This micro-credential, which is limited to 8 graduate students, will meet in-person at the Beinecke Library in classroom 13 from 11am-1:30 on the following five Fridays:
Friday February 10
Friday February 24
Friday March 31
Friday April 14
Friday April 28
All meetings are from 11am to 1:30 pm.
"What is an Archive?" micro-credential, taught by Melissa Barton, Curator Yale Collection of American Literature, will explore
archives in theory and practice, as both
figurative and literal, both concrete and abstract, repositories for “primary”
inquiry into the past. Many fields have undergone “archival turns” in recent
decades, and many cultural and performance theorists, critics, and historians
have advanced arguments about “the archive” as a monolithic concept. Meanwhile,
professional archivists regularly publish tweets, articles, and blog posts asking them to stop it. This micro-credential hopes to
ponder the question: What is up with this? We will
consider theories of archives from humanities fields and the archival
profession (including the emerging subfield “critical archival studies”), and
we will discuss how archives are made, how they are used, how they are made
usable, what may be assumed or elided in the making and use of archives, and
the popularity of, and tensions around, “the archive” as a concept. Topics and
keywords include: what is primary or original? What is order or process? What
does it mean to collect, to curate? What is an archival silence, and what might
be comparable notions of archival noise? What does it mean to recover or
discover? In addition to readings, students will complete a survey of an
existing collection at Yale, or another collection in consultation with the
instructor.
Goals
* Understand how archives, especially
collections of personal papers and the records of cultural organizations (in
contrast to the state and organizational records that inform much of archival
professional practice), have been acquired by institutional collections in the
20th and 21st centuries
* Understand the life cycle of archives
in institutional collections, including the concepts of record, provenance,
original order (respect des fonds), appraisal, and arrangement and
description (including aggregation, hierarchy, and taxonomy (i.e., controlled
vocabularies)), and understand how these concepts guide archival collection and
description
* Understand that archival principles
and practices are not politically neutral and are not immune to structures of
power; rather, archives have in themselves historically served as tools of
state surveillance and violence, and archival epistemologies share their
origins with enlightenment constructions of white supremacy and colonialism.
Archival principles and practices are embedded in and formative of structures,
biases, and assumptions of human activity in the past and the present.
Participants will understand, as well, some of the efforts made by archivists
to combat these embedded power structures.
Expectations
of time required for out-of-session prep and project assignments:
* Required readings will be limited to 1-2 hours of
advance preparation per session
* Participants will create a survey of a “minimally
processed,” but shelved and open, collection in Beinecke (or another Yale
repository). Participants will receive training and guidance in producing
this document.
a. collection must be shelved with a published
finding aid
b. collection should be minimally described *or*
minimally arranged, a list of choices will be offered and time set aside
to discuss options
c. participants will review a minimum of 10 boxes
in the relevant repository reading room
d. participants may choose a collection from the
list or are welcome to propose a version of this project relevant to
their own research
e. This project is expected to take 10-15 hours of
dedicated time in a reading room (Note that reading room hours are
typically 9am-4:30pm.)
Please respond to the following short questions:
