/140-revision-27/',0,'revision','',0),(3157,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','As the <em>Archive</em> is very aware, the Whitman corpus presents a particular set of linguistic challenges to the reader that seem to appeal for a more open and flexible form than what is offered by their original editions of print. Digital forms often work well for such challenging texts because they provide a-linear approaches of exploration and analysis, but in my opinion the <em>Archive </em>has not yet developed into a format that takes full advantage of this possibility. Though I was able to navigate around the site easily from any point with the aid of the menu across the top of the page and the breadcrumb links, my general experience of the Whitman archive was that it remains limited by linear arrangements of data. The structure of the database, which is dominated by a hierarchical folder system, can make it difficult to stir up new configurations of information: the volume of the repository is still impressive, but in this case a physical archive might allow better non-linear entry.\r\n\r\nAnd yet, the hierarchical folders and the linear browsing process they suggest also garnered my praised in an earlier question, due to their “clean” and “intuitive” qualities. While limiting to the agile Whitman scholar, these features are very advantageous in one’s initial foray into the <em>Archive</em> because they present easier options and clear delineations.\r\n\r\nPhysical archives fit well into folder systems while maintaining an element of the random and a-linear because each page is a potential entry-point. Web pages, however, favor top-view and selection rather than the act of flipping through or diving in at a random point. The <em>Walt Whitman Archive </em>has moved past the limitations of print in many ways already; if there was a way to reincorporate some of the random browsability of the physical archive, without sacrificing the intuitive appearance, the experience might benefit. This might be accomplished by exposing more metadata on the surface of the site in order to cut new cross-sections through the repository; for example, making it possible to browse by year rather than type and title of work, or organizing clusters of data by theme or biographical reference. If the editors can find a way to take the information out of its silos across the site, their users might enjoy an even more fluid and organic approach to the text.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 3','As the Archive is very aware, the Whitman corpus presents a particular set of linguistic challenges to the reader that seem to appeal for a more open and flexible form than what is offered by their original editions of print. Digital forms often work well for such challenging texts because they provide a-linear approaches of exploration and analysis, but in my opinion the Archive has not yet developed...','inherit','open','open','','134-revision-34','','','2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','',134,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/134-revision-34/',0,'revision','',0),(3158,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','While I found the basic navigability of the site to be well-designed, I wish that it was easier to discover new things in the database. The obvious place to begin would be the search tool, which is very limited. While more robust features are promised for the future (according to a notice at the top of the page), the current tool falls short of expectations for a database of this size and quality. Discovery of new material depends upon the possibility of encountering random bits of data and the ability to arrange information in new permutations such that new synchronies arise; currently, the <em>Archive </em>is not well configured for such active contact between the reader and the raw data. In addition to random data, an improved search tool would also better allow the user to conduct specific paths of inquiry. For a hypothetical student with an assignment to follow, it can be important to view thematic cross sections rather than vertical stacks of data under folders.\r\n\r\nThe addition of tagging would help to increase the fluidity of the site. In order to maintain the rigor of its editorship, the <em>Archive</em> might prefer to use tags that are curated by a team rather than a ‘folksonomy’ approach that opens up tag authorship to all users and lets the system grow on its own, minimally governed. The functionality of the search tool might improve, also, by responding to terms that have demonstrated relevance to users rather than random syntax in content.\r\n\r\nNavigation between pages on the <em>Archive </em>is smooth and intuitive; however, it could benefit form the implementation of same-page navigation tools. Many of the pages on the site feature very long texts, which require excessive scrolling and are difficult to read in a non-linear fashion. A hyperlinked table of contents at the top might be a first step, but many of the long critical articles do not have obvious breaking points and would not divide naturally into a table. Eventually, it would be good to see a more sophisticated tool for navigating through content on the same page—as it is, a database that deliberately embraces the fluidity of digital forms traps the reader in a format that is ironically dependent upon rigid sequence and imitated print forms. Reducing this rigidity would greatly improve the user experience.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 2','While I found the basic navigability of the site to be well-designed, I wish that it was easier to discover new things in the database. The obvious place to begin would be the search tool, which is very limited. While more robust features are promised for the future (according to a notice at the top of the page), the current tool falls short of expectations for a database of this size and quality.','inherit','open','open','','132-revision-28','','','2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','',132,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/132-revision-28/',0,'revision','',0),(3159,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','It is difficult for me to answer the final question because most of the scholarly material that I need are now available in digital form. As a digital humanist, rather than a literary scholar I have very little need to use original manuscripts or early printed books in my own work. What we know about the research practices of humanity scholars, however, suggests that this resource is extremely well designed for their needs. It does not assume that the digital will replace the need to use physical books and indeed it makes this easier by the inclusion of complex bibliographic data especially about Whitman\'s manuscripts and their whereabouts. It also follows good practice in digital resource creation in that it provides scanned page images of the books and manuscripts thus allowing users to compare the transcriptions provided in digital form to those images of the original analogue text.\r\n\r\nIt is notable that the website provides links to press material and interviews that scholars involved in it have given. This is especially welcome, since we have found that the strongest single correlation between the use of a digital resource and things that its creators do is effective disseminate of information about the project.[ref]Warwick et al., “The Master Builders.”[/ref] The presence of these transcribed interviews shows that its creators have been doing precisely this.\r\n\r\nAnother intriguing potential of the digital medium which the Whitman Archive makes use of is the ability to record the way that a resource has changed and grown. Books of course may have later editions, but few of us compare them in detail in printed form. This resource gives us clear information about its past as well as the way it is changing, since it not only archives two previous versions of the project, but provides a detailed change log, which tells users in detail what has been altered and when. For those of us interested in digital resources, this is an unusual insight into their evolution; for regular users of the material it gives instant information about what has changed since their last visit. Both are very much to be welcomed.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 3','It is difficult for me to answer the final question because most to the scholarly material that I need are now available in digital form. As a digital humanist, rather than a literary scholar I have very little need to use original manuscripts or early printed books in my own work. What we know about the research practices of humanity scholars, however...','inherit','open','open','','125-revision-28','','','2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','',125,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/125-revision-28/',0,'revision','',0),(3160,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:45','2012-10-15 23:06:45','In this issue, five contributors address how hands-on work with archives has been incorporated into undergraduate education.  They each answer a series of five questions to report on what they have done, what worked or not, and what value bringing archives into the classroom, or the classroom into the archive, has.  We invite you to read through the responses by author or by question.','Undergraduates in the Archives','','inherit','open','open','','1500-revision-53','','','2012-10-15 23:06:45','2012-10-15 23:06:45','',1500,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1500-revision-53/',0,'revision','',0),(3161,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:50','2012-10-15 23:06:50','In this issue, five contributors critique and analyze <em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/\" target=\"_blank\">The Walt Whitman Archive</a></em> by answering four questions about this digital archive. We invite you to read through the roundtable by question or by author.','The Walt Whitman Archive','','inherit','open','open','','336-revision-27','','','2012-10-15 23:06:50','2012-10-15 23:06:50','',336,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/336-revision-27/',0,'revision','',0),(3162,19,'2012-10-15 23:10:10','2012-10-15 23:10:10','In this issue, five contributors address how hands-on work with archives has been incorporated into undergraduate education.  They each answer a series of five questions to report on what they have done, what worked or not, and what value bringing archives into the classroom, or the classroom into the archive, has.  We invite you to read through the responses by author or by question.','Undergraduates in the Archives','','inherit','open','open','','1500-revision-54','','','2012-10-15 23:10:10','2012-10-15 23:10:10','',1500,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1500-revision-54/',0,'revision','',0),(3300,19,'2012-10-19 04:49:56','2012-10-19 04:49:56','In this issue, five contributors address how hands-on work with archives has been incorporated into undergraduate education.  They each answer a series of five questions to report on what they have done, what worked or not, and what value bringing archives into the classroom, or the classroom into the archive, has.  We invite you to read through the responses by author or by question.','Undergraduates in the Archives','','inherit','open','open','','1500-revision-60','','','2012-10-19 04:49:56','2012-10-19 04:49:56','',1500,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1500-revision-60/',0,'revision','',0),(3163,19,'2012-10-15 23:10:16','2012-10-15 23:10:16','In this issue, five contributors critique and analyze <em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/\" target=\"_blank\">The Walt Whitman Archive</a></em> by answering four questions about this digital archive. We invite you to read through the roundtable by question or by author.','The Walt Whitman Archive','','inherit','open','open','','336-revision-28','','','2012-10-15 23:10:16','2012-10-15 23:10:16','',336,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/336-revision-28/',0,'revision','',0),(3164,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:42','2012-10-15 23:06:42','The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room. A researcher sits at her table, inert. An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes. (Can we get a close-up of a box, please, to show the label with the long call number? [note type=\'figure\' number=\'1\'] <iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ykY6moIaDE?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\"></iframe> A staged archival encounter.[/note]) The archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back. The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt. She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading. (Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.) Now she is reading, and now she truly comes alive; she bends towards the papers, taps her forehead in thought. A sheaf of blank paper and a pencil appear on her table, and she begins taking notes. Her fingers fly—and soon, so do the pages she is writing upon. Caught up in eddies of excitement, they swoop to the ceiling and around the room and down to the floor, where they fall together into perfect piles. Bindings sprout from the outer strata; the pages sew themselves into bright, tight, hard-cover books. These the archivist gathers up and places on the shelves that line the room, next to other books and gray boxes.\r\n\r\nI may have it backwards: in other versions of the fantasy, it is the archive that is first animated by the presence of the researcher, a Dr. Coppelius who waves a pencil and sets the dusty boxes to dancing. But either way, the archival imaginary posits a symbiotic relationship between researcher and source, a photogenic pas de deux that leads to a finished scholarly product. This work, in turn, enters the archive for the next generation of researchers; it might even be taken apart again so that its secret ingredients (notes, drafts, letters) can themselves be served up in a series of boxes. Such a strangely private form of publication it creates, the coupling of researcher and source.\r\n\r\nWhat Freudian trauma results from witnessing this sight? Only the harm that myth inflicts. This primal scene is a fiction, a dream of perfect union between researcher and source that ignores, first of all, the full cast of characters. What about the archivist, who is rendered invisible? What about all those within and without the archive, upon whose labor—acquiring, preserving, organizing, reading, cataloging, describing, interpreting, analyzing, debating, teaching, writing, editing, digitizing, referencing and publishing—the current project depends? More a barn dance than a pas de deux: an archival encounter is an enactment of social authorship long before the researcher enters the room. [note number=\'1\']See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) on the idea of social authorship, which could be described as “the dialectic between the historically located individual author and the historically developed institutions of literary production” that help create a work, eg, printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).[/note]\r\n\r\nBut even a barn dance is much too mannered a metaphor. The sketch above misleads us more generally about the experience on the ground. Doing time in an archive is often tedious, uncomfortable and bewildering. For librarians, there is the struggle to promote and simultaneously protect what you have; the difficulty of fitting unruly materials into arrangements and workflows; and worries about space and time—where to put it all, how to address your backlog. For researchers, there is the struggle to locate the archives you need and what matters to you inside them; the uncertainty created by unruly data; and worries about time and space— how to access what you need during your research trip, how to record and organize the information you gather. At both ends, the archival encounter is counter-cinematic and erratic, days of monotonous sifting and dead-ends punctuated by one or two, or maybe zero, hidden moments of vivid, peculiar joy.\r\n\r\nSo archival research does not fulfill its ideal outline. So what? Who cares? Why dredge up the fantasy? Because the fantasy continues to structure our archival encounters—what we expect and undertake in the reading room, what we allow it to mean. Twenty years ago, Alice Kaplan observed that “conventional academic discourse requires that when you write up the results of your archival work, you tell a story about what you found, but not about how you found it. The less the seams of your findings show, the better your discoveries lend themselves to use by others… tell[ing] these stories breaks their spell and violates the spirit of the archives.” [note number=\'2\']Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.[/note] With a few word changes, the same could be said about what counts as professional archivist discourse: the impersonal, neutral genre of the finding aid, for example, should say what is in a collection, but should not discuss what is confusing or missing in it, or the problems it posed in processing. [note number=\'3\']See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).[/note] Despite the growing recognition that this sequestration is never completely possible—that the material conditions and social relations of the archive shape the work we do in it—that work continues to be represented in professional and scholarly publications as if it is. Despite the recent call to move to the fore “the backstage of the archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated” in order to support historiography “not merely [as] a project of fact-retrieval” but as “a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention,” the “backstage” stays in the background. [note number=\'4\']Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7-8.[/note] Antoinette Burton may be correct that “many if not most historians operate under the assumption that history is a highly interpretive act,” but this belief is not yet reflected in the archival encounter: the ways that researchers (not just historians) and librarians report their experiences with primary sources; the ways that librarians and researchers work together; the ways librarians and researchers regard the involvement of “non specialists.” [note number=\'5\']Burton, 8. Burton notes that “whether historians concede or fully countenance the impact of such contingencies on their work is another question. They rarely speak of them, and even more rarely do they do so in print” (8). Her books recuperates some of those archive stories but this effort, I’ll suggest below, is hampered by other kinds of obligations.[/note] While the advent of digitization and electronic resource sharing has revolutionized the research landscape, making primary sources public in unprecedented ways, there remains in the archive a habitus of secret knowledge—the “spell” that Kaplan is loathe to break. This is not necessarily intentional. It is rather the effect of layering recent shifts in technology, theory and professional definition onto older foundations: petrified conditions, relations, expectations and systems that continue to operate in part through the enduring power of fantasies about research. What we have in the archive is a stratified groundwork that still governs our archival encounters.\r\n\r\nBut, you will object, the archive has already changed. Now we have the “archival turn”—the scholarly interest in the archive not just as a source of evidence but as an epistemological mode. Surely, this attention to the constructedness of the archive has led to a revealing reconsideration of what actually goes on inside an archive; surely, as a result, those archaic fantasies have diminished. Have they? In what follows, I begin by unearthing one stratum of the archival turn, the decade of the 1990s, as represented by three texts: Kaplan’s essay mentioned above, “Working in the Archives” (1990) [note type=\'figure\' number=\'2\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-369\" title=\"fig 2 kaplan\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photocopy of Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s “Working in the Archives.”[/note]; Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994/95) [note type=\'figure\' number=\'3\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-372\" title=\"fig 3 Derrida\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.[/note]; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'4\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-373\" title=\"fig 4 steedman\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust.[/note] [note number=\'6\']Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).[/note] A cross-examination of these three texts reveals a pattern of interests, a set of efforts to defy customary practices—but only, it turns out, “in theory.” While certain practices are challenged in these texts, they leave mostly intact the older strata of archival research fantasies and conventions. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman do not dislodge the forces that organize the actual archival encounter.\r\n\r\nHow does this happen? Why is practice so stubborn? We need another take on archival practice: not practice in theory, but practice in action; not the 1990s, but now; not in terms of textual patterns, but in terms that suit the subject: the terms of the archival encounter itself, and the eccentric, anachronistic and even monotonous experience it generates. My second look at practice will take the form of a series of vignettes about a real-life archive, the George Peabody Library in Baltimore. While this narrative structure may seem to recreate the division of labor between theory and practice, my hope is that—by giving practice the last word—we’ll be in a better position to synthesize the two.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>I. “The library doubles as a detective’s office.” [note number=\'7\']Kaplan, 114.[/note]</strong>\r\n\r\nThe archival turn could be dated to the founding of “scientific” history in the mid-nineteenth century, or to the development a century later of the quantitative methods of the Annales School, or to other evidence-based movements in the history of history, but what is generally meant by this phrase corresponds with the formation of cultural studies and the use of the archive as a conceptual category. That is, the archival turn has to do with the notion of the “figuration” of the archive, a parallel decline in its empirical authority and a related expansion of its relevance within domains that are not exclusively historiographic, like art, literary criticism, textual studies, media studies and information studies. [note number=\'8\']See the use of the term in, for example, Carolyn Hamilton et al, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). This turn is partially construed as a “move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject,” but also by the earlier metaphorical interest in “the archive” that goes back to the 1980s (Stoler, 44-45) and by Foucauldian descriptions of archives as “‘monuments to particular configurations of power” (Hamilton, qtd. in Burton, 6).[/note] But it is not irrelevant that a devotion to archival methods precedes by many decades contemporary theories of the archive; if the archival turn lacks a precise origin, this (we will see) is completely in keeping with its own preoccupations.\r\n\r\nKaplan therefore represents in some ways an arbitrary beginning for this cross-examination—clearly the archive as a conceptual category predates 1990—but her article does initiate something new: the recognition that there is something called an “archive story” that must remain hidden in order for the official “results” to function authoritatively. In admitting this bit of professional legerdemain, and in telling her own archive story in a prestigious scholarly journal, Kaplan not only commits the violation she prohibits but also contradicts it. Through its publication, Kaplan’s own archive story is elevated to the status of “results”—a kind of research that shadows conventional academic discourse. Indeed, Kaplan notes, such “fables” of research “can be analyzed like a text,” a “mixed up genre” that combines the “redemptive detective fiction” with the epic and the dime novel. [note number=\'9\']Kaplan, 106, 107.[/note]\r\n\r\nKaplan’s archive story thus marks a distinctive moment in the archival turn—one which gained its most prominent authorization in 1994, with a paper that Jacques Derrida delivered (in English) to a conference sponsored by the Freud Museum, the Courtauld Institute and the Société International d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychoanalyse. Called initially “The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression,” the lecture was revised and published in 1995 as Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title Archive Fever. As Carolyn Steedman points out in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, however, this work that has been assigned a seminal status in archival studies “for the main part… is not about archives at all, but is rather a sustained contemplation of a work of history, of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991),” itself a sustained contemplation of Moses and Monotheism—which (according to Steedman) Yerushalmi examines through Freud’s description of the work as a “‘historical novel,’ or a kind of historical story,” undertaken “in order to understand the period of baroque anti-semitism through which he was living.” [note number=\'10\']Steedman, 3.[/note]\r\n\r\nDizzy yet? Let’s undertake a more careful reading of this splatter pattern of intra-references—or, to stick with the archaeological metaphor, let’s call them groups of potsherds buried in the 1990s layer of the “archival turn.” Digging down to reassemble them reveals a set of interests with special implications for archival practice.\r\n\r\nThe most prominent group of sherds to note are the fragments of disciplinarity: the inter-, multi- or perhaps simply anti-disciplinarity of the texts, authors and audiences caught up in these three archival addresses. Kaplan, an American scholar of French literature, calls the post-theory exchange between literature and history a “cross-pollination of desire between historians and literary critics” undertaken “with the curiosity and energetic passion of collectors.” [note number=\'11\']Kaplan, 107-108.[/note] Steedman, a British historian, performs this cross-pollinating process without comment: her epigraph to Dust is from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, one chapter treats George Eliot’s Middlemarch in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. [note number=\'12\']Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.[/note] Derrida, a French philosopher, produced a work that has been exceptionally mobile across disciplines, forms, languages and professional domains. He gave his initial talk to an audience drawing on three different kinds of institutions; Mal d’Archive was published in book form in both French and English, but also made an intermediate appearance as an essay in the journal diacritics. All of these texts, it seems, respond to the provocations of the archive—to the materials and circumstances of discovery—rather than to the disciplinary distinctions that arguably divide the archive from itself.\r\n\r\nArchive Fever has become a founding document even though, as Steedman notes in the very beginning of her book, many in Derrida’s audience “knew the ‘archival turn’ to be [already] well underway” at the time of his talk. [note number=\'13\']Steedman, 2.[/note] As it happens—and this is the second group of sherds I see—these three essays have in common an investment in or a problem with origins, especially with the failure of origins. Derrida, for example, defines archive fever as a kind of Freudian death drive—a drive to fix and preserve which at the same time “works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own ‘proper’ traces… [it] is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic… the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.” [note number=\'14\']Derrida, 14. [/note] If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. [note number=\'15\']The disorder of origins makes frequent appearances in the essay but one example will make the point—in the “Preamble” where he recounts how he titled the talk that he had not yet written and was to give at the Freud Museum. The “Preamble” starts with his reflections on the word “impression,” which has several simultaneous registers of meaning for him. One of these is the “scriptural or typographic” register: that of the graphic impression that marks a substrate. In English, “impression” is phonetically related to “repression” and “suppression,” key words in the Freudian vocabulary, translated respectively from the German Verdrängung and Unterdrückung. English, that is, retains the rhyming relationship of the two German terms, and “impression” in this company comes to have a vaguely Freudian meaning as well. But in French, Verdrängung is “refoulement,” which means something more like expulsion, a driving away. The Freudian sense of the French word “répression” has been reserved for Unterdrückung. So English “repression” defines a phenomenon that must be distinguished from the French “répression.” These translational shifts “directly concern the structures of archivization,” Derrida says, “because they touch on the topic differences and thus on the location of the substrates of traces\" (Derrida, 23). In other words, how do you classify concepts whose meanings shift across languages? Where do you store them in a disciplinary grammar—or in an archive? How do these asymmetrical linguistic structures shape the establishment and extension of a new science? For Derrida, the difference between “repression” and “répression” is “enough to disrupt the tranquil landscape of all historical knowledge, of all historiography, and even of all self-consistent ‘scholarship’” (Derrida, 23).[/note]\r\n\r\nOrigin failure appears both as deliberate performance and as unintentional oversight in these essays. Derrida stages his own inability to get past “go”; with an introductory section, and subsequent sections sub-titled “Exergue,” “Preamble,” “Foreword,” his essay functions, Steedman notes, like a “primer offering instruction in the principle of deferral.” [note number=\'16\']A short notice called “Priere d’inserer,” published only in the French book version, carried the bulk of an argument for which there was no room in the lecture. Steedman, 7.[/note] For all her insight into Derrida’s titling adventures, however, Steedman’s title is marked by its own origin aporia. While her first chapter is devoted to Archive Fever—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, Dust, seems more indebted to the last sentence of Kaplan’s essay, published five years before Derrida’s: “Usually there is no mother lode, no original manuscript to be retrieved—the gold is all in the dust.” [note number=\'17\']Kaplan, 116.[/note] Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. [note number=\'18\']Kaplan also begins her essay with a brief consideration of the “arche,” the Greek and Latin term for the public records office, which is a major starting point for Derrida. Is he borrowing from her, or is she borrowing from him, given that this sort of etymological investigation was an established signature of Deconstruction?[/note]\r\n\r\nKaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” [note number=\'19\']Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.[/note] These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” [note number=\'20\']Kaplan, 103.[/note] Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” [note number=\'21\']Kaplan, 104.[/note] Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'5\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/note] It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”\r\n\r\nWhile Kaplan’s research mystery resolves neatly, the truth about archives is that they are full of gaps, mistakes and excesses: in the words of one of the CDJC librarians, “‘ici on trouve tout’—there’s some of everything here”—but not, one could add, all of anything. [note number=\'22\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] Kaplan’s essay ends by nullifying both her detective story success and her “dry archival report,” by recognizing the disorder on which both of these narratives are unsteadily perched: “The archive is constituted by these errors, these pieces out of place, which are then reintegrated into a story of some kind.” [note number=\'23\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] “A story of some kind”? So much for “results.”\r\n\r\nKaplan sets us up to perceive one final potsherd pattern common to these three essays. If origin-less disorder is the order of the archive, it is a disorder that is generated out of human loss—a disorder that joins the body and the material world. The archive is always predicated on historical violence of some sort, whatever is censored, erased, excluded, trumped up, used up, misplaced, conquered, killed. Moreover, the archival categories that mark both the visible victories and hidden defeats do not stay within their walls; the archive is both a repository of existing schemas and a means of perpetuating them in the world beyond. While we might usually think of this disciplinary activity as a pact between the archive and its political authors, Steedman makes it clear that the dilemmas of order shape the archival body in many ways. For example, she takes literally the provocation of Derrida’s title Archive Fever to investigate the illness that researchers contract on the penultimate day of their trip to the archive: prompted by the anxiety of the task that remains unfinished, they end their research with night-sweats and head-aches. But what seems like a strangely specific malady is transformed by Steedman into a far-reaching social symptom: by relating the researcher’s “archive fever” to the terrible diseases suffered by tanners, skinners and other workers in the trades associated with paper and leather, Steedman expands our sense of who is in the archive—the bodies whose specialized labors populate our libraries with books, the many kinds of expertise the archive consumes.\r\n\r\nFor Derrida, the relation between the material archive and its human architects focuses on one kind of “graphic mark,” a particular “private inscription”: circumcision as the archival signature that is also the signature of patrimoine, with Freud’s relationship to his father as his main example. [note number=\'24\']Derrida, 19.[/note] It is perhaps not a coincidence that the body in question in both Kaplan’s and Derrida’s archive is Jewish, for that is a body that has come to symbolize the destructive power of classificatory regimes. Despite her contention that the private passions motivating research must be kept secret, Kaplan is fascinated by the “missing person stories” at the CDJC: by the “quantity of people who are there for personal reasons,” the survivors of occupation or deportation or camps, or their descendants, quietly looking up their lost ones or noisily dropping off their memoirs. [note number=\'25\']Kaplan, 113.[/note] This disorganized crowd of dead and living bodies tries to meet up with an equally disorganized crowd of materials—individual letters, trial transcripts, pamphlets, newspapers, first-person accounts, books, photographs, lists. The monumental task of match-making, the librarians’ work, is never complete. More papers are always generated or declassified or discovered, different human questions and needs emerge. The tidy choreography of the research fantasy, where the detective always finds her man, is not so much in evidence; what we have instead is corpora in excess of existing categories.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\nKaplan, Derrida and Steedman open up the archival body. They show us how paper meets the press of flesh; they make us feel just how intimate it is. [note number=\'26\']This interest in the corporeal dimensions and effects of order, its human and non-human components, has in common with their other gestures—an experimental attitude towards conventional disciplinarity and attention to the priority of disorder—the circumstances of the academic humanities in the 1990s. Since the archival turn came out of the ascent of cultural studies and allied intrigues in the 1970s and ‘80s, the circles in the Venn diagram of these ventures will necessarily overlap. We could also say that the archive took off when it did precisely because it made a clever new container for these preoccupations, thick in the humanities atmosphere at the time, where they were distilled and united. [/note] But for all their revelations about the limits of discipline and the multiplicities of disorder in the archive, these texts do not disclose the specific methods of engagement that led to their existence. While Kaplan offers up her own archival victory and outlines several other such stories, she still insists on their marginalization. [note number=\'27\']“Were the story of how you got the story really to be told inside the book, it would interrupt or complicate the narrative so much that no results could be understood or even perceived. Every story of success in the archives is emotionally charged, for only the most extreme emotions can drive people to the drudgery, to the discomfort, of sitting and sifting through dog-eared documents, manuscripts, microfilms. To reveal those emotions would not only gum up the narrative, it would threaten its credibility, by showing on what thin strands of coincidence, accident, or on what unfair forms of friendship, ownership, geographical proximity, the discoveries were based” (Kaplan, 104).[/note] If these texts are not concerned with actual practices in the archive or changes in its methodologies, what do they tell us?\r\n\r\nFirst, they suggest one reason for the perpetuation of myths about the archive. While Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are eager to show how archival materials do not conform to disciplinary distinctions—an enthusiasm related to other disruptive tendencies in late twentieth-century humanist scholarship –they seem less cognizant of a related phenomenon: the archive does not obey strict professional divisions, either. In Kaplan’s library-as-detective’s-office metaphor, the scholar is the detective, but does the “Eureka” moment belong only to the scholar who pieces together a narrative? What about the people who prepared those pieces? The archivist is still missing in action. Likewise, these essays do not dwell on missing boxes, illegible papers, neglected citations. There are no descriptions of archival slogging, no admissions that some materials failed to be relevant. And of course, there are no prescriptions for a different order. It is not the main aim of Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman to effect an evolution of practice; archival turnistas are not interested in disorder in order to re-order. But it is worth remembering that it is not in their professional interest as scholars to make their practices more transparent.\r\n\r\nSecondly, along the same lines, these texts inform us of the duplicity of speculative practices that reveal but cannot live out the instability of their archival mandates. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are put into the position of saying, “Yes, the archive is biased, idiosyncratic and treacherous—but the observations I draw from it are flawless.” [note number=\'28\']Derrida, unlike Kaplan and Steedman, makes no claims to work inside an actual archive, unless we consider Yerushalmi’s book as a kind of archive. But the fact that the essay was written self-consciously for presentation at the Freud Museum suggests that it was made out of an archive indirectly—in its construction, if not in its contents. [/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, these texts suggest why archival studies that attempt to be explicit about the messy nature of the archive have become instead “archive studies.” In more recent works like Refiguring the Archive (2002), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (2005) and Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), the archive appears as a subject in its own right. Although the archival scenarios that are put into play in each of these books incorporate different disciplines—art, history, anthropology, literature, post-colonial studies—they have essentially created a new discipline. “Archive studies” is something we might, in the taxonomy of disciplines, see as the love-child of cultural studies, history and archival methodology. Moreover, this new discipline has in common with other humanities disciplines a complete blindness about its professional investments; it does not register much awareness of the professional investments of librarians, archivists, curators and “non-specialists,” or invite insights from those perspectives. Perhaps this is inevitably what happens when academics must give legitimacy to something new, which in turn reflects the pressures of scholarly communication: a topic must be delineated in conventional terms in order to merit publication. [note number=\'29\']Perhaps this is also the moment to ask why we—I—have been using the term “archive” all along, with its statist resonances, rather than the term “collection,” which has institutional but also personal resonances. Does “archive” bring us closer to recognizably “serious scholarship”?[/note] But it is also true that in these more recent books, which openly investigate the archive’s power-politics, the disorderly drift of the archive and its hybrid corporeality have mostly been bent towards a particular narrative about the archive as an agent of history rather than as a set of ongoing practices. It is as if the historical archive has been assembled in ways that reflect and reiterate power relations, but the contemporary archive has not; it is as if the researcher’s own research travails remain a transparent layer over the body of work that it constructs. [note number=\'30\']Of course, this is precisely what Derrida meant about the “death drive” of the archival impulse. Archive Stories is something of an exception; researchers speak openly here about themselves as researchers. It is interesting, however, that this book—like Steedman’s—doesn’t cite Kaplan’s essay as a precursor text despite the clear titular link.[/note]\r\n\r\nPerhaps it would also be fair to note that, if archival studies are now being formulated as an interdisciplinary discipline called “archive studies,” this might be just another stage in the turn. It might be that what comes next reconfigures the premise of disciplinarity and the promise of disorder, with a different approach to the human/non-human interactions that the archive documents and realizes: a more diffuse and multi-vocal set of practices in place of a new field. One way to imagine this approach would be to fully embrace Kaplan’s idea of the archive story as an account of what one hoped for, looked for and found, what one did and did not do, in the archive—an account loosed from the quarantine she advocates. Some very basic genre precedents for the archive story do exist; the bibliographic essay and the methodology statement, for example, have played an important role in many disciplines in the past and still do in some. Instead of a para-textual nod towards that archive story (in Kaplan’s sense), why not create a parallel text written collaboratively by the researcher(s) and the librarian(s), or by one person acting in both professional capacities, that runs alongside the official “results”? Or in a set of expanded notes that address not just the “what” and “where” but the “how” and “why” of sources, which are lifted from their small-type, bottom-of-page basement up into the light? Or—to add yet another layer—parallel texts that also offer room for exchange with other researchers, archivists and even interested “non specialists,” like collectors, bibliophiles and fans?\r\n\r\nIf it is hasn’t been clear already that I have scrupulously avoided so far the other kind of archive, the digital archive, it will be now. What I am imagining would be far too complicated to produce or consult in print, but would not be at all difficult to organize as a digital object—as an archive in its own right. By avoiding the digital archive up to this point, I have also finessed the fact that our current archival research methods are completely reliant on the digital archive, along with the development of online research tools and electronic instruments of data discovery and organization. Those conditions probably bear the most responsibility for making the archive visible as something that warranted a “turn” in the first place. Even Derrida refers in each version of Archive Fever to the computer on which he is currently composing, predicting that email will not only totally transform the archive as he knows it, but will make his own essay obsolete.\r\n\r\nIn short, we already have in place both the theory and the media that will make it possible to enact a radical new archival practice. We have in place what we need to integrate the archive story into the archive itself, while making it visible as a new form of “results.”\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>II. The library doubles as a librarian’s office.</strong>\r\n\r\nI could end here, with a triumphant firing of the starter pistol and a rousing cheer. But that would be a bit disingenuous, given that the starter pistol for both the archival turn and the academic use of the internet actually went off decades ago. So the question remains, what stands in the way of the practical enactment of the archival turn’s speculative insights? I’d like to engage this question by following Kaplan’s example (but not her main claim): through some archive story-telling about the George Peabody Library. These three vignettes, identified as “typical” through conversations with my colleague Paul Espinosa, illustrate the intractable formations that present-day archival encounters come up against.\r\n\r\n<strong>1. The Perils of Description.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A group of Russian speakers visits the Peabody Library. The dozen men and women sit down around the screen that Paul has set up. He narrates a brief slide-show about the Peabody’s history, then leads them to a table where a dozen books from the collection have been laid out in cradles. He tells them about each book: what it is, why it is interesting. Each phrase of his presentation is painstakingly translated by the group’s leader into Russian.</blockquote>\r\nWhen academic and community groups visit the Peabody, my colleagues and I draw upon a standard tour-guide’s repertoire to describe it. We explain that George Peabody was a tradesman cum financier cum philanthropist who decided in 1857 that Baltimore needed a cultural institution to support the arts and learning. We talk about the evolution of the Peabody Institute, the four-part athenaeum that resulted, with its art gallery, lecture series, conservatory and free, public, non-circulating library. We discuss the model of philanthropy that George Peabody initiated and its wide-ranging influence. We point out the signal features of the awe-inspiring architecture of the current library, built to accommodate a rapidly growing collection in 1878. But when it comes to the library itself, as a collection, it is hard to know what to say. How to accurately translate the library’s holdings into a succinct and memorable statement that conveys an appropriate level of detail to different audiences? While it poses specific challenges, the Peabody also exemplifies more general problems of collection description.\r\n\r\nWe do not lack evidence for the evolving contents of the Peabody. We have the two-volume printed list of “desiderata” drawn up by the Peabody’s first librarian, John G. Morris. [note number=\'31\']Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'6\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-6-alpha-index-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-395\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-395\" title=\"fig 6 alpha index\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"484\" /></a>Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).[/note] We have the collections register for several decades’-worth of acquisitions, recording bibliographic information and accession numbers that can still be found on the inside front end papers of many of the books in the collection. We have the librarians’ annual reports to the library trustees. [note number=\'32\']The Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore: The Founder’s Letters and the Papers Relating to its Dedication and History, Up to the 1st January, 1868 (Baltimore: William K. Boyle, 1868); and subsequent Annual Reports, 1869, etc.[/note] We have the library’s first printed catalogue, an unsurpassed achievement when first published in 1883, which listed 100,000 volumes by author and title. [note number=\'33\']Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'7\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-7-print-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-396\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-396\" title=\"fig 7 print cat\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/note] We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'8\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-8-card-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-397\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-397\" title=\"fig 8 card cat\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/note] Now, of course, the library’s collections are represented in an online catalogue that integrates them with other collections in the Hopkins library system.\r\n\r\nThese markers of the collection, however, fail to satisfy some contemporary research queries for reasons that are both practical and philosophical. The transfer of the printed index, organized by author, to the Dewey decimal system, organized by topic, represented a major epistemological shift that facilitated browsing by subject category. But of course, those categories are embedded in historically-bound notions about the subjects and structures of knowledge: Dewey was invented in the 1870s, and the 22 revisions it has undergone since then cannot overcome its essential organizational distortions. For example, the literature range—the 800s—offers only 10% of its categorical space to literatures in languages other than English, Germanic and Romance languages, Greek and Latin.\r\n\r\nIn the case of the Peabody, the Dewey arrangements overlay even older systems of knowledge hierarchy. Should we continue to offer, for example, a description of the Peabody’s “voyages and travels” books? This category represents a Renaissance schematic that was still in service in the mid-nineteenth century; while actual “voyages and travels” were extended by colonial ventures, the category was eventually disbanded. Dewey combined it with geography to make a sub-category of “history.” In keeping active the old-fashioned phrase “voyages and travels,” we are participating in a centuries-long project of euphemism about the material aims and actual activities of colonialism; we are privileging an early phase of the Peabody’s evolution over later phases; we may even be confusing modern researchers. And yet, as one of the topics in Morris’s “desiderata,” a considerable portion of the Peabody’s collection was acquired with the aim of fleshing out that descriptor. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'9\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-9-index-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-398\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-398\" title=\"fig 9 index detail\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"274\" /></a>Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/note]\r\n\r\nYet another classificatory dilemma is expressed by George Peabody’s original statement of the library’s purpose: that it “be furnished in every department of knowledge, with the most approved literature… It should consist on the best works on every subject… to satisfy the researches of students who may be engaged in the pursuit of knowledge not ordinarily attainable in the private libraries of the country.” [note number=\'34\']“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.[/note] The Peabody was founded as a cultural institution for the people of Baltimore, but from the first, this democratic ambition was in conflict with the intellectual aspirations of the first librarians and their desire to facilitate civic “self-improvement.” Morris (a doctor of divinity), his successor Nathaniel Holmes Morison (a schoolmaster and poet), and Morison’s assistant and successor Philip Uhler (who had trained as an entomologist) were all devoted to the nineteenth-century idea of the scholar-librarian. Morison wrote in one annual report that “Education always proceeds from the above downward, from the best to the common minds, from the leaders of the people to the people themselves. Furnish... the foundations of intelligence and thought, and they will... stimulate and improve the whole community.\" [note number=\'35\']Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in George Peabody (1795-1869): A-Z Handbook of the Massachusetts-Born Merchant in the South, London-Based Banker, and Philanthropist\'s Life, Influence, and Related People, Places, Events, and Institutions. . 11 Mar. 2011.[/note] When the Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 in close proximity to the Peabody—in large part to take advantage of the library—the tendency of the librarians to address scholarly needs and “approved literature” over popular desires was given additional momentum. In keeping with these ideas, the Peabody’s librarians kept careful track of their readers’ choices, noting with special caution the numbers of novels that were requested. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'10\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-10-annual-report-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-399\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-399\" title=\"fig 10 annual report detail\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"452\" /></a>Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/note] This schism at the heart of the library’s collecting paradigm was not unique to the Peabody; the question of reading matter—should it offer leisure for the masses or the means of social uplift?—was central to the public library movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. [note number=\'36\']See, for example, Alexis McCrossen, “’One Cathedral More’ or ‘Mere Lounging Places for Bummers’? The Cultural Politics of Leisure and the Public Library in Gilded Age America,” Libraries &amp; Culture 41.2 (2006): 169-188; Paul Sturges, “The Public Library and Reading by the Masses: Historical Perspectives on the USA and Britain 1850-1900,” ; Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, Upon the Objects to be Attained by the Establishment of a Public Library, 12 Dec. 2010.[/note]\r\n\r\nFinally, the Peabody’s “desiderata” acquisitions and librarians’ selections were supplemented by book donations from local elites—bibliophiles with extensive private collections that included incunabula, classical authors in Renaissance editions, expensive illustrated atlases. At the same time, book donations came in from more plebian sources. The Peabody’s growth overlapped with the decline of the local social libraries, and it eventually absorbed some of the books from the Library Company of Baltimore, Robinson’s Circulating Library and several small professional and mechanics’ libraries. And I haven’t even touched on the Peabody’s twentieth-century fate.\r\n\r\nThe variety of philanthropic impulses, resource streams and classification philosophies that have fed the Peabody over the 150 years of its existence has led to a collection that does not so much map the nineteenth-century mind as signal its odd amalgam of popular and scholarly investments. The Peabody’s collection effectively evades succinct description—at least, any kind of description that pretends to be coherent, that is not perforated by its stakes in local history, library history, book history. But more importantly, it suggests the degree to which accident and opportunity and prejudice and wealth and the changing winds of cataloguing rules shape any archive. Description, which should be the most fundamental tool of communication between librarians and researchers, turns out to be utterly elusive. Yet we do not know what to replace them with, these inadequate descriptions, these exercises in stilted and partial translation.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>2. The Researcher’s Progress.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>I am preparing for my class about women and nineteenth-century print culture, which meets in the Peabody; we have reached the part of the syllabus where we look at gift books and annuals. I want students to examine several examples of these literary miscellanies, offering some illustration of their variety, and I have a list of such items that I have used in the past. But since I also want to show the students new acquisitions, I need to refresh my list. I will start with “gift book” as a keyword in the online catalogue.</blockquote>\r\nIn place of perfect and commensurate description—not possible—what we have are cataloguing systems that indexically represent collections through data and metadata that are, as I have already suggested, historically marked and inevitably inconsistent. In the case of the Peabody, these records are further compromised: Dewey cards developed from a nineteenth-century print index do not offer Library of Congress subject terms or detailed tables of contents; they also frequently lack other kinds of information. [note number=\'37\']Many of the electronic records for Peabody books have been copy-cataloged, that is, developed from records for identical books in other libraries. But these records might also be incomplete or inconsistent, given that many are quite old. The expense of original cataloging prevents our staff from creating full, new records for every item in the Peabody’s collection of over 300,000 titles.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'11\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-11-ddc-cards/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-400\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-400\" title=\"fig 11 ddc cards\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/note] My search for “gift book” will turn up bequests—the term “gift book” is often attached to these donations—and it will miss many of the nineteenth-century gift books and annuals in our collection whose records lack subject classifications, or whose subject classifications reference the book’s contents, not its format. For example, the 1848 Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” [note number=\'38\']Rough and Ready Annual (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).[/note]\r\n\r\nThe problem of finding is perhaps only a sub-set of the problem of description, but I want to give it special attention because it introduces another variable: the physical space of the object. My search for gift books in the Peabody also entails the privilege of retrieving the books from the stacks. There are two search processes, the intellectual and the physical, that I must navigate. The intellectual search in this case requires a variety of keyword/date range combinations, and ultimately, recourse to my prepared bibliography—a holdover from pre-catalogue research methods. Now the second search begins.\r\n\r\nThe Rough and Ready Annual is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'12\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-12-rr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-401\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-401\" title=\"fig 12 r&amp;r\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/note] This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them, edited by the temperance writer T. S. Arthur and published in London, has been given the call number 813 A7910 duodecimo—fourth floor east, in the “American literature in English, fiction” section. [note number=\'39\']Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1979), from Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. To check on this, I need Mitchell Sharpe Jr.’s A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'13\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-13-orange/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-402\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-402\" title=\"fig 13 orange\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Orange Blossoms in the stacks.[/note] Arthur shows up again as co-editor of The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” [note number=\'40\']The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).[/note] We have two copies of this very genteel little gift book, one at 808.83 B2175 (rhetoric &amp; collections of literature), and one at 810.8 C297 (American literature in English). The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. [note number=\'41\']The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'14\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-14-rbr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-403\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-403\" title=\"fig 14 rbr\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The rare book room.[/note] In this case, the book’s rarity has to do with a lovely fore-edge painting. It has been assigned to 820.8 N42017 (general books about literature). On the other end of the “rare” continuum is The Family Circle and Parlor Annual, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). [note number=\'42\']The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (New York: Comstock, 1847).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'15\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-15-parlor/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-404\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-404\" title=\"fig 15 parlor\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/note]\r\n\r\nI’ll fill out call slips for each book, stick the slips into red flags, and put the flags in an order that will help me chart a logical course through the stacks. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'16\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-16-slips/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-405\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-405\" title=\"fig 16 slips\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Call slips and flags.[/note] It’s easiest to start on the sixth floor and work one’s way down, picking up books along the way. Usually I find other interesting items as I go, so I carry a batch of blank call slips and extra flags. (On this occasion, for example, I find The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse; published in 1813 and inscribed by its owner in 1817, it pre-dates by several years the official beginning of the gift book phenomenon. It might be more of a “literary almanac.” [note number=\'43\']The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse (Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'17\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-17-new-reader/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-406\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-406\" title=\"fig 17 new reader\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Inscription in The New American Reader.[/note]) Usually I am also unable to locate at least one of the books I have set out to find. Most likely the book has been misshelved, so I’ll check the quartos and folios, which are shelved separately; then I’ll check the rare book room’s octavo, duodecimo and quarto shelving areas. It used to astonish me that books were still shelved by format in the Peabody, but it does save space. At the same time, this shelving system—along with the multiple distinct areas within the library where books may reside, eg the rare book room, the reference section, the genealogy books, the Limited Editions Club, and several discrete named collections—means that retrieving a few books can take quite a long time, as I traipse up and down the six floors of the library, thread through stacks, open secured doors with multiple keys, turn lights on and off, and maneuver a book truck in and out of a tiny service elevator built in the 1920s. By the end of the journey, the library and I will have exchanged dust; I’ll take on a few streaks of red rot, and the library will have taken in particles from my body as well.\r\n\r\nWhile the Peabody is unique, these conditions are not in the end very unusual. In terms of the intellectual search, the absence of “gift book” from many of the catalogue records is no less egregious than the absence of other information—the names of all the contributors; the subjects of the illustrations. The metadata is potentially infinite. The “gift book” only exists as a category because of scholars who teased out this cultural phenomenon; it would be very difficult to define its absolute borders. In terms of the physical search, the Peabody might be messier than, say, a rare book library that has assigned current LC call numbers to all its contents and houses them in compact shelving, but it exemplifies the general on-the-ground situation. As I wind my way through the Peabody stacks, I remember how much more difficult it is to gather research materials from several different institutions.\r\n\r\nThe fact is, for scholars who rely on archives, research is something you do only after you have already undertaken a rigorous search. It is the search that provides you with the foundational sense of your subject. But the search is rarely acknowledged or accredited; even the foot-soldier craft of bibliography, the link between “librarianship” and “scholarship,” has largely lost its scholarly status.\r\n\r\n<!--nextpage-->\r\n\r\n<strong>3. An Architecture of Disctinction.</strong>\r\n<blockquote>A non-affiliate researcher contacts the Peabody about our H. L. Mencken collections. Since she will bring a couple of graduate students with her, I set up a group work space in one of the library alcoves where the three of them can share materials and talk without disturbing other readers. I pull the requested volumes with the help of some students and set the cart up within easy reach of the alcove. When the researchers arrive, I show them the Mencken collections on the ground floor. Then I lead them to their group work space and leave them, returning to the glassed-in office behind the reading room, the vantage point that allows me to monitor the otherwise empty reading room.</blockquote>\r\nIn “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” a team of Dutch sociologists investigates the library as a space that is strongly marked by situational norms—“knowledge-based beliefs about how to behave in particular situations that are shaped by social influence.” [note number=\'44\']Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84.1 (2003), 19.[/note] Their research leads them to argue, however, that such norms do not require direct social influences to be triggered; in fact, “the situation can activate mental representations of normative behaviors automatically. And once activated, these representations provide the knowledge necessary for guiding one’s own situationally appropriate behavior.” [note number=\'45\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.[/note] Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” [note number=\'46\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.[/note] Talking in a quiet voice in the library, a normative behavior, is only activated for those who plan to visit the library.\r\n\r\nTen years ago, when the research for this article was conducted, the “silence of the library” was still a widespread norm. While the situation is now often reversed—in our main campus library, we must designate specific quiet areas because otherwise a sociable undergraduate din would take over—the norm of silence does continue to preside at the Peabody. Because it is off campus, the Peabody is often attractively under-populated compared to the crowded main library; it is mostly used by advanced researchers and those who seek a quiet place to study. The large central open area catches and amplifies even the smallest noises. The shelf-lined alcoves on either side of this central area offer the appearance of privacy, but in fact are little echo chambers. Visitors immediately detect these acoustics, and—except for the periodic tour groups—most spend their time in the Peabody in silence. But it is not just the physics of sound that shape behaviors here, as the Dutch researchers show; the social expectations of the space prefigure those behaviors.\r\n\r\nIn setting up a group work space for the Mencken researchers, I have quite deliberately contravened the usual norm of silence. Clearly, I am not inviting them to shout, and by putting them in an alcove in back, I have taken measures to protect any quiet-seeking visitors who might arrive. But in accordance with new ideas about the use of library space, my colleagues and I have decided that we must accommodate group study even if it might occasionally disrupt the silence desired by others. As it happens, the Mencken researchers’ conversation is eventually interrupted by a tour group, and the two activities play out side by side.\r\n\r\nI must admit that at moments I have mixed feelings about the tour groups and even the study cohorts. While my pedagogical instincts tend towards cheerful hub-bub, there is a part of me that is still in awe of the sanctuary-like atmosphere of the Peabody. John Morris called the library a “cathedral of books,” and clearly that’s what architect Edmund G. Lind had in mind. The central area with its grand skylight and the alcoves on its sides is like a nave bordered with chapels. Lind didn’t need a psychological study of environment-based situational norms to tell him that he might activate different behaviors within his building. The great central space inspires reverence—your eye is drawn to the skylight the way it would be drawn to the rose windows of Chartres, and on its way up catches row upon solemn row of books stowed behind gilded railings, a testament to the accumulated wisdom of the ages. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'18\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-18-skylight/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-407\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-407\" title=\"fig 18 skylight\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/note] But step into an alcove, especially on the ground floor where each is filled with an immense wooden table, and you instantly feel something else, something no less grand but more human. The alcoves are study-sized, and once you sit down at one of those dark, gleaming, broad tables, it is like you are the master of your own private library. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'19\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-19-alcove/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-408\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-408\" title=\"fig 19 alcove\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/note]\r\n\r\nIronically, the Peabody’s architecture was out-dated by the time it was completed. With the professionalization of librarianship and the evolution of library science in the late nineteenth century, librarians like William Frederick Poole advocated for a functional rather than decorative design of interior library space. [note number=\'47\']See William Frederick Poole, Remarks on Library Construction (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).[/note] Moreover, the actual use of space in the Peabody in the late nineteenth century was at odds with its symbolic appeal. The main library was known as the “stack room”; readers were seated in a comparatively plain reading room on the other side of the main doors. In this arrangement, the librarians reigned inside the gorgeous “cathedral of books,” but the building’s potential to civilize the masses was lost.\r\n\r\nNow, of course, we do not send readers outside. Inside the “stack room,” we explicitly call visitors’ attention to its beauty to explain the connections between the library’s architecture and its collections—how both speak eloquently of Victorian values. At the same time, we who staff the library have relegated ourselves to its periphery. We work in the glassed-in room at one end that serves as a monitoring point and occasional classroom; the official “librarian’s office” in one corner—its luxurious proportions suggesting something like a sacristy and something like a robber baron’s lair—is now shared work-space stuffed with several desks and laden book trucks. There is another monitoring station near the main doors. I often do my work at the photography station, in the back of one of the alcoves [note type=\'figure\' number=\'20\']<a href=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/2011/04/archeology-of-archival-practice/fig-20-station/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-409\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-409\" title=\"fig 20 station\" src=\"http://archivejournal.net/journal/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/note]. It offers some privacy but is close enough to the central reading tables to be accessible to readers.\r\n\r\nThe space of the Peabody initiates other situational behaviors besides the norm of silence, and our work-station arrangements testify to this. The spatial re-centralizing of readers and marginalization of staff is not merely practical; it is a reflection of the modern office of librarianship. We are there to be of service, in a para-textual position. Consequently, our work should be out of sight; it should be separate from and secondary to the work that readers do. Our locations call upon us, in other words, to support the scholar’s effort to hide the “seams of [her] findings” by hiding the ways we contribute to that work—by the ways we sometimes do that work.\r\n\r\nI think about these complications as I escort the Mencken researchers to their table and walk back to the glassed-in office, where there is nothing pressing for me to do. I’d rather spend more time talking with them. I’d like to learn about their research and introduce them to some underappreciated parts of the collection. I’d like to share with them what I learned curating an exhibition of Mencken-related magazines and writing about one of those magazines. But I don’t want to get in their way; it’s likely that they are ready to get on with work that they don’t see as connected to mine. The professional norms of the archive are strong, and although I know how to talk about my research in many contexts—in presentations, interviews, hotel elevators—I haven’t figured out how to mix my scholarly role with the curatorial role I am supposed to play here, in the Peabody. In the end, I say nothing. Professional segregation is another kind of silence in the library.\r\n\r\nWe cannot change the archaeological record beneath our feet, but we can rearrange the fossils we dig up to create new narratives. We can tell different kinds of archive stories, including the story of what research in the archive was and is. Is it too idealistic to expect that dissolving the entrenched fantasies about archival research will make room for new methods? Is it naïve to imagine a space that, in putting into practice the archival turn’s preliminary insights about disciplinary and disorder, can support experimentation, facilitate connection across professions and disciplines, and enable new discoveries?','The Archeology of Archival Practice','','inherit','open','open','','2199-revision-18','','','2012-10-15 23:06:42','2012-10-15 23:06:42','',2199,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/2199-revision-18/',0,'revision','',0),(3165,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:43','2012-10-15 23:06:43','The biggest challenge by far is the preliminary work, which must be completed before the semester begins.  In order to work with either the APS or Penn Museum collections, a good deal of paperwork must be filled out securing permission from the curatorial staff.  Because this material is rarely used by students designing digital exhibits for the web, this can require creating new forms and convincing very conservative curators that the material will be used for educational purposes.  I find that it is essential, too, to communicate openly and honestly with institutional administrators at every level to help them understand that such projects are mutually beneficial to the archive, the students, and the indigenous communities.  Having done so, the next challenge is to locate enough relevant material to keep the students occupied for a month and to ensure that the resulting exhibit is of high enough quality that it will be valuable to the Native American communities, and the general public.  In addition, contacts must be set up in the Native American communities and visits to the APS for the Native American scholars program must be coordinated with Penn’s semester schedule to create an opportunity for the elders to speak to the class (this is not always possible, but has worked on occasion).\r\n\r\nPedagogically, it takes at least a month to provide the students with enough historical, anthropological, religious, and cultural background so that they can identify primary important materials.  Because some of the material is considered to be sacred, students must also be taught protocols about culturally sensitive objects.  This is made even more difficult because the Society of American Archivists has delayed issuing protocols concerning Native American cultural sensitivities.  A recent Mellon grant to the APS to digitize more than 3000 hours of audio recordings related to Native American cultures allowed for the creation of a Native American advisory board to address this issue.  This is cutting edge work that interests some of the students, and I currently have two independent study students working on documenting and implementing protocols for cultural sensitivity at the APS.\r\n\r\nIt can also be difficult to teach the students to be respectful of how Native people see their own culture.  The idea, for example, that museum artifacts are considered animate objects—or living beings— is sometimes beyond the intellectual reach of certain students.  The success of the projects, therefore, often depends on the students’ respect for and intellectual understanding of the culture.  The performance of the students is very uneven, with some students going on to win grants to pursue further work in the area and others sitting quietly in the corner.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 4','The biggest challenge by far is the preliminary work, which must be completed before the semester begins.  In order to work with either the APS or Penn Museum collections, a good deal of paperwork must be filled out securing permission from the curatorial staff.  Because this material is rarely used by students designing digital exhibits for the web, this can require creating new forms and convincing very conservative curators that the material will be used for educational purposes.','inherit','open','open','','1586-revision-17','','','2012-10-15 23:06:43','2012-10-15 23:06:43','',1586,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1586-revision-17/',0,'revision','',0),(3166,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:44','2012-10-15 23:06:44','The single biggest challenge my program faces is one of supply and demand.  Demand for class sessions in SC&amp;A is increasing— all to the good!— but the supply of time for teaching is not.  In this sense, we are the victims of our own success.  More staff to share the teaching load would help.  Increased use of digitized sources and online tutorials can help as well, and many institutions, both large and small, are exploring these options, some with considerable success.  Digitization can help make our holdings more readily accessible to larger numbers of students.  Naturally, care and preservation of materials that are heavily used is always a concern.  Digitization helps to protect the originals from being damaged in the service of learning and scholarship, but the experience of using digital surrogates isn’t really the same as that of using the “real thing.”  Best, of course, is when the original and a digital surrogate can be used in tandem.\r\n\r\nFaculty often find it difficult to squeeze a visit to Special Collections &amp; Archives into an already full syllabus, even when it’s pedagogically desirable.  Scheduling extra sessions outside of regular class meetings can be complex in the extreme, since students are extraordinarily busy with academic and extracurricular commitments.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 4','','inherit','open','open','','1568-revision-13','','','2012-10-15 23:06:44','2012-10-15 23:06:44','',1568,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1568-revision-13/',0,'revision','',0),(3167,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:44','2012-10-15 23:06:44','The first set of challenges is logistical: bringing students into the Library changed some of the Library’s usual operating procedures and has necessitated adjusting some of my own habits of teaching. The Undergraduate Program was the first time the Library allowed undergrads into the Library to conduct research in any sort of ongoing basis. (There has long been a fellowship for Amherst students that brings two or three students down to do research at the Library for a couple of weeks each year, but the intense use of rare materials and the duration of the fellowship are significantly different from the structure of the Undergraduate Seminars.) Even though the Library was supportive of my program and eager to help adjust policy, there was understandably some concern about how needy the students would be: Would they require a lot of supervision? Would they be asking for lots of assistance? Would they be disruptive to the other readers? (The answer, to all of these, is no: in part because of the intensive training they receive in the classroom about how to handle books and how to find the resources they need, the students are in many ways better prepared to work in the Reading Rooms than many others!) There were also procedural questions that needed to be resolved: before my program, rare materials were not routinely brought into the Library’s classrooms and were never handled by non-staff members in classrooms. Putting together a new policy on classroom use (how many items, how they could and could not be handled, the number of staff members necessary to supervise, etc.) was vital. It also wasn’t difficult, with the supportive curatorial staff. I did have to adjust my own teaching style. My preference is to decide what I’m going to do in any given class as I go along—I might decide to try a particular approach the day before class, if my sense of how the class is proceeding suggests it. But I cannot decide at the last minute to bring a set of rare books into this seminar room: rare materials need to be vetted by the curators in advance. That’s not a big obstacle, but just something I’ve needed to adjust to.\r\n\r\nA bigger challenge has been getting used to not having all the answers. My students come from a wide range of majors—English and History, to be sure, but I’ve also taught majors in French, Theology, Art History, Music, Drama, Medieval Studies, and Economics. And because I let them choose any work that was printed before 1700 for their research project, students often choose works that I’ve never heard of. What this means is that I need to learn along with them. A student working on <em>Utopia</em> is fairly easy; a student working on a Czech herbal is a lot harder to offer guidance. But this is also a challenge that’s fun and that is beneficial to both me and my students; if I knew everything, it would be boring for me and wouldn’t allow students room for discovery.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 4','','inherit','open','open','','1550-revision-13','','','2012-10-15 23:06:44','2012-10-15 23:06:44','',1550,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1550-revision-13/',0,'revision','',0),(3168,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:44','2012-10-15 23:06:44','Undergraduate archival work can be like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. In most classes, the readings and discussions act as essential compasses in guiding the student through the semester. In the archive, most—if not all—bets are off: there are rarely already-made tutorials on organizing and making sense of the productive entropy that often marks an archive. How are we to situate a newly discovered text if we haven’t even finished our undergraduate prerequisite courses?\r\n\r\nFor me, the most challenging moments in the archive were the earliest, both because I was adjusting to the demands of archival methods and because I had only a small number of anchoring texts echoing in my head to help me make sense of anything I found. In fact, I probably missed a number of promising leads in the archive because I didn’t know to look for.\r\n\r\nA good friend and I won a small grant at NYU for a research project about marginalia. We were to trace the marginalia of a particular ancient religious text, the Hermes Trismegistus. While I was scouring libraries in Paris for the history of the text’s early translation, my partner was in New York looking for evidence of contemporary readers’ marks on the book. My job was to plot the ancient scribbles, which seemed easy enough before I actually entered the stacks. (FIG. 3) I was looking for the text itself while piecing together others’ accounts of the its migrations. <span class=\"caption right\" style=\"width: 200px; padding-left: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig3.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2333 \" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"gotkin_fig3\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig3-190x250.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 3\" width=\"190\" height=\"250\" /></a> Figure 3: Depiction of the god Hermes Trismegistus (courtesy of Roanoke College)</span> As it turns out, the Hermes Trismegistus is an enduringly baffling historical object and its ancestry is riddled with gaps. A more experienced researcher would know how to explain this fitful history and perhaps use the inconsistencies and question marks as launching pads for substantive contributions. But since it was my first time in the archive for a sustained and labor-intensive project, they instead weighed on me like chains. Not only did I have trouble tracing the marginalia themselves, I had trouble explaining how I was having trouble.\r\n\r\nI realize now that this situation is not so much overcome with academic training as it is more efficiently handled. That moment of chaos and crisis is in fact a prerequisite to clear thinking, in my experience. As an undergraduate, I was overwhelmed by the disorder of the archival process, but then again, these troubles might have been the best training.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 4','Undergraduate archival work can be like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. In most classes, the readings and discussions act as essential compasses in guiding the student through the semester. In the archive, most—if not all—bets are off: there are rarely already-made tutorials on organizing and making sense of the productive entropy that often marks an archive. ','inherit','open','open','','1533-revision-18','','','2012-10-15 23:06:44','2012-10-15 23:06:44','',1533,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1533-revision-18/',0,'revision','',0),(3169,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:45','2012-10-15 23:06:45','The major challenges in writing and editing <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are the profusion of variant spelling systems found in Haitian Creole until 1980. Most Haitian-Americans I work with at the University of Florida have limited exposure to written Haitian Creole prior to enrolling in my courses. After a year of intermediate Haitian Creole, it is typical to still misspell certain words. Given that the source texts they work from routinely employ spelling conventions that are no longer current, it is also common for undergraduate research assistants to reproduce the outdated spelling, especially in the cases of words that refer to concepts that are unfamiliar to them. The source text in (a) below, taken from scholar Milo Marcelin (1950), illustrates the base from which transcription (b) and translation (c) were produced:\r\n\r\n(a)\r\n\r\n(b) (c)\r\n\r\nDanbala Wèdo se koulèv dlo! Danbala Wèdo is the water snake!\r\n\r\nChèche Danbala, ki bò w a wè li? Look for Danbala, where will you see him?\r\n\r\nPapa Danbala se koulèv dlo, Papa Danbala is the water snake,\r\n\r\nli plonje anba dlo! he dives under water!\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIn texts like this one, it is common for research assistants to import words like <em>Oueddo </em>uncorrected, or to accidently retain the “c” in <em>coulève </em>instead of writing the official <em>koulèv</em>. This impacted my work as it required that I extensively edit the students’ work and send it back for review and correction; while labor intensive, the feedback provided the students with the opportunity to master the transcription of Haitian Creole and the translation into English. Students will learn from their mistakes if they can see what they are and have the chance to correct them. It is also common for students to import erroneous grammatical analyses by writing “wa” following <em>oua</em> (in line two), a minor confusion in which separate words are conflated. The correct representation of <em>oua </em>is “<em>w a</em>” (‘you will’ or ‘will you,’ when used interrogatively as in the above). As senior editor, I had the challenge of constantly encountering traces of outdated spellings that research assistants had unwittingly imported into their transcription.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nThe quality of the work of the undergraduates varied widely. The nuances of the mythology, the ‘cryptic tricksterism’  of Vodou semantics, and the rich—and obscure—idioms, expressions, and conceptualizations of the Haitian Creole language meant that all the texts required years of refinement through the editorial process which is based upon countless critical re-readings from various points of view. Thus working with undergraduates is rewarding but requires mentoring and patience due to their limited experience.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 4','The major challenges in writing and editing <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are the profusion of variant spelling systems found in Haitian Creole until 1980. Most Haitian-Americans I work with at the University of Florida have limited exposure to written Haitian Creole prior to enrolling in my courses.','inherit','open','open','','1513-revision-13','','','2012-10-15 23:06:45','2012-10-15 23:06:45','',1513,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1513-revision-13/',0,'revision','',0),(3170,19,'2012-10-15 23:08:23','2012-10-15 23:08:23','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery tool for exploring what he calls “the wild and unpredictable intersections of the data that the interface allows us to generate.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1609-10.[/ref] The prospect of having the Archive uncover meaningful relationships between texts is, indeed, an exciting one. As Jonathan Freedman notes, the “ability to link heterogeneous subjects and find once-occulted connections and interconnections makes scholarship invigoratingly fun.”[ref]Jonathan Freedman, “Whitman, Database, Information Culture,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1597.[/ref] As a frequent user of the Whitman Archive, I’ve experienced this “invigorating fun” first-hand, and I look forward to the Archive including more texts by and about Whitman, and incorporating more discovery tools like Brian Pytlik Zillig’s <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/resources/tools/index.html\">TokenX</a>.\r\n\r\nAs someone working on digital humanities projects of my own, however, I’m as interested in understanding what it takes to create such tools for discovery as I am the end-user experience of having digital tools make “unpredictable” and “invigorating” discoveries on my behalf. For the remainder of this essay, I’m going to share some thoughts on what has to happen on the back end of a digital project in order to make an otherwise rigorously structured digital artifact feel “wild and unpredictable” to its users. I’ll start with Kenneth M. Price’s description of the necessary labor that goes into structuring data such that it will yield surprising results for end users: \"A database is not an undifferentiated sea of information out of which structure emerges,” Price writes. “Argument is always there from the beginning in how those constructing a database choose to categorize information.\"[ref]Price, “Edition.”[/ref] To an end user who searches a database and finds an interesting juxtaposition between a handful of the hundreds (or thousands) of total documents on that database, it can seem as if those documents have emerged out of “an undifferentiated sea of information.” The reality, however, is far different.\r\n\r\nWhen Price alludes to the process that the creators of a database go through as they decide how to “categorize information,” he makes it clear that whenever a user generates a surprising set of juxtapositions between documents it is because someone, somewhere, at some point, has meticulously categorized those documents in such a way that a search engine (or other text analysis tool) will be able to process those documents in a meaningful way. Jerome McGann, who has also commented on the rigorous process of structuring data that is required to create a digital archive, writes that “databases and all digital instruments require the most severe kinds of categorical forms. The power of database—of digital instruments in general—rests in its ability to draw sharp, disambiguated distinctions.”[ref]Jerome McGann, “Database, Interface, and Archival Fever,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1590.[/ref] As both Price and McGann indicate, what can feel like a surprising juxtaposition for the end user has, to a certain extent, already been determined in advance through a time- and labor-intensive process of marking-up, encoding, or otherwise categorizing data.\r\n\r\nThis is not to say that those who structure the data for a digital archive have already anticipated every possible search string that users could ever imagine. On the contrary, what interests me as both the user and the creator of digital archives is the effect by which this “sharp, disambiguated” structuring of data can, indeed, produce juxtapositions that archivists could never have predicted. The fundamental preconditions for cultivating such serendipitous discoveries, it seems to me, are a large enough data set and a sufficiently intelligent schema for categorizing that data (not to mention the time, money, software, hardware, human resources, and expertise required to process and categorize the data in the first place).\r\n\r\nAllow me to cite an example from outside the realm of digital archiving to illustrate what’s involved in structuring data that yields serendipitous juxtapositions. Pandora Radio is an Internet music service whose goal is to create customized, online radio stations for its users. This customization is based on the work of the Music Genome Project, which has categorized the musical attributes of thousands of different songs. Taking into consideration “everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and . . . singing and vocal harmony,” the Music Genome Project assigns anywhere between 150 and 400 different descriptors to a single song. These descriptors are based on both objective criteria such as the types of instruments used in the song or whether the song is in a major or a minor key, as well as more subjective criteria such as whether or not a song features “Acoustic Sonority,” “Prevalent Use of Groove,” or a “Wet Recording Sound.\"[ref]“The Music Genome Project,” Pandora Radio, accessed December 2, 2010 <a href=\"http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml\">http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml</a>.[/ref] (These descriptors are referred to as musical “genes,” but they could just as easily be called metadata or tags.) Visitors to Pandora Radio type in the name of a song that they like, and then based on the attributes that have been pre-assigned to that song, Pandora will play other songs with similar attributes. The promise of Pandora is that once a database of songs is categorized according to a controlled vocabulary capable of being processed by a computer, listeners will be pleasantly surprised to discover songs that they never knew they already liked. (These songs are, of course, available for purchase so that no serendipitous discovery goes un-capitalized.)\r\n\r\nI cite this example within the context of the Whitman Archive not necessarily because Pandora Radio provides a model for digital scholarship of nineteenth-century literature, but because the process of categorizing songs for the Music Genome Project is remarkably similar to the archivist’s effort of structuring data in such a way that it can produce surprising results for the end user. For both Pandora and the Whitman Archive, then, the goal is to reach the tipping point where methodical structuring becomes unexpected discovery, where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and structured data takes on forms that the structure-ers never quite imagined. I like to think that this tipping point where structure yields serendipity is similar to the moment in a fractal pattern where geometry becomes art, the moment where a rigorous, mathematically defined structure takes on an aesthetic quality that was never explicitly intended by the mathematical code that undergirds it, but that is nevertheless absolutely dependent upon that code for its very existence.\r\n\r\nMy hope as both the user and creator of digital archives is that we can come to a better understanding of the processes of classification and naming that are involved in these efforts structure data in meaningful ways. Scholars of literature are already comfortable thinking about the power of language to represent—and even create—the world around us. We already have at our disposal a variety of theoretical apparatuses for thinking about the power of language to name and define the world, from the formalism of the New Critics to the semiotics of the Post-Structuralists and even the focus on the materiality of language in Book History scholarship. What we need to add to this list of theories and methodologies is a more sophisticated understanding of taxonomy and categorization. This will not only require an interdisciplinary rendezvous with librarians and scholars of information architecture, but it will also demand that we do the cultural history of such seemingly mundane phenomena as filing cabinets and accounting ledgers. Compared to the work being done by digital humanities scholars in the areas of data visualization, text mining, social networking, and geo-spatial analysis, studying the history of cataloging, sorting, and organizing seems to be the intellectual equivalent of a trip to Target to buy hard-plastic storage bins when you’d rather be at the Apple Store picking up an iPad. Nevertheless, everything that we want digital technology to do to help us better understand literary texts depends upon our ability to properly name, sort, and categorize the information that we put into a computer. We do ourselves a disservice to ignore or even minimize this crucial stage of the process.\r\n\r\nOne of the most frequently quoted statements about the future of digital scholarship in the humanities comes from Jerome McGann, who wrote that “the digital technology used by humanities scholars has focused almost exclusively on methods of sorting, accessing, and disseminating large bodies of materials. In this respect the work has not engaged the central questions and concerns of the [humanities, which is] . . . . the exploration and explanation of aesthetic works.”[ref]Jerome McGann, <em>Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web</em> (New York: Palgrave, 2001), xi-xii.[/ref] I don’t want to make a straw-man out of McGann’s powerful insight, but I can’t help but take issue with his claim that the “sorting” of texts will not aid us in our goal of using digital technology to explore and explain aesthetic works. Before a digital tool of any kind can work with a text in any way, the elements of that text must be sorted, classified, and categorized according to a schema that the computer will understand. This is not to say that scholars in the digital humanities should put aside their text visualization projects and their geo-spatial analyses in order to do the Dewey Decimal system one better, but rather that the foundational tasks of organizing and classifying should more completely theorized and more intimately woven into the fabric of digital scholarship.\r\n\r\nBy attending to the tedium of taxonomy we may begin to feel like nineteenth-century scriveners rather than twenty-first century techies. Like those scriveners of old, we may prefer not to spend our time with such mundane things. Nevertheless, if we wish to generate the kinds of “wild and unpredictable intersections of . . . data” that “makes scholarship invigoratingly fun” we should embrace what actually promises to be a fascinating conversation about the history of taxonomy, structure, classification, and form. This conversation will take us through the Library of Alexandria, the Great Chain of Being, medieval bestiaries, Wunderkammer, the Mundaneum, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, cryptography, tarot cards, and Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Every time we tag, code, or classify a text for a digital archive, we are participating in the long history of human classification systems. The better able we are to understand that history and to situate ourselves within it, the better understanding we will have of our digital archives and what they can do.','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  4','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery to...','inherit','open','open','','144-revision-40','','','2012-10-15 23:08:23','2012-10-15 23:08:23','',144,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/144-revision-40/',0,'revision','',0),(3171,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','In the Digital Humanist’s tool belt, the database is the trusty stand-by. Robust and indispensable, it has become a basic tool of modern academic research. One of the primary endeavors of the Digital Humanities, however, is to re-focus the perspective on the tools we use, and perhaps to redefine the term “tool” in the process. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a thing … with which some operation is performed; a means of effecting something.”[ref]<em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed., s.v. “Tool.”[/ref] This definition points plainly toward outcome, the tool’s utility at accomplishing “some operation,” as if it were an extension of the user’s will as a wrench is an extension of his or her hand. But by emphasizing results only, the dictionary neglects a tool’s significant influence over process.\r\n\r\nTools define process as much as they do outcome. When one searches a database, its individual design mediates the experience, filters it, frames it. A sleek database makes the act of use nearly imperceptible—it stays out of the way, as it were, by anticipating the needs and intuitions of the general user in its design. However, the specific user will always be limited by these presuppositions. It is tempting to imagine a database as a neutral container, a kind of Tupperware 2.0, while in fact the tool guides the searches that one can make, the items that they will return, and which will appear prominent. Facets of the design guide what sorts of orderings of information, or narratives, the researcher will construct out of the raw data, such that the database itself can form a subtle argument or narrative claim.\r\n\r\nAcknowledging the skewed nature of any tool that presents information, <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> co-editor Ed Folsom describes his approach to structuring the database: “Initially, [co-editor Kenneth] Price and I had ideas of how we would control the material in the database, and we knew the narratives we wanted to tell, the frames we wanted to construct. But the details of the database quickly exceeded any narrative we might try to frame the data with. Little roots shot out everywhere and attached to particulars we could not have imagined. Only if we insulated the narrative from the database could the narrative persist.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: the Epic Transformation of Archives,”<em> The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed November 2010,<em> </em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html</a>.[/ref] To me, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is rife with narrative paths for the user. Some of these are micro-narratives, unavoidably emerging from details of the interface. Because the left-hand navigation menu is more visually prominent than the search bar, the user is more strongly guided into a browsing mode of exploration, which encourages him or her to consider Whitman through a compartmentalized view of his life and works. By featuring a simple search bar without advanced specifications or filtration[ref]A notice on the site informs the user that this feature is soon slated to undergo an enhancement, which will include the development of faceted search capabilities.[/ref], the database allows the user to cast a virtual fishing line for an assortment of items but makes it more difficult to conduct a narrowly directed search—thus, one is likely to encounter information that seems scattered rather than tight and contextual.\r\n\r\nApart from these micro-narratives, the database also cradles a deep narrative claim pertaining to Whitman’s corpus: throughout the database there is an open discussion examining the suggestive congruity between Whitman’s work and the digital medium in which it is takes form. The documentation of this resonance begins with observations about Whitman’s language and works, which seem to share characteristics of digital structure. For example, Ed Folsom to the organic networks present in Whitman’s language, an intertextual and burgeoning web of words. He compares this quality to the dense entanglement of leaves and roots that adorn the lettering on the first edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, recalling the rhizome[ref]Defined as “an elongated, usually horizontal, subterranean stem which sends out roots and leafy shoots at intervals along its length.” <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 3rd ed., s.v. \"Rhizome.\"[/ref]—“that subterranean stem that grows every which way and represents the nomadic multiplicity of identity—no central root but an intertwined web of roots.”[ref]Folsom, “Database as Genre.<em>”</em>[/ref] Databases, too, are rhizomorphous, he argues—and this accordance between Whitman’s work and its digital format allows the two to reflect through and off of one another, revealing new permutations of form and language.\r\n\r\nIn a proleptic twist, Whitman’s work predates its own ideal medium. A common observation in the various articles about the database is the fact that the work is perhaps better displayed in digital form that it ever was in print: the digital medium is better equipped to represent the shapes and forms of the Whitman corpus, and flexible enough to accommodate the complex relationship between the many iterations of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>. The database does not privilege one edition over any other, and treats them as autonomous but entwined works rather than pieces of a distinct whole or drafts leading up to a definitive version. The sheer multiplicity of his writing is betrayed by the rigidity of print mediums. “Whitman’s work was always being revised, was always in flux, and fixed forms of print do not adequately capture his incessant revisions,” argues Price.[ref]Kenneth M. Price, “About the <em>Archive</em>: History,” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed November 2010, http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/history.html.[/ref] Whitman himself advocated methods of reading and taking meaning from his texts that today seem almost designed for digital tools. A line from <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, first appearing in the 1881-82 edition, reads “the words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing.”[ref]Walt Whitman, <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, (Washington, D.C, 1881-82), http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1871/whole.html.[/ref] Taking long-view of literature, Whitman’s remark resonates with the current practice of distant reading, in which vast quantities of text can be analyzed as an entity using statistical information and visualizations. Predating this practice, Whitman draws the reader away from the individual minutiae of his poetry and towards impressionistic views. If any text was written for a database, this one was.\r\n\r\nThus, the <em>Archive</em> attempts not only to exhibit its contents, but to carry out a vision that Whitman may have offered in the original work. This narrative is present throughout the site primarily via the apparent compatibility between the content and form. The claim is so elegant, so fluid and simple, that the argument almost makes itself.\r\n\r\nThe <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is able to transcend its (considerable) utility as a research tool, performing simultaneously as a critical analysis, a new edition of Whitman, and independent artistic work. I imagine four theoretical levels at which a format can manage a text, with increasing involvement: presentation, description, criticism, and artistic response. The sophistication of this particular database is in how it blurs the lines between those acts, seeming to realize all at once and none predominantly, and, further, how it reveals the fact that this multiplicity of function must be true of all databases, however subtly, however unintentionally.\r\n\r\nThis remarkable plurality within a single tool (if tool is still an adequate term) is both fitting, in the context of Whitman, and disruptive to the user’s relationship with the technology. It remains to be addressed how, or whether, the user should adjust his or her approach to such a complex mechanism. At the recent undergraduate digital humanities symposium Re: Humanities, keynote speaker Amanda French advocated for the “rehumaniz[ation of] the inhuman mass of data.”[ref]Amanda French, “Humanities Research Methods from 1860 to 2060” (presentation at Re:Humanities, Haverford, PA, November 11-12, 2010).[/ref] She suggests that scholars who favor distant reading may be losing track of a meaningful element of the text. Rather than conducting interpretive based on massive aggregates of information, why not reacquaint ourselves with an affection for individual pieces of data, find “datum love” among the mass of details? The two methods appear to be mutually exclusive. However, by reconceiving the practice of data mining, it is arguably possible to find personal touches in the thrill of broad claims as well as the nuance of the particular.\r\n\r\nIf each database frames its contents in an array of narrative claims, then each one is specific, disputable, and limited. Rather than markers of failure, however, we might use these idiosyncracies to reawaken us to the particular experience that that tool offers. We could use the fact that a database mediates actively to inject an element of personal interaction into the task of digital research. In the course of achieving proficiency with any tool, one gains an understanding of its particular advantages and limitations through repeated contact and experimentation, returning to the interactive original meaning of “interface.”[ref]Defined as “a means or place of interaction between two systems, organizations, etc.; a meeting-point or common ground between two parties, systems, or disciplines; also, interaction, liaison, dialogue.” <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 2nd ed., s.v. \"Interface.\"[/ref] Here is an opportunity to find a better alternative to the impersonal database experience, an escape from hard vocabulary statistics untempered by readerly love.\r\n\r\nThe management of scale is a challenge that each database must address by determining how the user will navigate between detail and distance. Due to Whitman’s distinctive engagement with matters of scale, especially the fluidity between the individual and the masses, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> may be uniquely able to offer a distant reading that is paradoxically intimate in its connection to the philosophy of the poet. How can a distant reading cheat the humanist if it scrutinizes the work of the man who wrote, exhilarated, “Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses?”[ref]Walt Whitman, <em>Leaves of Grass: 150<sup>th</sup> Anniversary Edition</em>, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), iii.[/ref] Ed Folsom describes Whitman’s “poetic project” as an endeavor “to move from a particular person, period, or place toward an absorptive embrace of all people, periods, and places,”[ref]Folsom, “Database as Genre.”[/ref]emphasizing the blurred distinctions between love of the particular and love of the vast. TokenX, a textual analysis tool that is available through the database, numerically charts the uses of particular words throughout the six editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, giving a visual representation to the exponential growth and organic proliferation of certain words as the poetry burgeoned in its various iterations. Statistical tools such as these, when applied to the work of this particular author, are not reductive but in fact profoundly resonant with the tone and principles of the poetry they describe. Perhaps this is the database to wed tender devotion to individual data and multiplicity.\r\n\r\nFeatured prominently on the home page of the <em>Archive</em> is a striking engraving of Whitman’s face.[ref]William J. Linton, (1870-72), engraving, (http://whitmanarchive.org/multimedia/image044.html?sort=year&amp;order=ascending&amp;page=5).[/ref] The poet appears as if caught in motion, whipping past the viewer with his eddies of hair scattered about his face like sprouts. The beard connotes a general outward drift as it spreads from his face in swells and waves. And then, from somewhere in the profusion of hair and wrinkles emerges an arresting pair of dark eyes: Whitman’s eyes simultaneously confront and confide in the viewer, imparting a personal moment amidst a storm of minutiae.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 4','In the Digital Humanist’s tool belt, the database is the trusty stand-by. Robust and indispensable, it has become a basic tool of modern academic research. One of the primary endeavors of the Digital Humanities, however, is to re-focus the perspective on the tools we use, and perhaps to redefine the term “tool” in the process. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a thing … with which some operation is performed; a means of effecting something.\"','inherit','open','open','','136-revision-35','','','2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','',136,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/136-revision-35/',0,'revision','',0),(3172,19,'2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','In the following section I would like to reflect on some questions about the nature of digital resources, humanities scholarship and the uses to which such material may be put. One of these is the still-contentious issue of whether the creation of such resources is regarded as scholarship in itself or as a way of facilitating the work of other scholars. Even the most recent studies indicate that opinions still remain sharply divided about whether the creation of digital resources such as the Whitman archive is considered to be scholarship and worthy of being rewarded us such by promotion, tenure or in the UK Research Assessment Exercise.[ref]D. Harley, S.K. Acord, S. Earl-Novell, S. Lawrence, and C.J. King, “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines” (UC Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2010).[/ref] There is an understandable tendency in digital humanities to regard this as an outrageous undervaluation of what we do, and to wish to advocate for our work to be better understood. Yet if we can resist this temptation, the question at issue is an important one. The argument against granting digital resources scholarly status equivalent to a journal article, monograph or critical edition must surely be that such resources are performing a service, akin to that provided by an archive or library in the analogue world: that of bringing together useful materials for other scholars to use.\r\n\r\nIt has long been the case that as Melissa Terras has argued so eloquently, in order for our digital work to be valued we must publish in traditional media.[ref]M. Terras, “Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon Digital Humanities” (plenary presented at Digital Humanities 2010 Conference, Kings College London, 2010). http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/2010/07/dh2010-plenary-present-not-voting.html[/ref] However, this is about to change, at least for some of us. In the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework in the UK, digital resources will be assessed in all subject areas as a comparable output to print. This is a vitally important change, carrying with it the implication of a re-evaluation of the scholarly value of the digital; but it places ever more emphasis on the need for us to consider in a rational, not evangelistic, fashion what may distinguish a digital scholarly work from that which renders a service.\r\n\r\nIn this context, nomenclature is not a useful guide. The Whitman project’s creators chose to call their creation an archive, perhaps because like the Rosetti Archive or Valley of the Shadow it contains a collection of various different types of material. However, McGann himself describes Rosetti as a digital edition.[ref]Jerome McGann, “Electronic Archives and Critical Editing,” <em>Literature Compass</em> 7:10 (2010): 37-42.[/ref] While I do not mean to imply that creating and curating an archive in the analogue world is not an intellectual exercise, it is not in itself something for which scholars gain credit. Thus the metaphor would hold that if scholarship done as the result of the use or creation of a physical archive as opposed to in its curation is recognised, then it should be similar in the digital sphere. But is this really appropriate, and does the name ‘archive’ under value the complex nature of what is being achieved in digital resources such as this? Conversely, why is it then that creating a critical edition, whether print or digital form is considered to be a scholarly activity worthy of credit in its own right?\r\n\r\nIt may be because in the print world editors are called upon to make selections and decisions about the best possible copy text, and which textual variants to include. Yet as Gabler argues, as digital technology progresses, digital editions increasingly try to make as many different texts and variants available to readers as possible, to the point that while we may choose to read a literary text in print, the digital medium is most appropriate for complex comparison and study of variants.[ref]H. W. Gabler “Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition,” <em>Literature Compass</em> 7:10 (2010): 43–56.[/ref] The theory of social editions also suggests that the literary text should be presented with reference to its broader social and intellectual milieu.[ref]Jerome McGann, <em>A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism</em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and D. F. McKenzie, <em>Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts</em>(London: The British Library, 1986).[/ref]\r\n\r\nThe Whitman archive provides page images and transcriptions of all six printed editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, as well as manuscript material and newspaper copy. It calls itself an archive, yet could as easily be considered an excellent example of the digital social edition, where users are encouraged to become part of the scholarly process by comparing transcribed manuscripts with the page images or making judgements about which version of a given poem to use. So this is this, an edition (scholarly product) or an archive (service for others)? I would argue that this distinction is no longer meaningful in the digital sphere where boundaries between what we consider to be editions and archives have become blurred.\r\n\r\nEven if we assert that this is a resource for others to use, that could as easily describe a scholarly edition. It is also arguable that the value of such a resource as a scholarly product in its own right is in the choices made about what types of different materials should be brought together, and how contextual material about Whitman’s life, work and even disciples should be presented. Once again, these are just the kind of decisions that editors of scholarly editions also make. As all digital humanists are aware, the act of marking up text is in itself one of scholarly interpretation, which is why it is so vital that the full marked up texts are presented here. This, like the decision to present page images alongside transcription is an act of intellectual openness: it allows other scholars to understand, and if necessary question the decisions that have been made in their presentation. Far from being a sub-scholarly process, digital resources such as Whitman achieve a lustration of the decision making processes that are the silent underpinning of the task of editors or literary scholars in general. In this sense, digital humanities is ahead of many other fields. Science is only beginning to discover the potential of using digital technologies to link experimental data to articles written as a result of its analysis, so that other scholars may use such data to replicate the experiments that are reported on.[ref]C. Bizer, T. Heath, and T. Berners-Lee, “Linked Data - The Story So Far,” <em>International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems</em> (IJSWIS), Special Issue on Linked Data, ed. T. Heath, M. Hepp, and C. Bizer, (forthcoming). http://linkeddata.org/docs/ijswis-special-issue[/ref] Yet resources such as the Whitman archive have been providing this kind of functionality for some time. Texts are the primary data of literary scholars after all.\r\n\r\nThere is, it appears, a good case to be made for the scholarly robustness of digital resources, even those which modestly refer to themselves as an archive. The other question we must address, however, in making the case for our discipline is not just whether such resources constitute scholarly activity, but what kind of new types of research they make possible which would not have been achievable in an analogue world. This is surely the main criterion by which digital humanities must be judged. At present this is much less clear.\r\n\r\nWe know that the digital medium presents many new possibilities for editors and resource creators themselves, but we still know too little about whether research and scholarship themselves are changing as a result of their use. Vanhoutte, for example, has argued that most users simply require a reading text despite the fact that digital resources make a deeper kind of scholarly engagement possible.[ref]E. Vanhoutte, “Every Reader His Own Bibliographer – An Absurdity?” in <em>Text Editing, Print and the Digital World</em>, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (London: Ashgate, 2002): 99-112.[/ref] Even the most recent study of humanities users of digital resources[ref]C. Madsen, “Communities, Innovation, and Critical Mass: Understanding the Impact of Digitization on Scholarship in the Humanities through the Case of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies” (PhD diss, Oxford University, 2010): Chapters 6-7.[/ref] suggests they still make relatively simple uses of digital resources, which they value as a way to access greater amounts of primary texts without the need to travel, to search them faster, and ultimately, overwhelmingly, to read them. Digital humanists may be using computational analysis or visualisation techniques on huge data sets, (for example Dan Cohen’s recent studies of Google Books[ref]Patricia Cohen, “Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers,” <em>New York Times</em>, December 3, 2010, <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/books/04victorian.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all\">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/books/04victorian.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all</a>[/ref]) but it appears that resources such as the Whitman archive may be more transformative of scholarship from the point of view of their creators than of most of their users. Digital Humanities has have moved on from writing evangelising articles and prescribing more training to writing use cases that, arguably, only the converted digital humanists ever read (for example a recent paper on the Monk project[ref]C. Plaisant, T. Clement, R. Vuillemot, S. Steger, and K. Uszkalo, “Use Cases Driving the Tool Development in the MONK project” (paper presented at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, University of Maryland, USA, June 22-25, 2009).[/ref]) Yet the results appear the same, such excellent resources as Whitman may find that only a few expert users make best use of the potential of what they are being offered.\r\n\r\nThis may seem rather a depressing vision, but social networking theory may offer a more positive interpretation of this. We know that in most online communities only 10% of the participants post, the others may read, enjoy, but not take part.[ref]B. Nonnecke and J. Preece, “Lurker Demographics: Counting the Silent” in <em>Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems</em> (Proceedings of the SIGCHI, 2000): 73-80. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=332040.332409&amp;type=series [/ref] It is also an often repeated law of software development that 80% of users make use of 20% of a given application’s features. Thus if we apply such metrics to digital humanities it seems perverse that we somehow feel we have failed unless all users are making the most extensive use of every last piece of potential a resource has to offer. This is why it is important that, as I argued above, digital resources should be accessible for the interested amateur as well as the academic expert and why we should not be disappointed if most people search for quotations for their college assignments or print out poems to use to teach a class, or to read when writing an article. Digital resources have different types of user, and to expect them all to be expert is a kind of techie arrogance of the worst kind.\r\n\r\nSocial networking is also relevant in another context when consider digital resources. The possibilities of a very different kind of social edition are only beginning to be explored by projects such as UCL’s own Transcribe Bentham project. Yet the popularity of crowd sourcing has been proven in science, and we know that users will support, explore and exploit more fully resources that they help to create.[ref]Claire Warwick, M. Terras and C. Fisher, “iTrench: A Study of User Reactions to the Use of IT in Field Archaeology” (paper presented at Digital Humanities 2008 conference, University of Oulu, Finland, June 25-29 2008).[/ref] Thus it may be that an alternative way of involving users in digital humanities is not only to consult them about what they would like to do, design resources so that they can do it as well as possible, or suggest ways in which a resources might be used, but also to encourage them to take part in their creation.\r\n\r\nIt can be seen therefore that the metaphysics wrought by the digital transformations inherent in the Whitman archives take us well beyond the limitations of books. We can appreciate the new potential inherent in digital production for the scholars who produce such resources, but further work remains to be done on exactly how such editions or archives may transform the lives of their users. Part of this work will be undertaken in the coming year by researchers from the INKE project, when we will consider digital scholarly editions. However, in a more general sense it will be fascinating to see whether and how far any kind of crowd sourced content may be integrated into serious scholarly resources such as Whitman. Until that experiment is tried in earnest, we are still some way from utilising the potential of the truly social edition.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 4','In the following section I would like to reflect on some questions about the nature of digital resources, humanities scholarship and the uses to which such material may be put. One of these is the still-contentious issue of whether the creation of such resources is regarded as scholarship in itself or as a way of facilitating the work of other scholars. Even the most recent studies indicate that opinions still remain sharply divided...','inherit','open','open','','127-revision-27','','','2012-10-15 23:06:51','2012-10-15 23:06:51','',127,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/127-revision-27/',0,'revision','',0),