The Great Cory Library Fieldtrip! Blog 36, Keeping track of loose ends

Wed 20 Aug: I’ve made a provisional list of loose ends and matters arising from the Great Cory Fieldtrip. All archive research gives rise to such things and it’s important to keep track of them, not least because such things tend to echo across to future work. For this trip and so far, in no order at all:

Consolidated Gold needs some more practical exploration as well as thought. It’s a huge collection. BUT, it isn’t key for the WWW project so I shan’t do this, tho I do have the relevant part of the long List of Accessions information. An excellent source for a PhD though.

Bessie Price not only writes different genres, but there are overlays of genres in some of the things she writes. Do other people do this? This to be thought about later.

Knowing the future of people when they are writing in the moment of their living is a strange business (slight understatement). It’s troublesome specifically in standing between you and their ‘now’ (it’s the ‘V. Woolf committed suicide’ issue).

Mary Moffat, and also later letter-writers like Robert White in the 1850s and 60s in Grahamstown and environs, are very aware of and think about ‘the Post’ and opportunities for its delivery and collection. And in the midst of the frontier war of 1849-1851, someone on the absolute frontline writes complaining that a post delivery is a whole 24 hours late! Eh? What is this about the Post for them?

There is a silence from many whites in South Africa that resounds across many, most, of the letters they write. The relevancies for them are so telescoped that they do not see, or rather they do not write about, the black people who do many things around them. The whys and wherefores seem to differ for different networks and figurations – mega-thinking about this required!

How material arrived in the Cory Library and wad initially – up to when? the 1960s? – curated impacts on how the researcher proceeds. Each item wwasis the earlier period given its own call number,mso its existence as part of a collection is hard to keep track of (viz. Mary Moffat), and results in vitiating a sense of ‘a collection’, although the List of Accessions shows they arrived all of a piece.

Traces: What exists in most collections is generally not orderly, nor neat, nor to any discernible point. It has its own point (or none), and any methodological pronouncements that instruct people they are to have pre-determined ‘research questions’ seem barking mad. Attend to the traces!

Farming diaries as a sub-genre are interesting – are there more of them? and why do they exist at all? who or what decided that such things ought to be kept? or is ‘farming diary’ a categorical imposition on something less frequent, less organised?

All those interconnected Pringles, Hocklys, Ainslies, Rosses and so on and so on! Making sense of their relationships will need a genealogy of some kind, but those on internet locations contain some quickly apparent mistakes, so we will need to do our own.

Last updated: 20 August 2014


Recent Posts