International Contexts for Digital Initiatives.

Transcription

1 International Contexts for Digital Initiatives. Catherine Hobbs As I thought about the topic for this panel, I realized that what I was interested in discussing around international co-operation was why institutions and individual archivists should work together for the translation of context for the archives. In other words I hope that we can make the displaced born-digital components of literary archives intelligible in their new custodial settings, not just safeguard them, although, as you ll see later, the idea of interpreting and safeguarding do come together. There is a lot of productive and important effort around the risks for archives and safeguarding them. I am, I suppose, calling for a balance of effort between safeguarding archives and rendering them intelligible in their new contexts. My interest in the digital remains an interest in literary lives. Two imperatives that derive from our engagement with writers fonds as I see it are: 1) how can the archivist Do right by the writer s life and development and 2) how can the archivist Do right by that author s aesthetic? So the question becomes, How do we adapt to changes in technology to preserve archives while led by the creator of those archives? I don t believe that we just throw the baby-out-with the bathwater and consider that because something is massive, digital and hard to manage or hard to safeguard there aren t original orders there or elements of what I ve lately been calling contexts of personal meaning there that also deserve attention. Writers archives continue to be provenance-based and our interest in them derives from that. We want to interpret literary works knowing as much as we Catherine Hobbs, 23 Oct Page 1

2 can about the life, interests, development and context of creation (office space, family situation, etc.) that we can glean about the writer. In literary scholarship this interest has survived and intertwined in interesting ways with postmodern theory over the decades. The writers workspace is still important. We still recognize that the place a writer writes has a psychological effect on the creative process. A haven for creative thought (as in the writers office of Wendy Cope documented by the British Library) or Hemingway in a café in Montparnasse or Saint-Germain-des-Prés, or Rushdie on his laptop under the fatwa. Knowledge of these contexts adds to what can be understood of the text. Presumably Hemingway nowadays would bring his laptop and his smart phone into the café. The geospatial aspects of sites of creation are interesting even for so-called analogue archives: as many of you know there is an increasing interest from the digital humanities in adding digital locators to literary projects, even those using digitized mss. (Richler project). It seems that archivists and others are naturally continuing our interest in creative space by looking at the technological ecology and habitat of the writer and the writer s behaviour toward technology. Archivists have added to the idea of creative space in the last decade by considering how this is framed by technology. Projects like the Salman Rushdie digital archives emulate a desktop. We have seen research into digital behaviour and digital materiality emerge. Right now we don t see the same approach accommodating multiple devices, Cloud storage and social media but presumably this is coming: an ability to map how the technology and behaviour and development of a writer intertwine. Catherine Hobbs, 23 Oct Page 2

3 Writers also display a range of technology-loving to technology-hating behaviours in this age. Canadian poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky talks of writing The Book of Frog on clipboard sitting on her porch in the sun. And yet she uses technology and, in fact, The Book of Frog is based on an exchange between herself and poet (husband) Robert Bringhurst. It is a piece touching on the dislocation of one person travelling speaking to the other person at home. The self-consciously Luddite approach involves printed that was later edited in the early drafts and the work was produced in its final form as a beautifully bound letterpress book. I am interested in tracing and documenting context: which is a semantic rather than digital forensic issue (although the two should be aligned, in my view). In fact, I think that all treatment of paper, digital desktop and dispersed media/social media storage should be aligned rather than considered at all separated because of our provenance-ial interest. The digital is contiguous with the analogue. How such an archival approach take in the impact of technological ecology and habitat for a particular writer? Then how does it see them in a broader interest of contexts of personal meaning; which are in turn, framed in broader social and cultural contexts: creating successive rings of context, all of which perhaps need translation for their new archival settings, or at least the archivist must document the important elements of those contexts that are demonstrated in the records and thereby make them intelligible. I. We can consider then how the thoughts about creative contexts change for diasporic archives: Catherine Hobbs, 23 Oct Page 3

4 In these cases translating cultural context will be an issue that impacts the interpretation of the writer s life and development but also interpretation of a writer s aesthetic. For example, the aesthetic impact of a change of place takes on weight for W.G. Sebald s archives at the Deutsches littertur archive Marbach, Germany. Not only is Sebald s fonds a particularly ironic archives because of his questioning of archives and documentation within his aesthetic But, in addition, the very manuscripts of his The Rings of Saturn (a peculiar ramble of a German writer through Eastern Britain: an interesting mix of insight and alienation) exist in a now-twice-disjointed German context at Marbach. This story of a ramble was created abroad [although not perhaps abroad to Sebald who was resident for a long time in Britain] and then brought back to Germany. The fonds also includes the translation into English in which Sebald himself took a strong role. This raises issues about translating cultural contexts. How do we ensure that the researcher picks up on the clues of context of the archives creation in the place of deposit? This would be the case (although with far less archival irony) for Simone de Beauvoir s diaries of her time in the U.S. (published in 2008) and many other cases where there is geographic dislocation. If we think about the Josef Skvorecky fonds held in Toronto which is where the novelist settled after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, these archives brings together the translation of cultural context and where textual distribution and/or earlier technology seem to mix. As with Milan Kundera, Skvorecky s books his subject matter dealt with Czech life under oppression and were banned in his homeland under the Soviets. This led to a covert circulation of texts copied out and passed on secretly. After settling in Canada, Skvorecky set up Sixty-Eight Publishers which published over 200 volumes banned in Czechoslovakia. Here Catherine Hobbs, 23 Oct Page 4

5 then, the technology of writing and publishing impacts what we can know about the circulation of texts in Czechoslovakia under occupation and their circulation through efforts abroad. Now the need to translate contexts and trace the circulation of texts are both affected by computer technology. Even in cases where there is no political oppression involved questions the archivist must ask can include: What affects the circulation of texts? What impacts the access to technology? Perhaps in certain cases the universities take a role as they have for so many writers in providing access to technology. As well, technology s broader social and economic contexts need to also be considered: what type of software and hardware was available in the year 2000 in this particular country? How was it perhaps obtained? Other elements need further exploration in a diasporic context for example, questions that put together changes in geographic place and technology. It is now possible to move to a different place in the world and to store your archives in the same Cloud storage setting. The archivist will need to keep an eye on the qualitative differences that affect personal development and aesthetic here. From a technological standpoint, the seamlessness of the technology does not tell the story. We are not disembodied beings: we are in a certain place when we blog or Tweet or create old-fashioned word documents. The writer will know what element of context is important here and the archivist should know to ask these questions at the time of appraisal. How would we archivists make these elements available to the researcher? Can we include these translations of context in descriptive tools? Can we reserve a Catherine Hobbs, 23 Oct Page 5

6 way to make the contexts of personal meaning accessible along with broader social contexts that affect writing and access to technology? Can we do this while also allowing for all the neat data mining, modelling, geospatial referencing addons that digital humanities is providing? You may know that I proposed project for the Special interest Section on Literary and Artistic Archives within the ICA on Aiming to protect the archives of Dissident writers and artists. David, Heather and I have been working this project up and developing guidelines to allow repositories and individual archivists to have proper processes for the acquisition, preservation and access provisions for these archives. This project is forming fruitful links to other archives at risk projects. II. As well, then, we should perhaps think a lot about which elements of context need further exploration for dissidents creators to enable the interpretation of their archives: These are records created and/or kept under situations of duress. Technology has never been neutral but it is perhaps not neutral in different ways. There are corporate and governmental controls on access and privacy. This also has a bearing on the technology made available, its context which will probably affect the writers relationship to writing technology and to creative space in the digital. What if your device can be confiscated or your ability to access technology or platforms blocked? What are the relationships between the regime in question and the universities or other entities providing technological access? Catherine Hobbs, 23 Oct Page 6

7 Also what are the aesthetic or literary content issues that are formed by duress or limited access to technology (which impacts digital materiality)? The limits to production of writing and the elements around personal safety can also change the aesthetic: for example, what is made plain in the text and what is made into extended allegory or cloaked in metaphor is likely to form differently in literature created under duress. A researcher s ability to interpret the work of Zimbabwean-Canadian writer Yvonne Vera (who left Zimbabwe under political pressure), for example, is dependent on understanding the allegory around the stone birds unearthed in her unfinished novel Obedience. One of these same birds features on the flag of Zimbabwe, signalling the pre-colonial Shona empire as a powerful root culture to which Vera provides a creative counter-narrative. The archivist should be concerned with how all of this intersects with the ability to trace the writer s trajectory and aesthetic and connection to broader social and political contexts. If the creator turns to blogging as Ai Wei Wei did in China to make a public and activist archives of his everyday interactions and activity, archivists probably recognize that they don t need to be so precious in delineating archival from socalled quasi-public realms of social media. We will probably also be bending what we consider to be archives to get some or any evidence in some cases and this will be aided by technology. So, the issues of authenticity have been such a focus in InterPARES, for example may be challenged by the intake of documents that cannot be substantiated in the same way that news media now use unsubstantiated video of Arab Spring, the war in Catherine Hobbs, 23 Oct Page 7

8 Syria or the situation in Ukraine with a caveat about authenticity but also with an eye to their particular archival contexts. In closing, for me the question of international co-operation, guidelines and human rights related issues is also how do we create guidelines and practices to allow the writer s archives to continue to speak to us in these various ways; to continue to be deeply interpreted in terms of these various contexts, even despite geographic displacement and/or political pressure. We should be asking what types of acquisition records and description are possible to ensure that the researcher at a distance from the context of creation has the tools to see the evidence of these many contexts and trying to implement these practices. All of this is an effort to retain the keys to what makes literature so powerful. Many of these elements derive from these rings of context: the broader social context of the work, the particular contexts of the writer and the constraints and contrivances that still enable innovative literature to be produced nonetheless. In this sense, the issues of technology are contiguous with other discussions of context. It is, I would argue, an archivist s imperative to preserve as much evidence of these as one can. Fragmentation. Yvonne Vera and the aesthetic of fragmentation. (so it is: what happens to information about context? when the fonds is displaced and how to we co-operate to ensure that information about contexts is passed along.). Catherine Hobbs, 23 Oct Page 8