8/2/2019 Leisa Gibbons - The question of the archive is not, we
repeat, a question of the past - abstract
1/2
The question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the
past
Derrida made it clear in his lecture and subsequent book,
Archive Fever, that
the question of the archive is a question about the future.
Derrida refers to thearchive as being a response, a promise and a
responsibility for tomorrow. In a
contemporary society, where the physicality of culture and
civilisation has been
twisted upside down by the creation and population of the
virtual world, how can
the future archive be understood?
Technology such as computers and mobile phones allow people
to
simultaneously exist in the world of objects of books, art and
performance, as
well as in the world of bits and bytes of data, information and
communication.
Over the last 30 years it has been made clear that the
traditional model of the
archive does not work in the world of electronic records. The
response has been
to undertake significant research in the field of electronic
preservation andcuration. However, there is still a heavy
conceptual burden which focuses on
preservation of the artefact and retains the archivist as
collector and preserver
of cultural heritage.
Digital technologies found in social software and user-generated
websites
provide tools and a space that enable users to contribute,
manipulate, define,
describe, organise, publish and store cultural forms. Online
technologies and
social websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are tools
and places
being used by everyday people to record culture through their
own eyes. These
traces of recorded culture are full of complexity for the
archive; they are privateand public, ephemeral and enduring, all at
the same time. Social media is a
technology that can tell multiple stories for the future
personal stories about a
life, technological stories about software, cultural stories
about what it means to
exist online, stories about identity, stories about community a
venerable
multiverse of stories!
The role of the archivist is to seek out and develop frameworks
for understanding
what this phenomenon means for Archival Science. In this paper I
put forward
the Cultural Heritage Continuum model, one of array of Continuum
models
developed by Australian archival theorist, Frank Upward, as a
framework to
explore the nature of online culture and in particular, social
media. I will
reference Twitter and the acquisition of the public Twitter feed
by the Library of
Congress and also introduce my own research into this area,
looking at how I
have used the model to explore Youtube videos.
The challenge (and the responsibility) of the current-day
archivist is to seek out
and understand the multiple stories in the recorded culture of
society,
particularly those that are being used and re-used for personal
and public story-
telling. In pursuing this goal, the role of the archive as a
place for artefacts and
the role of the archivist as a passive collector, cannot be
sustained. The archive
as an institution which plays a part in the process of recording
culture must be
