Blog post 3

18 Jan – 24 Jan 2015
Cape Town

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Recording archival documents at volume

We’re in the thick of the Schreiner-Hemming collection and its thousands of letters and Blog3other documents. I’ve been unusually preoccupied with these letters. A violent throat infection left me voiceless apart from squawks and croaks, so for days there have been short intense silent halfdays in the archive punctuated by violent coughing. Outside, it has been 38c and I’ve been the only person in Cape Town wearing a fleece, while at the apartment I’ve been swathed in a fleece blanket and shivering as I clutch my laptop and expand on things done in archival situ.

As I can’t speak much, I’ve been puzzling away at things I’ve been working on, the letters read. A query from someone at home has led me to eye each letter, dozens, hundreds, by now perhaps a thousand or so, that I’m reading and recording. The question I’ve been asked is – how to know what to record, what’s important, how to pick this out? My answer in short is, but no, I don’t do this! I skim-read it all, then let it flow over the research gills, like plankton. Only later will the contours of meaning become clearer.

To explain.

Research should perhaps aim to make a letter or some other archival document ‘ring’, a bit like hitting a bell with metal or a piece of china with a fingernail. It doesn’t get made to ‘sing’ because it has no voice of its own. It takes meaning from the mind being cast on it and the questions which are asked of it. And, while a capacious memory helps in this, good note-taking is better. Note-taking on —-

Context – For each collection, note who contributes, start and end dates, context of the collection as a whole and why it is archived where it is, what its main relevancies are (nb. best done at the end).

Basics – For each item, note who it is from, who to, when and where written, broad circumstances for why it was written.

Content – For each item, its tone, structure, different sections, its message or point, its audience (both the named addressee and perhaps more widely).

Intertextualities – Other letters, documents etc referred to; reference conceived more broadly.

Specifics – Record project specifics. For WWW, (a) people/narrative of connections, (b) ‘naughty word’ usage – ethnic and racial terminology, (c) labour, land and boundaries, plus (d) that all important ‘anything else that’s interesting’.

Relevancies and Jpegs – if permitted, the limited taking of JPEGs is helpful so some passages can be extracted or transcribed in greater detail post archive, but this should be done sparely, not on a factory scale. Read and think about the damned stuff!

This might sound like a lot of things to do, but we have a database form written in the File Maker format into which these things are very quickly recorded. And NO, we never just JPEG! This is a beginner’s mistake and it just defers the issue of figuring out what is going on and whether stuff is interesting, relevant, etcetera. So only what a day’s work suggests is important is jpeged, doing so at the end of a daily process.

At the end of a day of doing this per letter or other document, there are usually some hundreds of short records. Going through these over a cold white wine après archive generally enables fuller sense to be made of who is who, why they write to particular people as they do, what the elliptical references are about, AND, in project terms, what are the more and the less significant things being thrown up. Understanding then becomes iterative and incremental. If doing this suggests that anything has been missed, it can then become number 1 on the agenda for the next day’s work.

Last year I bumped into an acquaintance in Archive X. They were there to check one letter, in a large collection, which had been referenced by another researcher. That’s all they looked at and were interested in; and having looked, they left. How to stay within the confines of what you and a few other people already know, is my view of this as a research strategy. Ah, but the acquaintance would say that I was wasting my time on much that isn’t directly relevant. Wasting my time in well-stocking my mind! Phoey! And how to know what will become relevant to future work? Tsch-tsch.

The role of the documentary method of interpretation – This term is Harold Garfinkel’s and signifies a fundamental of ethnomethodological thinking about how sense is made of things (see his Studies in Ethnomethodology). The analogy of the jigsaw puzzle helps explain. A piece or couple of them is taken as indexical of something a bit bigger but in a trial and error way – some red bits, perhaps they are part of a sunset; no, add this bit and it’s a red ball. And so with that large puzzle that is a set of letters, a collection, an organisation’s papers. There isn’t just one thread that can be followed through the composing documents but many, and thus my ‘plankton over the gills’ approach, which takes more time but is much more thorough. And because of it, I can return to the stuff and think about, and then think again.

For Garfinkel, the ‘document’ isn’t a literal one, although it can be. His concern is wider – how do we know what’s going on, how do we find out? But the method fits with working with literal documents as well – What’s in them? What do they add up to? What should be taken most note of? Anything unsuspected here? And so on.

Last updated: 25 April 2015


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