Making and erasing traces
Niamh Moore, University of Edinburgh
My chapter in The Archive Project focuses on the making of an archive, a community archive, as a site of research. Likewise, in this presentation I focus on making traces as way of exploring the questions of what is an archive, a collection, a document. I do this through drawing on my work in making and contributing to a range of different kinds of archives. I have encouraged and worked supporting community groups to archive their own histories; I have led on archiving a large dataset from a qualitative longitudinal research project; and I have engaged in some diy academic archiving and created my own online archive of research data, including oral history interviews and other research materials. I draw on these different projects to explore what traces they made, and what traces they covered, to see how tracing traces can help us understand what is an archive, collection and document, and how these objects appear, disappear and morph in different contexts, and what we can learn from these shifting grounds.
Last updated: 30 January 2017
