An Archive of the People, for the People… just not by People

This post was by far the most fun and the hardest to write: On one hand, I didn’t need to do any research on the creator—after all, who knew me best but me? On the other hand, I could no longer pretend to be the “objective critic” peering through the files of some bygone historical figure. What was originally intended to be a brief, perfunctory scroll through my Facebook page turned into a two-hour stroll down memory lane. As a daily user of Facebook, it was difficult to switch hats and become a user of the archive. After all these, were my memories—weren’t they? Finding room for critical distance was near impossible.

Perhaps this anxiety is what Joanne Garde-Hansen, in her chapter “MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook,” gestures towards when she urges us to “move toward understanding personal digital archiving as the expression of memory rather than history” (136, added italics). Garde-Hansen complicates our idea of how social media platforms such as Facebook function as a form of personal digital archives. Drawing on Derrida’s seminal paper, “Archive Fever,” to demonstrate how these soi-disant private archives are both more institutionally and publically influenced than anticipated, she writes, “we cannot ignore the powerful politics of archiving and friendship at stake in SNSs [social network sites]” (136).

Garde-Hansen cites many convincing examples to demonstrate the institution’s control over user content—she must be one of the few people on earth who have actually read the entire user legal agreement, and while parts of her paper are obviously outdated, recent developments on Facebook only go to support her larger claim. Now and then, ready-made videos (“On this Day” and “Year in Review”) will pop up on the user’s newsfeed, a slideshow of pictures curated by Facebook to celebrate friendship anniversaries or important moments, such as “Beatrice and Jocelyn: Friends on Facebook since 2012” or “Highlights of 2016”. However, as hard as Facebook tries to “story,” to borrow Sinor’s verbification of the term, the presence of its underlying database logic is still jarringly apparent. Just the other day, I received a notification that a video documenting my friendship with Gary Turner* was ready to be posted (*name changed). Who is this dude, what is he doing on my wall, and why would I want to share this video? It turns out that Gary was an acquaintance from high school and whose friend request I had been too polite to decline. Facebook’s algorithm had assumed that we were close buddies since we had both been tagged in a series of grad photos that received a lot of likes. I thought this was a neat instance of how Facebook controls our memories. Garde-Hansen writes that “the wall is only really meaningful to the user” (143), but I would argue that this too is no longer so. Albums which only have one photo of me end up on my wall. Videos commemorate memories I never made. Not only does the “technical structure determine how… private memories come into public existence” (137), but the underlying mechanisms of a social media archive determine what can and should be remembered. The institution has become a smart computer. In this day and age, the creator has no control over her own archive.

Last thoughts:

One of the “dangers” of a social media archive is that traditional methods of categorization are not and were never meant to be applied. The fonds no longer exists. Whereas the 9/11 Archive, though disorganized, still maintains some sense of archival classification (Collection: Photography >> Creator: Mark Phillips >> Item: Satan in the Smoke), each Facebook wall, if we can consider them “collections” of an individual, are so fluid that clicking on a picture posted on your wall will lead you immediately to another friend’s album by means of a hyperlink. Hyperlinking is not only an “exteriorisation of history” (144), but a meshing together of identities and private archives. This trans-creator aspect of social media archiving demonstrates how people are not bounded beings; we are populated by our memories of and interactions with others. The social media archive most clearly illustrates this by the way it replaces the hierarchical structure of classical archival organization by an interactive and often messy web of associations.


Works Cited:

Garde-Hansen, Joanne. “MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook.” Digital Memories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 135-150. Print.

 

Uncovering the Silence of the Colonizer  

School children during visit by Governor General Lord Tweedsmuir. (Item a034664)

Ok, I know I’ve been speaking a lot about archival silences lately, but bear with me!

In “Reading Colonial Records Through an Archival Lens,” Bastian assures archivists that there is hope “in face of the elitism, complicity, and narrowness of the colonial record” (278). While recognizing that silences are inherent in the creation and management of sources, Bastian emphasizes the need to identify the socio-historical context of a record and to expand our definition of records to encompass radical forms such as memory texts and embodied performance. Most importantly, she writes, “framing records within social provenance and a ‘community of records’ helps to locate all voices within the spaces of records” (267). Bastian’s discussion of provenance prompts archivists to seek out the multiple relationships of creation surrounding a record.

Beverley Brown’s photo collection nicely illustrates and complicates Bastian’s claim. Reading the archival description, I was surprised to uncover that these photos were taken by “Beverley Brown, her friends, and school supervisors.” This fact can be interpreted in multiple ways. On one hand, it can be read as an inversion of subaltern theory. Post-colonialism is all about uncovering the voice of the marginalised in the fault lines and interstices of official history, however, here we find the reverse: in a satisfying poetic justice of sorts, it is within the fonds of a residential school survivor that we find the traces of the dominant discourse, subsumed under the voice of Beverley Brown. Bastian begins with a reference to the old cliché, “history is written by the winners,” yet here it is the victim, not the victor, who survives to tell her tale after years of oppression. On the other hand, it can be argued that, although Brown represents ostensibly the subaltern voice, her message is still mediated and contaminated by the hegemony. Hence, Spivak would probably agree again that once again, that there is “no ‘real Rani’ to be found” (Spivak 271).

Lily Wildman, Mrs. Staley's help at manse. (Item a034661)

“Lily Wildman, Mrs. Staley’s help at manse.” Telfer is mostly able to identify her subjects by name. (Item a034661)

In the quest to “locate all voices within the spaces of records” (267), Bastian quotes Ballantyne on the need to “appreciate how our colonial archives were constructed… and to reconstruct the ideological work that they have done” (276). Colonialism allows us “to analyze multi-class, multi-ethnic societies that were simultaneously co-dependent” and stratified” (269). Turning to the context of Indian Residential Schools, I sense that there is as much of an archival silence regarding native children pre-TRC as there are regarding school supervisors post-TRC. Journals and diaries of school supervisors we have and do quote much, but what are the thoughts and responses of the surviving clergy members and institutional managers in the present? While the government has actively sought to record (and contentiously retain) the oral testimonies of res school survivors, there has not been much of an effort to hear from the perpetrators as individuals. Perhaps there were, and these were unsuccessful. Here we find yet another face of archival silence–that of the colonizer in the postcolonial era. After all, nobody likes to play the criminal. For this reason, Jean Telfer’s decision to donate her collection to the MOA in the two years before her death, I find, is incredibly courageous. Her act of contributing to the ‘total archive’ necessitated a public recognition of her involvement as teacher at the Morley and Alberni residential schools. Her fonds include the names of students. While we must still, of course, remain cognizant of the biases and prejudices embedded in every individual’s subjective self-representation, I daresay Telfer’s view of residential schools must have shifted dramatically for her to speak so bravely into this archival silence.


Works Cited:

Bastian, Jeannette Allis. “Reading Colonial Records Through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space and Creation.” Archival Science 6 (2006): 267–284.

“Beverley Brown Fonds.” Audrey and Harry Hawthorn Library and Archives. Museum of Anthropology. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

“Jean Telfer Fonds.” Audrey and Harry Hawthorn Library and Archives. Museum of Anthropology. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

Spivak, Gayatri (1985). The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives. History and Theory 24 (3):247-272. http://www.cameronius.com/helen/rhprg/Spivak%20the%20Rani%20of%20Sirmur.pdf

 

Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Archives

First Nations culture and communities

South African Apartheid history

Understanding settler colonialism (specific to Canadian context)

A Place for Shimizu

This week, I had the pleasure of digging through the fonds of Kosaburo Shimizu (1892-1962). I’d like to start off with a brief biography of his life because I think it will be pertinent to the topic of my blog post. Shimizu was a Japanese émigré born in the village of Tsuchida in Japan. He came to BC in 1907 to live with his eldest sister after the death of his father. After graduating from Royal City High School, Shimizu taught English at the New Westminster Methodist Church. Against his family wishes, Shimizu decided to pursue his dreams for higher education and went on to study at the newly-established UBC in 1915 and obtained his MA in English Literature from Harvard. He was ordained into the United Church in 1924 and pastored several congregations in Vancouver. During the interwar period, Shimizu was an active participant in peacemaking efforts to resolve growing racial tensions between Japanese and White Canadians. During WWII, however, Shimizu was labeled as an “undesirable person” and deported to an internment camp in Kaslo, BC. After the war, he relocated to Toronto, where he lived with his family until his death in 1962.

In “Autonomous Archives,” Moore and Pell examine the autonomous archives of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, Hope in Shadows, and Friends of the Woodward’s Squat Archive as “oppositional spaces in which marginalised groups construct collective identities and discourses apart from dominating groups” (256). Intrinsic to the notion of marginalization is the idea of displacement. They write, “The intimate connections between these publics and their environments call attention to the significance of place for communities, and by extension for their archives. By connecting stories of past experiences to present localities, public histories give places meaning.” Autonomous archives, then, are places which document dis-placement.

One of the first things that caught my eye about Shimizu’s life was how well-traveled he was for a “foreigner” in the early 20th century. Yet many of his outings were not by choice. Displaced by the death of a parent, by war, and by discrimination, Shimizu never had a permanent “place” to call home or substantiate his history. It is sadly ironic but perhaps fitting that the 13 diaries that travelled with him to all these places found their final resting place in the institutional archive of a patriarchal society that never quite accepted him in the first place.


 

After reading about radical archives this week, it seemed mightily ironic that I would be attempting to draw conclusions about autonomous archives from works found in an institutional archive. In fact, it seemed quite the impossible feat. Yet, as I spent time with Shimizu’s fonds, it seemed to me that it was asserting its own autonomy and resistance against the archoviolific archive that housed it.

Today, I’d like to compare two of Shimizu’s journals. The first comes from his 1909 diary (RBSC-ARC-1500-01-01). It’s quite unruly (literally) and written mostly in Japanese, as be fits someone who had only recently begun learning English. Snippets of English such as “Ms Hill (presumably a school teacher)… arithmetic” or “Ms Hill… Tennyson” suggests that much of his discussions center on learning. Above all, Shimizu seemed to have a vested interest in geography—place names like Strathcona, measurements of the Fraser River—stand out from amidst the jumble of Hanzi characters. Shimizu’s diary seems to reflect a newly-immigrated 16-year old’s attempt to locate himself through linguistic and geographical markers, yet jumping back and forth between languages, he never does quite find a place of rest.

12790054_910379535747244_64294175_o

Shimizu’s later journals, like the one pictured above from 1916 (RBSC-ARC-1500-01-03), are much more organized and defined. What immediately strikes the eye is the segregation of Japanese and English on the page, highlighted by difference in ink colour. Each day is marked by choice words from the bedrock of the Western canon: Aristotle, Emerson, St. Paul, but Shimizu’s personal reflections, his moments of introspection, were hidden from me.

In “The Making of Memory,” Shwartz and Cook write that, “Like archives collectively, the individual document is not just a bearer of historical content, but also a reflection of the needs and desires of its creator…” (3). “Reading” Shimizu’s diaries, or rather, admiring the columns upon columns of beautiful Japanese script I could not decipher, I began to wonder whether or how these two passages related. Did the English quotations summarize his day? Encourage? Remind? Chastise? Or perhaps they were juxtaposed altogether arbitrarily. The archival descriptions did little to clear the enigma, as the curator obviously did not read Japanese either. Although indeed, UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections has made Shimizu’s diary public, his decision to write in Japanese continued to assert his privacy and right to self-representation. The very fact that all these English words were boxed into a little square on his page seem reflective of someone compartmentalizing opposing cultural identities. Although, as a literature scholar, Shimizu undoubtedly held the Western canon in high respect, perhaps, we can go so far to say that the diary itself is resisting its inclusion in the institutional by counteractively placing hegemonic discourse in solitary confinement. Thus, while Shimizu’s fonds remain housed in a public archive, I believe that they function as an autonomous voice, one which too can “point to the intersecting concerns of social identity, claims to place, and the political stakes of representation within heterogenous and unequal publics” (Moore & Pell 255).

Note: Wondering how an autonomous archive for the Japanese-Canadian experience would look like? Last summer, my family visited the lovely town of Greenwood in interior BC and were surprised to learn at their local museum (run by two Japanese ladies) that many of their Japanese “interns” came from no other than our hometown, Richmond! Shimizu’s fonds were transferred to RBSC from Steveston United Church, which still stands as a historic site in Steveston Village.


 

Works Cited:

Moore, Shaunna and Susan Pell. “Autonomous archives.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 16.4 (2010): 255-268.

Schwartz, Joan and Terry Cook. “Archives, Records, and Power: the Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science 2 (2002): 1-19.

Dropping into the “Preserving Liquid Communication” Symposium

On February 11th, I had the pleasure of attending the Preserving Liquid Communication symposium held by the Association of Canadian Archivists chapter at UBC. Here is a summary of Panel 4, titled, “Liquid Communication in Archives: Theoretical Considerations, Tools, Strategies, and Tips from Work in the Field” with panelists Babak Haidzadeh, Patricia Klambauer, and Erin O’Meara.

Patricia Klambauer oversees the tech department at Library and Archives Canada. Her projects involve documenting the 2010 Olympics and federal campaigns. To date, her team has currently harvested 28 terabytes worth of data in website and social media content.

Babak Haidzadeh is a computer engineer and professor at the University of Maryland. His role entails transferring Twitter content to the Library of Congress and devising methods of categorization. Due to the sheer volume of tweets sent out each day (upwards of 500 million), his team focuses on three areas

  1. Conflict (tweets concerning wars, tracking terrorist activity i.e. studying posts from ISIS)
  2. Labour (tweets sent by unions, public relations of corporations)
  3. Mass Media (tweets as a medium for broadcasting news or advertisements)

Erin O’Meara is manager at a private archives for the (Bill) Gates family, philanthropic foundation, and related companies (minus Microsoft).

Many good points were raised by the panel. However, due to the nature of the discussion, the conversation turned very technical at times (there were some very specific terms about computer coding) and became difficult to follow. Here are the key points I’ve gleaned from the dialogue:

  1. Project management strategies

Before beginning any project, always present ideas as a business case. Questions that should be asked include, “Why should we harvest this content? What is the cost? Can we justify the cost? What is the impact of not collecting this?”

  1. Common harvesting tools, and their successes or limitations

Bagger is a software application developed by the Library of Congress that bundles sets of collected files together. However, it can only organize them at the bit and file level—it’s not content or semantic level specific. At Library and Archives Canada, Twark is used to capture databases of tweets, while Offline Explorer Pro is a desktop tool which records live streamed content.

Curating social media content is vastly different from dealing with websites. Each digital object (a tweet, a facebook post) has a completely different code, and it is impossible to create a generate software. There is no “one size fits all” solution and that is what makes the digital archiving so daunting and costly.

  1. The translation of traditional archival practises to a digital environment

Appraisal continues to be an important element of digital archiving. It is vital to identify which level of content archivists are looking for and to set “crawl” parameters. For example, conversations in the form of comments can continue for months and are often very intermittent. Tweets can be retweeted. Archivists now face the challenge of setting boundaries to these ongoing conversations and forging connections between sets of data collected at different times.

  1. Opportunities offered by a liquid archives

The beauty of online content is that each tweet or comment has a digital footprint. Thus, unlike a physical letter, it is almost always possible to trace its path back to its point of origin.

Due to sheer volume of content available, automation has become inevitable, yet it cannot be forgotten that the archives is all about the human. Online archives present a great opportunity for archival organizations to work together strategically and gain wider coverage of materials.

Diagnosing Sandwyk

This week, I had the pleasure of digging through the fonds of internationally-renowned artist and author Charles van Sandwyk. Since the 1980’s, UBC’s Rare Book and Special Collections has been collecting his works, which include printmaking, watercolor and calligraphy. Sandwyk produces small-press publications as well as original works of art. A native of South Africa, Charles divides his time between Deep Cove, North Vancouver and the islands of Fiji.

12656125_897929770325554_593797807_o

Print (RBSC-ARC-1713-2-2)

Box 2 (RBSC-ARC-1713-2) stood out particularly because its odd shape promised to hold some unconventional contents. I was not disappointed. Though rather large and cumbersome, the beautiful hand-drawn prints within were well worth all the unwrapping and rewrapping. More importantly, from my digs, I found traces in Sandwyk’s work which both speak to and against Jacque Derrida’s ground- breaking essay “Archive Fever.”

In File 2, Sandwyk recounts the origins of Savuti Press, a private press he formed with Waisiki Doughty. Savuti is named after one of their favourite hideouts in Fiji. He fondly recalls Jack Savuti’s house, a colonial sugar planter’s cottage itself originally built on the island of Suva that was taken apart and moved to Navuti, then finally “dragged piece by piece” and reassembled in Savuti by Jack’s sister Lucy. Like Derrida, for Sandwyk, this house is a metaphor for memory—the psychological archive. He writes (of this new press), “… we would like to try our hand at cobbling together some reminiscences from the nearly forgotten early years of south sea island life” (boldface added). In his essay, Derrida describes archive fever as the “compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire… to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (91). Sandwyk, in his desire to “cobble together” memory, shows telltale symptoms of this disease.

Savuti Point via Getty Images

Savuti Point via Getty Images

Yet, perhaps this is too simplistic a reading, for the way in which Sandwyk’s house exemplifies Derrida’s assertions prove uncanny. Jack Savuti’s repeatedly re-constructed shack neatly illustrates how entwined in the desire to archive is a cyclical force: the archive is the retention of a specific origin through repetition. Furthermore, the colonial history of the hut also gesture to what Derrida identifies as the originary violence of the “patriarchontic” archive as an institutional and ideological site: Law and authority has inscribed itself into nature from the start. Finally, the decrepit nature of this shack speaks to the distortion enacted by the archviolithic archive. Derrida brilliantly demonstrates that every hypomnesic memory (unconscious memory or archival memory) is not only a reminding memory but a distorted one, since according to Freud, we can only understand violence and trauma in its distorted form. These three factors taken into consideration, if we pursue a physiognomical reading of this house, then the ‘historical foundation’ of this press itself seems very much cognizant of archive fever.

Sandwyk continues, “We began this venture with the hopes of printing our artistic endeavours and philosophical wanderings on exquisite papers, and in small editions. Like the spit of land the press is named for, this is where our cultural tides converge, and where we mix the familiar with the new.” By recognizing the intertwining of familiar and foreign, of memory and philosophy, the founders confirm Derrida’s assertion that the archive cannot remain outside what it memorializes. Also included in this notion is that the relationship between the archive and what it archives is fluid. Derrida writes, “the technical structure of the archiving archive [which] also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event” (17).

Although Sandwyk and Doughty began publishing to establish an archive of their memories, they also recognized the potential and the inherent nature of the archiving technology to create, produce, and inspire new memories. Even in succumbing to archive fever, Sandwyk continues to resist it.

Jim Wong-Chu & Helen Koyama

Although I had never heard of Jim Wong-Chu* before this class, I was immediately drawn to his collection once I learned of his work in preserving Chinatown, since I recently wrote an article in contribution to the current “Save Chinatown Heritage” movement.

This week, I studied a series consisting of correspondence sent to Jim Wong-Chu by friends (RBSC-ARC-1710-3), family, colleagues, and other writers, including Joy Kogawa (whose letter I couldn’t find), Rick Shiomi, Helen Koyama, Joy Kogawa, Andy Quan, Kam Sein, Paul Yee, Phil Hayashi, and Linda Uyehara Hoffman. <rbsc.ca>

via AsianCanadianWiki.org

Jim Wong-Chu (via AsianCanadianWiki.org)

In particular, a letter from Helen Koyama** caught my eye (03-34). (First, because I thought I recognized the butterfly stationary.) The letter reads, in stark contrast to perfunctory addresses from editors and other colleagues, like a conversation with a close friend. In this message, Koyama briefs Wong-Chu about her life, almost as if writing in a diary: she is 3.5 months pregnant, struggling with writers block, and half proud, half envious of fellow writer Paul Yee’s success. “I’ll be 60 by the time I publish my first book!”, she complains good-naturedly.

Koyama’s letter offers us a rare glimpse into the life of a minority, female, children’s lit writer struggling to get published in the 1980’s. While the Japanese Canadian never mentions racial or gender tensions she does disclose that, as a busy homemaker, she hardly has time to sit down and write. In fact, it takes her a TWO WHOLE MONTHS to complete this letter. The letter, first dated October 19, 1983 at the top, is interrupted by new entries, which can be inferred by the change in typewriter ink or are mentioned by a self-conscious Koyama herself stating that “It is now Nov 4th.” Halfway through, Koyama gives up typewriting and switches to handwriting.

Koyama’s letter verbally articulated and physically demonstrated how her other roles as wife, mother often came into conflict with her identity as writer. But, it also led me to meditate on the difference between contemporary and older mediums of writing—and its implications for archival research.

Hand and typewritten letters allow you to be more aware of the process of creation. In the letter, Koyama explains that she has just received Jim’s latest letter, but even before she tells us, we know time has passed, because the ink is darker and the line spacing shifted. Today, digital technology makes it difficult to trace the passage of time and an author’s editing process during the creation of a work. While we can see Koyama trying to type around butterflies on the stationary and manually correcting “sentense” with a pencil, today, spelling mistakes are mitigated by Word autocorrect or quickly pressing backspace. These minute transformations are quickly forgotten. Digitalization creates a space for erasure; we lose that the ability to archive much of the creative process that happens while the author is writing—the crossed out phrases, replaced words, moved paragraphs, etc. Advancements in technology have occluded our awareness that creation is a temporal act, a performance. If Jimmy Wong-Chu had written on a lap top, then Box 2, with all the edited manuscripts and saved pages that couldn’t be sent to the publisher because of one typo, would not exist.

In “New Approaches to Canadian Literary Archives,” Hobbs emphasizes the need for archivists to understand the particular relationship writer share with their works, and to document the writer’s creative intention through their arrangement of the fonds. She writes, “What has lent the literary manuscript page its rarity and value in market terms is its proximity to the act of creation, its closeness to the spark or intention of the creative author” (113). As archivists in the 21st century, a large question will be how we can capture these increasingly transient and elusive moments of revision and rewriting that are integral to the ongoing process of creation.

Helen and son Robin at the Kaigai Manga Festival in Tokyo (via Drawn & Quarterly)

* Jim Wong-Chu is a “writer, photographer, historian, radio producer, community organizer and activist, editor, and literary and cultural engineer” (UBC Rare Books and Special Collection Archive). Born in 1949 in Hong Kong, he was sent to live with relatives in Canada as a “paper son“. Over the years, Wong-Chu has founded various community and cultural organizations including: Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Asia Canadian Performing Arts Resource, and Ricepaper magazine. He was awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for his important contributions to shaping the Asian-Canadian voice.

** Helen Koyama is a Japanese Canadian children’s lit writer whose family was sent to live in internment camps during WWII. Today, she runs a publishing company in Toronto.


 

Hobbs, Catherine. “New Approaches to Canadian Literary Archives.” Journal of Canadian Studies 40.2 (2006): 109-19. Print.

Enchanté !

Greetings! My name is Beatrice and I am a third year student at UBC working towards an Honours degree in English Literature and a minor in French. This is my very first blog ever, so thanks in advance for your patience if it takes me a few posts to develop a suitable voice. Hello blogosphere!

What drew me to a course in archival studies was my family’s interest in all things historical. The highlight of our summer road trips have always been visits to museums of natural history, aviation centers, or war memorials. We would spend hours contentedly perusing every display in the quiet, air-conditioned collections of whichever small town we happened to come across. No Disneyland, much to the chagrin of my younger brother.

These experiences, while inculcating an appreciation for history, also raised questions about archiving and cataloguing. What do those cryptic serial numbers at the end of each description signify? How do curators come to the conclusions they share in the display descriptions? Which items are kept hidden from the public eye? In what ways do the sociocultural values of the archivists themselves influence how items are preserved or represented? What do archivists do when they encounter fragments or illegible handwriting? How do they work around this lost or silent space? What assumptions are made?

Having thus far been stuck on the “outside” of the glass, I chose this seminar because it will afford me a unique opportunity to come into close contact with the objects themselves. Being an auditory and haptic learner, I am interested in exploring the preservation of sound and the material history of the artefacts—with particular attention to their modes of production as well as how people are connected through a single object.

It is with great anticipation that I look forward to the discoveries that will be made in and by this class, and I hope to share mine with you through this little online archive.

Cheers,

Beatrice