Where, what and who is s/he? Picture postcards from the archive, the collection and the trace
Liz Stanley, Professor of Sociology & ESRC Professorial Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh
The opening chapter of The Archive Project comments on three problematics which are most productively explored in grounded, substantive ways rather than pronounced on abstractly, concerning the ontological, epistemological and methodological aspects of archival work. My part of the book is concerned mainly with methodological aspects. Discussion here focuses of some ontological aspects of the relationship between the archive, the collection and the trace around research data from the (ESRC funded) ‘Whites Writing Whiteness’ project. This will result later in 2017 in publication of a digital archive/collection/traces in the form of a searchable database containing letters, extracts, notations and other data designed to promote secondary analysis, and it follows publication of the Olive Schreiner Letters Online, produced from a previous project. Three issues of an ontological character are discussed:
Who is s/he? A postcard of ‘The Ruins of the Past’
What is s/he? A postcard of ‘UnCollected UnCollectables’
Where is s/he? A postcard of ‘Archival Dis/Appearance’
They are explored in relation to three postcards, showing that these ontological matters also have epistemological and methodological consequences.
Whites Writing Whiteness www.WhitesWritingWhiteness.ed.ac.uk
Olive Schreiner Letters Online www.OliveSchreiner.org
Last updated: 30 January 2017
