Now that I’ve had the opportunity to consider the bibliographical citations linked to my assigned area, I realize that trying to describe a “living archive” is very much like trying to describe the future. We can imagine it but we’re not quite there. And there is certainly not a wide body of research on this topic at all. The most useful citations were those related to open access (Gerhards and Schäfer) and (Morrissey) and “participatory archives” (Huvila). What I’ve realized through this research is that the work I have been doing with poet Erín Moure to build what we’re calling a “living knowledge site” will also function as an attempt to articulate this future.
The idea for “The Erín Moure Living Knowledge Site” originated in my work as compiler and editor of The Fred Wah Digital Archive. The “living archive” we have in mind will include a digital archive supplemented with annotated bibliographical information like the one I prepared on the work of Fred Wah. But “The Erín Moure Living Knowledge Site” will also be a portal to Moure’s current and new work. It will be a “living archive” also in the sense that it will be linked to the writers, editors, and artists with whom she collaborates and with whom her work directly engages, across national and linguistic boundaries. Moure describes it as:
A locus, a site, a place (not just a carrefour or intersection, there are structures there) where the highways in and out are visible and can be followed by other people … where knowledge is created, altered, comes to be when people can intersect with ideas, cause alterations, open discussions, involve the writer in discussions (not to sway critics from their forensic tasks but to give critics ways of performing new tasks, since they will be able to observe and even interact with the enzymatic reactions that actually go into creating literary works). (Moure email to Susan Rudy)
Our contention is that only with access to the broad range of Moure’s collaborators (including Nicole Brossard and Chus Pato, the living authors of texts Moure has translated), readers, texts, contexts, engagements, and identities, and through undertaking the task of generating new readings through a digital environment will scholars be able to grasp Moure’s project in its entirety.
Since there is as yet no clear consensus about what a “living” archive is or indeed even what exactly the term “new media” signifies, we will need to drawn on scholarship from a range of disciplines. In Digitize This Book! Gary Hall (2008) makes a compelling argument that the term “new media” itself should be replaced by "`emerging media,' as derived from Raymond Williams notion of the "dominant, residual, and emergent (Marxism and Literature 1977)”:
`Emerging media' has more of the sense of `becoming,' of things in process" (227-228) and is broader in scope than, say `computer media,' `networked media', or even 'digital media' with their privileging of the formal and the technical'. (Digitize This Book 228)
This notion of “emerging” is linked very much to the idea of an archive as living in the sense of “`becoming,’ of things in process.”
Stuart Hall, in “Constituting an Archive” (2001), argues that the construction of a “living archive” must be seen as “an on-going, never completed project" (89). Hall reminds us of Foucault’s notion (in The Archaeology of Knowledge) that the “archive” exists:
between the `language' in which artists practice--its langue--and what he calls `the corpus', which he defines as the relatively inert body of works which happen to be produced and survived. The `archive' he thinks of as something between the two. (90)
The “living archive” will therefore pose fundamental questions about sustainability since, as Hall also reminds us, "The question of technology, of access and therefore inevitably of funding are as central to a `living archive' as the aesthetic, artistic and interpretative practices" (91).
To broaden our thinking about how an archive might be “living” and to extend our thinking about how the work of poets is particularly important for this research area I have added the following resources: (G. Hall), (S. Hall), (“Archive of the Now”), (Louise Adair), (Rudy and Wah), (“Culture Machine: generating research in culture and theory”), and (Emerson).
Works Cited
“Archive of the Now.” Web. 2 July 2010.
“Culture Machine: generating research in culture and theory.” Culture Machine: generating research in culture and theory. Web. 8 Oct. 2010.
Emerson, Lori. “The Rematerialization of Poetry: From the Bookbound to the Digital.” 2008: n. pag. Print.
Gerhards, Jürgen, and Mike S Schäfer. “Is the Internet a Better Public Sphere? Comparing Old and New Media in the USA and Germany.” New Media & Society 12.2010 (2010): 143-160. Print.
Hall, Gary. Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now. Minneapolis, Mn: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print.
Hall, Stuart. “Constituting an archive.” Third Text 15.54 (2001): 89. Web.
Huvila, Isto. “Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management.” Archival Science 8.1 (2008): 15-36. Web.
Louise Adair. “Growing Knowledge:
Is the physical library a redundant resource for 21st century academics?.” Web. 22 Oct. 2010.
Morrissey, Sheila. “The economy of free and open source software in the preservation of digital artefacts.” Library Hi Tech 28.2: 211-223. Print.
Rudy, Susan, and Fred Wah. “The Fred Wah Digital Archive | Fred Wah.” The Fred Wah Digital Archive. Web. 22 Oct. 2010.
1 comment:
I think that the concept of the living archive actually points to a key feature about new kinds of scholarly research dissemination that aren't modeled on print: they are dynamic, living spaces of ongoing knowledge production and dissemination, and they require sustaining as such. In print culture production and dissemination of knowledge were more distinct: while publication is of course essential to the ongoing production of knowledge, the two weren't as thoroughly imbricated as they have the potential to be with the use of digital media. While we have still much to discover about the extent to which scholarship needs points of pausing or virtual snapshots, so that we have marker of the state of knowledge at a particular moment, I hope we would all agree that the kind of fixity imposed by print (typos and all) is not what we we want in digital scholarship. That in turn means that sustaining and preserving such scholarship is going to pose very different challenges than if we were talking about materials with less flux.
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