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Last week in class, we discussed the democratizing aspects of digitally born archives. In relation to conventional archival formats (i.e. museums and libraries), the digital, user-generated archive provides a realm where marginal voices are offered the opportunity to speak on an equal front. It is believed that a diverse assortment of personal narratives can be heard in the digital archive. However, as I slogged my way through the bewildering array of xenophobic and ridiculously patriotic documents in the 9/11 Digital Archive, I couldn’t help but question whether this collection of “individual” narratives were really all that different from one another. Could it be that the website’s platform enabled the homogeneity seen in the archive’s records?

Joanne Garde-Hansen addresses a similar concern in her article “MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook”. In her analysis of Facebook in relation to the idea of ‘consignation’ in Derrida’s Archive Fever, Garde-Hansen argues that only superficially are social media platforms sites where “powerful and immediate versions of the self emerge and interconnect with others” (139). Garde-Hansen takes note of Facebook’s uniformity and how user profiles signal social norms as newcomers replicated their friends’ profiles in an effort to “fit-in with the existing digital collective” (139). With a structure in place, users must consign to tell their stories and record their memories in not only a formulaic way (as designed by the team at Facebook), but also in relation to how other users have conveyed their personal narratives.

Over the years, Facebook has evolved into a multifaceted platform where a user’s identity is not only created and preserved, but now actively remember (sometimes without consent). Since Garde-Hansen wrote her article in 2009, Facebook has undergone significant changes and ‘improvements’. Some of its newest features, “On this Day” or “A Year in Review“, allow users to remember their biggest moments on Facebook.

This morning as I logged on to my account, a post I had written “on this day” four years ago was displayed at the head my News Feed. Oddly enough, on March 28, 2012 I had posted a status announcing my acceptance to UBC. What an appropriate memory to recall now that I’m finishing up my degree! Although I’ve shared other posts on this day over the years, Facebook has chosen to remind me of this particular event based on what I can only assume is the number of ‘friends’ who’ve “liked” or commented on the status.

What this ultimately implies is that my memories (and whether or not I choose to recall them) are presented to me and attributed a value based on their relation to other Facebook users. With this new feature in place, I am forced to remember certain memories over others – not for how I value them, but for how others do. My memories on Facebook are tied to how they were evaluated by my ‘friends’. An user’s memory has gone from a subjective experience to a collective experience on Facebook. As a website founded on the ideals of inter-connectivity and friendship, Facebook’s default platform does not allow individual users to choose how they construct, archive, and more recently remember themselves. Since I am the only one who can see these memories when they appear on my newsfeed (unless I decide to ‘share’ them), why should they be displayed based on how others have rate them? Based on its fundamental nature, Facebook is not a truly ‘personal’ archive. One user’s personal narrative, identity, and memory will always and indefinitely be understood in relation to another’s.

Works Cited:

Garde-Hansen, Joanne. “MyMemories? Personal Digital Archival Fever and Facebook.” Save As…Digital Memories. Ed. Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins, and Anna Reading. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. 135-50.

In my introductory post to this blog, I included an epigraph from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.”

I thought I would briefly recall Orwell’s statement, seeing as though it is especially relevant for this week’s focus on archives within former colonial societies. As Bastian reminds us of the old cliché, “history is written by the winners” and recorded in the archive (Bastian 267). Documents in the colonial archive celebrate the exploits and conquest of the colonizers, meaning the settlers’ history takes precedence over the largely undocumented history of the natives. However, with the recent rise of post-colonial studies, scholars are endeavouring to uncover the silenced histories of First Nations communities within the colonial archive. Strategic readings of these past imperial texts were intended to unearth a new counter narrative to the archive’s more conspicuously European history. Similar to Orwell’s statement, scholars today are readjusting our understanding of the colonial past in a way that accounts for the very real histories of an entire group of people who’ve been both canonically and culturally ostracized.

Jeanette Allis Bastian and Krisztina Laszlo, two scholars of colonial or post-colonial societies, are actively searching for these silences for two reasons:

1. As a way to correct injustices, vindicate the oppressed, and demystify the “winners” (Bastian 269).
2. For preservation of culture; a type of anthropological salvation of a “dying culture” (Laszlo 300).

After my encounter with the archives and readings this week, I, like Bastian, am skeptical that a true and accurate account of these “subaltern” histories can derive from a colonial archive. Further, I’m unsure as to whether the museum archive is an appropriate place to “preserve” and “vindicate” these marginalized cultures. Within a conventionally established archive backed by federal institutions, these narratives are invariably and inescapably tied to a position of “otherness”.

Take for instance the Beverly Brown fonds, located at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. Ostensibly, Beverly Brown’s photographs offer an example of a marginalized voice under colonial power that has made its way into the museum’s archive. The collection is mainly comprised of photographs documenting Brown’s experience studying at St. Michael’s Residential School in Alert Bay, BC. From roughly 1937 t0 1945, Brown photographed her friends, classmates, teachers, and the surrounding landscape. At first glance, the images are aesthetically beautiful and evident of true photographic artistry. However, when bearing in mind that the photographer who captured these moments was also a student within the residential system, one realizes the advantageous position Brown was in to portray both colonial and native experiences simultaneously.

First of all, I was struck by how happy the subjects of these photographs appeared to be. The dominant counter-narrative in circulation highlights rather the injustices, horrific conditions, and abuse the children at St. Michael’s were subjected to (Here is an article that recounts one resident’s horrific experience at the school one year after Brown had left).

However, in the Beverly Brown fonds, the children were photographed dressing up, playing games, and enjoying the outdoors. The narrative these images convey deeply complicates our general understanding of the abusive context in which these photographs were taken. Without dismissing the very abusive circumstances of these residential schools, I merely want to point out the potential difference in narrative being conveyed when looking at images of the residents photographed by white settlers, versus images captured by natives themselves. In opposition to the traditional photograph of unhappy students sitting in their desks or in a strict formation before a church, Brown’s more youthful, candid scenes of children playing outdoors challenge the colonial archives’ account of First Nations communities as victims, as the conquered and assimilated. In the Beverly Brown fonds, the children most often appear resilient, steadfast, and hopeful, standing stoically before a totem pole.

The image above is a perfect example of the two colonial narratives existing simultaneously. Here we have a residential school (a marker of colonial power), bordered by two Kwakiutl totem poles, were a group of First Nations students are marching across the front lawn.

Despite these photographs being taken by and of students in this residential school, I continually find myself wondering how much “vindication” are we actually offering these marginalized narratives if they are always understood as “other” or “counter” to the colonial narrative? The indigenous narratives documented in these archives will always be tied to the Western, colonial perspective that has enabled and called for their appraisal. While their place within the museum archival context may serve to legitimize and vocalize these previously repressed narratives, they are always understood in opposition to the colonial narrative, never fully equal. My question remains, how fully can these repressed narratives be heard in the archives of traditionally marginalized figures (such as Beverly Brown) within a colonial institution (i.e. university museum)?

Works Cited:

Bastian, Jeannette Allis. “Reading Colonial Records through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space and Creation.” Archival Science 6.3 (2006;2007;): 267-84. Web.

Laszlo, Krisztina. “Ethnographic Archival Records and Cultural Property.” Archivaria.61 (2006): 299. Web.

This week, my encounter with the Olive Allen Biller fonds unearthed questions about personality, performance, and authorial intent in what are typically considered ‘ordinary’ or ‘personal’ forms of writing. In her introduction to The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing, Jennifer Sinor contextualizes that, canonically speaking, narrative and story are the elements that distinguish “ordinary writing” from other more valued forms of literary works. Sinor remarks that the narrative lens through which we tend to approach and understand all forms of writing, further divides texts into those which are “crafted”, and those which are not – namely, ordinary diurnals (Sinor 6).

This reductive line of distinction being drawn between genres of writing has inherent consequences. The artificial binary, either/or approach imposed on how we view narrative in literary works effectively denies a writer authorial intent. However, as Sinor hopes to make visible in her reading of Annie Ray’s diary, personal documents and ordinary writings do participate in a process of story-telling: “of the self presenting or representing the self” (Hobbs 131). To me was clearly apparent in Olive Allen Biller’s collection of “ordinary” documents.

Allen Biller’s fonds included pocket-book diaries documenting day to day happenings, journals which recorded summer vacations in Trebarfoot, artwork, illustrations, poems, and photographs of both her time in England and Canada. While these documents may be classified generically as “personal”, not once as I was reading Biller’s journals did I have a moment where I felt I was encroaching on the individual’s privacy. In fact, the Trebarfoot Volumes were arranged in a way that would suggest Biller clearly intended these journals to be viewed and appreciated by eyes other than her own. A clearly meticulous, detailed, and aesthetic hand went into the creation of these journals. The lettering was polished and legible, decorative markings embroidered the pages, and there was a clearly intentional authorial voice emitted from the words on the page. Sketches, illustrations, poems and other works were included to further suggest that for Olive, such an ordinary genre was nothing but ordinary (in the canonical understanding of the term). Her Trebarfoot Volumes were something akin to a communal scrapbook in its layout and aesthetics. While the unstructured, scrapbook-like arrangement oftentimes made context difficult to follow as a reader not privy to the full details of Allen Biller’s day, the inclusion of photographs and signatures provided the journal’s potential reader with a fuller picture of vacation happenings.

I want to draw attention to evidence of authorial intent found Trebarfoot Volume 1, where Olive Allen Biller seems to be offering a commentary on the very practice of journaling. After providing a simple, daily log of activities occurring over the course of two-weeks, where the weather and evening pass-times were briefly recorded in point form, Olive writes:

“By the amount of snow, drizzle, and downright rain entered in this journal, the uninitiated might think we didn’t have a jolly time – but we did. Log fires are hosts in themselves. It takes a lot of people to blow them and pull them down, pile them up again, fetch more…”.

Allen Biller clearly appears to be addressing someone in her journals. After her previous, point-form mentions of daily remarks, Olive takes the time to further explain her two weeks for the “uninitiated” (us, the reader and researcher) in a more literary way.

Here’s is another example of Olive’s authorial intent surfacing in her ordinary writings:

“Nobody kept a journal. Perhaps five weeks of everyday doings might become a stale read. However, some of the principle events are chronicled in a certain blue diary…but she didn’t write it up…consequently much valuable information has been lost”.

Olive Allen Biller’s intent in creating these journals becomes evident as she addresses the potential reader -“the uninitiated”. These instance of personal, ordinary writing appear to be a deliberate attempts to create and memorialize the “self”.  The creation of the “self” within personal archives, whether elaborate, mundane, authentic, or fabricate, is a narratological construction, similar to that seen in literary works. As Sue McKemmish and Catherine Hobbs’ argue, personal archives are “narratives of the self”.

Works Cited:

Allen Biller, Olive. 1890- c.1950. Box 1. RBSC-ARC-1033 Olive Allen Biller Fonds. University of British Columbia Rare Books and Special Collections, University of British Columbia Library, Vancouver. 23 February 2016.

Hobbs, Catherine. “The Character of Personal Archives: Reflections on the Value of Records of Individuals.” Archivaria 52 (2001): 126-135. Web. 28 February 2016.

Sinor, Jennifer. The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray’s Diary. Iowa City: U of Iowa, 2002. Project MUSE. Web. 28 Feb. 2016.

After reading French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s seminal work, Archive Fever, I resolved to be cautious in seeking “origin”, “essence”, or inject meaning in the organization of the fonds in this week’s encounter with the archives. In other words, I planned on resisting “the irrepressible desire to return to the origin” (Derrida 57).  Because, as Derrida posits, will we ever really know if the origin resides in the archival documents, or if the archive is merely an external trace of the original inscription, which essentially remains hidden in the archive’s subconscious? Coupled with the insight provided by Douglas and MacNeil that I referred to in my last post, reading the archival fonds in order to gain a deeper understanding of the creator and their archival intent is perhaps a futile and ultimately impenetrable endeavour (Derrida 35). Furthermore, it cannot be refuted (especially for those archives which are closed and their creators long gone): our encounters in the archive are “monologues”, so to speak. So, in approaching my encounter with Anne Blades’ archives at UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library this week, I came prepared with a different set of questions.

To be honest, I had never heard of Anne Blades before. However, after doing some research into her work as an author and illustrator of children’s books set in British Columbia, I was interested in uncovering how Anne managed to capture and illustrate those secondary, canonically marginalized voices that emerge from her collaboration with an author who wrote a fictional tale about the experience of indigenous children in the earlier half of the 20th century.

Interpreting Box 7 of the Anne Blade Fonds was like reading a novel whose plot develops in a non-sequential manner. The box includes a series of sketches, drawings, and watercolour paintings, royalty documents, correspondences, and manuscripts relating to her work illustrating Jean Speare’s  A Candle for Christmas (1986). It includes evidence of many (at times indiscernible) voices: publishers, authors, illustrators, editors, managers, and printers. Often times there were no markings to indicate whose revisions were scribbled in the margins of manuscripts, or whose notes were attached to documents and sketches.

The way in which the contents of box 7 were revealed was in no way chronological, but nevertheless exciting. For every file I read, my understanding of the collection of archives and its contents shifted. Just as Derrida argues that archival meaning occurs in the retrospective, it was only overtime that a comprehensive understanding of Anne Blades’ materials was established (Derrida 30).

Reflecting on each new “revelation”, and the excitement of finally assimilating the contents of the box, I caught myself…Derrida was right. I was succumbing to the archive fever I had initially vowed to avoid in my archival encounters this week. So much for trying…there really is something ‘feverish’ about digging into the unknown.

While the contents of Box 7 were rather intriguing, I would like to connect Derrida’s Archive Fever to my archival encounters on a more macro level. While I could provide for you a ‘reading’ of the Anne Blades fonds that would hopefully give you a profound understanding of her work as an artist, my encounter with the archive is simply an act of interpretation. A psychoanalytic reading of Anne’s archive represses the possible meaning in the archival objects themselves. It places precedence on the “matriarchal” figure, ignoring the numerous and equally (if not more) important voices within the texts that document the production of Speare’s book A Candle for Christmas. This is a book where many individuals had a hand in its fruition. Anne Blades was only the illustrator. The box contained much more than merely evidence of her contributions and artistic process. Three revised drafts of Speare’s story were included, where over revisions, key figures are altered due to editorial suggestion (i.e. the nurse in the final draft was initially a nun). The documents of Box 7 demonstrate and document a truly egalitarian collaboration. Stressing psychoanalytical importance on the “creator’s” fonds, in this case, doesn’t seem right.

In thinking ahead to this weeks article by Kimberly Christen, those indigenous voices that murmur in the background of this collection are called to attention. What do we make of those voices which have not been offered a chance to speak, or are being spoken for without documented consent?

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques, and Eric Prenowitz. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics 25.2 (1995): 9-63. Web. 8 Feb. 2016.

There’s just something about Douglas Coupland which made me think that rummaging through his fonds at the Rare Books and Special Collections library at UBC would unearth something incredibly intriguing, profound, and most definitely perplexing. Having been a long time fan of Coupland’s novels, artwork, films, and most recently his Twitter account, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on and sift through some of his archival materials.

After considering the issues raised in Jennifer Douglas and Heather MacNeil’s article, which aims to understand “whether and how we can know a writer through her archives” (Douglas & MacNeil 26), I was excited by the prospect of uncovering who Coupland is as an artist. Delving into his fonds, I was expecting (more like hoping) that a document, Post-It note, letter, receipt, or the collection more broadly would provide insight into the brilliant mind of such a multifaceted artist. Through that item, the possible “intent” of his archive would be revealed. I’ll admit that being quite new to archival research I unintentionally pulled Box 67 of the Coupland fond, which happens to be a series of correspondences, fan mail, and other miscellaneous textual materials sent to Coupland, dating from the year 1996 to 1999.

The files included letters of admiration, missed connections, manuscripts and poems from aspiring writers, a BC hydro statement, envelops with stamps, and a daily-log journal (most likely written by Coupland himself). One of the most challenging aspects of working with these materials was that most of these files (aside from the journal) were written to Coupland and would not give me a first hand account of the writer himself. These files merely highlight the one-sided relation between a public figure deemed culturally important and his audience. This indirect understanding of Coupland incited questions about the relation between the writer and researcher, and how that is mediated by the archivist. What about the researcher’s motives? What if the researcher’s intent is not to “dig out” the writer’s “neuroses and asses her psychological state”, as Marian Engels believes (Douglas and MacNeil, 36).

Guided by my reading of Catherine Hobb’s article, which explored the archival approaches in the establishment of a writer’s archive, I was curious as to how the Coupland fonds were received and processed. Luckily, I stumbled upon a blog written by student archivists who documented their archival method! I was surprised to learn that the materials were received in what seemed like “a veritable mishmash of non-related items”. The archivists couldn’t discern whether or not there was any significance to the way in which the objects arrived. This new information lead me to read Douglas Coupland’s fonds as a kind of “cabinet of curiosity”, so to speak. If the “wholeness” of the fond cannot be determined from its “fragments”(Douglas & MacNeil 27), what could that indicate about how the writer wishes his item to be viewed?

The only answer I could arrive at is guided by my own personal understanding of Coupland. Douglas Coupland, through all of his mediums, is a cultural analyst. His artwork, novels, films all reflect the conditions of our generation and where he believes we’re headed. These archives are evidence of what life was like in the 20th and 21st century – Coupland’s generation. Coupland appears to be thinking ahead. His archives are for future researcher, who through digging into his files will uncover certain things about this generation.

Here’s an article written by Douglas Coupland which might provide insight into how he thinks – specifically about “one man’s trash”:

http://thewalrus.ca/2003-10-detail/

The writer/creator has a direct relation to the researcher. The archivist, in this case, may potentially pose as a barrier to the researcher’s discoveries. Coupland appears to be providing researchers the opportunity to make sense of the objects in his fonds without imposing his own intent. Unlike how Douglas and MacNeil see the writer as “continually performing different versions of herself”, Coupland doesn’t seem to be performing any version of himself (Douglas & MacNeil 39)! It is the researcher who is crafting meaning and will teach Coupland something about himself. It is the researcher who constructs the “narrating I” (Douglas & MacNeil 34). But the question inevitably arises whether we, as researchers, are actually getting to the “core” of the writer’s fonds if there’s an additional level of mediation imposed by the archivist in its construction.

Works Cited:

Douglas, Jennifer, and Heather MacNeil. “Arranging the Self: Literary and Archival Perspectives on Writers’ Archives.” Archivaria 67 (2009): 25-39. Association of Canadian Archivists. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

Gilean, Dan, Laura Hebert, and Sarah Hillier. “Unpacking the Douglas Coupland Fonds.” Web log post. UBC Blogs. Ed. Sromkey. New at Rare Books and Special Collections, Sept. 2013. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.

Hobbs, Catherine. “New Approaches to Canadian Literary Archives.” Journal of Canadian Studies 40.2 (2006): 109-19. Project MUSE [Johns Hopkins UP]. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past. – George Orwell

Hello! My name is Bronwyn Graham, and I am a fourth year undergraduate student in the midst of completing an Honours degree in English literature at the University of British Columbia.

My interest in archival materials begins as far back as I can remember. As a young child strolling through museum galleries, rummaging through familial archives, and encountering artifacts of generations past has incited fascination, imagination, and of course, an incessant amount of questions to my poor parents’ annoyance, I am sure. To whom did these artifacts originally belong? Why has this particular “relic” been deemed important, valuable or “archivable”? What does it signify? Why has it been enshrined in a glass box? The action of archiving and ascribing an artifact some arbitrary significance is something my younger self was far too easily conditioned to blindly accept and even be in awe of. As a child, I saw these archives as sacred, venerated, fragile, and of some significant value without ever really challenging that idea or noticing what hasn’t been included. The fascinating aura of mystery these archives seemed to exude, along with the power they wield in culture, captured my childhood intrigue. As an “adult”, part of me still finds the prospect of handling century old archives exciting and only slightly sacrilegious.

This childhood interest has only grown over the years, but in a much more critical way. A few summers ago, I had the pleasure of gaining real world experience working with the Vancouver Biennale as an archives and research assistant. Part of my responsibilities were to organize and digitize physical archives, as well as research and compile digital archives of the Vancouver Biennale’s outdoor installations and happenings. In a sense, I was creating an archive of the present. This was something, as a child who was clouded by the allure of historical archives, I had never consider to be of much value. The work I was doing for the contemporary artists at the Biennale could be seen as enshrining them – procuring and compiling artifacts and information for future archives, as deemed worthy. Given the artists’ success and popularity, some of the work I did may prove to be useful and go on to be included in other institutional archives. However, some (probably most) of the work I did will have been in vain; these archives will remain in a file online or in a file holder for the rest of time, never to reach the public or opened again. Forgotten.

My experience with the Vancouver Biennale and the resulting questions surrounding the selection, preservation, and access of archives, has served as motive for my registration in this seminar. Throughout this course I hope to engage with the issues that arise when exploring the voids and gaps within canonical archives: these “forgotten” or marginal memories of those who have no objective account of their existence. I am also interested in discussing how archives may figure into identity formation. Lastly, I hope to further discuss the ways in which archives function as a commemorative practice, especially in relation to dealing with trauma.

It was a pleasure to meet you all and I look forward to diving deeper into these issues and more over the course of the term!

Cheers,

Bronwyn