Archives, Information
Infrastructure, and Maintenance WorkCiaran B. Tracehttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-7118-6610The University of Texas at Austincbtrace@austin.utexas.edu
Ciaran B. Trace is an Associate Professor at the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree and a Higher Diploma in Archival Studies from University College Dublin and a PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of California at Los Angeles. She has taught previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Trace’s work explores what constitutes a literate society, and the role that recorded information plays in creating and sustaining literate environments (both personal and professional).
Alliance of Digital Humanities OrganizationsAssociation for Computers and the Humanities000603016118 February 2022article
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In the scholarly communications lifecycle, it is the archive (as place and as
collection) that has traditionally functioned as the research
laboratory, the source of knowledge for the humanities and
its sub-disciplines. This article examines the notion of the archive as revealed
through a process of infrastructural inversion, with an emphasis on understanding the
working information practices of archivists as a prerequisite to any discussion of
humanities infrastructure initiatives. Situating the archive as a form of
infrastructure and archival labor as a form of maintenance work generates
descriptions of archival systems and practices that shine a spotlight on key
negotiations and tensions that adhere in a profession that exists in service of
others. In particular, the article and the argument therein set out to describe
what will be lost if this archival assemblage of people, practices, activities,
artifacts, and structures is set aside rather than ported into any imagining or
re-imagining of the humanities of the future.
This article examines the notion of the archive as revealed through a process of
infrastructural inversion, with an emphasis on understanding the working information
practices of archivists as a prerequisite to any discussion of humanities
infrastructure initiatives. Situating the archive as a form of infrastructure and
archival labor as a form of maintenance work generates descriptions of archival
systems and practices that shine a spotlight on key negotiations and tensions that
adhere in a profession that exists in service of others.
Introduction An early draft of portions of this
work was presented at the Maintainers III Conference, Practice, Policy
and Care, Washington, D.C., October 6-9 2019.To be modern is to live within and by means of infrastructures
The task for scholars of infrastructure, then, is not merely to dwell
on the materiality of infrastructure — an important topic on its own right, to be
sure — but to dig deeper and uncover the humans who keep things going.
Built over centuries, the scholarly infrastructure that forms the backbone of the
humanities includes diverse collections of primary sources in libraries, archives, and
museums; the bibliographies, searching aids, citation systems, and concordances that
make that information retrievable; the standards that are embodied in cataloging and
classification systems; the journals and university presses that distribute the
information; and the editors, librarians, archivists, and curators who link the
operation of this structure to the scholars who use it. Since
its modern inception, the infrastructure of the archive has enabled key functions
required of humanities scholarship: authentication, providing researchers with an
assurance of the trustworthiness of records as records; awareness, enabling a community
of scholars to discover and understand needed sources; gathering, allowing scholars to
build personal collections of primary source materials; contextualization, facilitating
scholars in situating sources in the circumstances of creation and use; tracking,
creating a means to credit the information used through the process of proper citation;
and preservation, ensuring the reliable and long-term maintenance of the historical
record for future generations of scholars .
In the past twenty years the virtue inherent in the long-standing nature and widespread
use of research infrastructures has been upended in a world in which the digital has
come to the fore and the infrastructural push in the humanities is oriented to the
large-scale, the new, the innovative, the future-oriented and the technologized.
Initiatives such as the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure and the Cultural Heritage Data Reuse Charter situate
archives as institutional players in the ongoing development and transformation of the
humanities. Yet in analyzing the rhetoric of Our Cultural Commonwealth, a 2006 report
published under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies to guide
humanities infrastructure development in the United States, Speck and Links highlight
the limited role ascribed to the archivist centered on the collection, management, and
preservation of the cultural record . As Speck and Links note, in the push to attune humanities infrastructural development with
cyberinfrastructure developments in the sciences, existing relationships between
scholars, archivists, and archives have generally been overlooked. Indeed, research by
Poole and Garwood suggests that some scholars working on large scale data-intensive
digital humanity projects are unaware or unconvinced that archivists have requisite
skills on which they could draw . Part of the explanation for
this may lie in arguments made by scholars such as Svensson who, while acknowledging the
need to engage with existing infrastructural traditions, caution against extending or
building uncritically on this base .
Such viewpoints seek to upend existing epistemic commitments in the humanities,
whether pertaining to structure, material types, selection procedures, access and
retrieval systems, or the relationship between researchers and entities such as archives
. Disrupting the institutions, systems, and professions at the heart
of collection management is one way of seeking greater legitimacy for the humanities;
rejecting the image of the humanities as a discipline bound to pen and paper and instead
focusing on developing novel infrastructural platforms, material assemblages,
intellectual agendas, modes of material engagement, and interpretive frameworks
. Even in instances where there is a recognized lineage between the
traditional and the emerging, the reimagined humanities are expansive at a scale that
threatens to stretch the fabric of the already overtaxed infrastructure on which it is
built . Such an unrestrained vision for the humanities in the digital age
includes the complete digitisation and virtual unification of the cultural record,
along with universal access to it .
Missing or buried in much of the recent discussion of the future of humanities
infrastructure is the idea that lessons can be learned from studying extant systems; to
reflect on the ways in which they have existed in use and the ways in which they have
been stewarded - sustained, maintained, repaired, and remodeled - over time. Also
largely missing from this discourse is the understanding that claims that the archival
infrastructure is visible, knowable, and available to the humanities scholar is
complicated by the act of mediation. In the digital humanities literature Speck and
Links note the diminished sense of understanding of the role the
archivist plays as intermediary and as mediator in the research process, with Rosenzweig
providing a historical grounding for the associated decoupling of the
historical and archival professions. As Speck and Links discuss, inter-mediation is
undertheorized in the literature on research infrastructures despite an acknowledgement
that humanities research infrastructure exists within a complex relationship between
scholar, archivist and archive. From an archival
perspective, what is lost or at best ignored in this discourse is the central and
evolving role that archival information labor has played for the past one hundred years
in allowing humanities infrastructure to function. In the focus on the digital we see a
neglect of notions of physical space and the associated skills and knowledge that grew
up around and alongside the physical archive.
As Downey asserts, information labor always takes place in, and depends on, a
particular spatial/temporal and political-economic context. Despite
or perhaps because of its invisibility to the outside world, the nature and composition
of the labor that undergirds maintenance work has recently been the focus of intense
scrutiny among archival practitioners. Echoing Jackson, the archival profession has come
to understand that questions of visibility and invisibility may be intimately linked to
power. That its labor is often contingent, done by workers on
temporary contracts brought in to try and diminish an ever-present backlog, highlights
one set of concerns about the ethics and sustainability of the maintenance process
. That, typical of other feminized professions, the emotional labor inherent
in such work goes unrecognized, has been an additional source of tension.
Edwards states that to understand an infrastructure, you have to invert it. This article is a call to action to resituate the archive as a critical form
of infrastructure embedded within and existing beneath the surface of academic life. The
goal is to enact the archive as a form of information, knowledge, and research
infrastructure; an infrastructure that science and technology scholars show is
sociotechnical in nature . The article centers and scrutinizes the
labor of the archivist as a form of infrastructural maintenance work for the humanities;
a maintenance that is of the network, of the buildings, and of the collections under
care. Situating the archive as a form of infrastructure and archival labor as a form of
maintenance work generates descriptions of archival systems and practices that shine a
spotlight on key negotiations and tensions that adhere in a profession that exists in
service of an infrastructure built for others. In particular, the article and the
argument therein serve as a reminder of what will be lost if the traditional
infrastructure and the maintenance work of the archive is set aside rather than ported
into any imagining or re-imagining of the humanities of the future.
Star outlines several ways that information infrastructures can be read: as material
artifacts of human construction with a focus on the attendant physical and pragmatic
effects; as records or traces of human activities whose artifacts can be examined as a
way of unearthing associated cultural values, conflicts, points of decision making etc.;
and as unproblematic, genuine, and complete representations of aspects of the world
. In the context of this article, the emphasis is on reading archival
infrastructure as a long-lived artifact, looking at the organizational complexity and
the layers of control and access it supports and that affect the ways in which
humanities work gets done.
The Development of the Archive as an Information Infrastructure and Mediator for
Knowledge Discovery
Infrastructures are man-made facilities and resources – roads, railroads, municipal
water supplies, sewers, communication networks – which produce goods and services on
which the modern world relies . Such infrastructures are said to be the
connective tissues and the circulatory systems that create and co-create modernity
. Metaphors present infrastructure as a ‘substrate,’ a material
entity that is built and maintained in service of, and as a base for, the running or
operation of public and private systems . The notion of
infrastructure as an inert entity is complicated by the recognition that
infrastructures are more than simply material things. As Edwards notes, infrastructures
function not just as environment but also as social setting.
Indeed, infrastructures are understood as fundamentally relational in nature,
instantiated, and given substance when a continuous and potent mix and flow of people,
practice, activities, artifacts, and structures come together . As a form of socio-technical assemblage or ecology, infrastructures
exist within specific landscapes, having grown from an installed base, being embedded in
other social structures and arrangements, and having a certain spatial and/or temporal
reach. The number and complexity of socio-technical ties, coupled with the fact that it
develops cumulatively over time, means that once set in place or in motion,
infrastructures take on distinctive inertial qualities.
Infrastructure is also knowable in various ways - transparent and available for use,
shaped by the conventions of communities of practice, and learned as part of membership
in distinct groups. Yet it is often taken for granted, most visible when it is in
breakdown mode and in need of repair .
Infrastructures for research and scholarship have been around since late antiquity when
the Alexandrian Mouseion housed a cultural center, university, and library. Over the
centuries, developments such as the advent of scholarly disciplines, advances in the
creation of taxonomies and classifications, and the diffusion of scholarly journals
helped to create the bedrock infrastructure for humanities scholarship . This
past century has seen a boom in the development of a network of infrastructures that
exist to support and sustain knowledge discovery. As Paul Edwards describes, these
infrastructures exist as robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions that
generate, share, and maintain specific knowledge about the human and natural worlds. This growth of knowledge and information infrastructures coincided
with a period of change for higher education in the United States, one in which the
model of a research university with distinct academic disciplines, and with original
knowledge production at its heart, was ascendant. Looking at the more recent history of
knowledge infrastructures highlights how different fields have responded to and
organized around the recent call to be ‘data intensive’ . The rise of data archives in the twentieth century, as an exemplar, was
linked to the quantification of social science disciplines, with the associated shift
toward methods and data afforded more prestige in the academy . In the United States, data archives emerged on university campuses from
the 1940s onwards, providing preservation and access services for social science
researchers looking to conduct longitudinal, comparative, and cross-sector research with
quantitative statistical data sets, at scale . As an
information infrastructure, data science archives are constituted by and rely on the
work of agents (data processors and data curators), who reformat and clean survey data
in an act of remediation as the data moves from the collection and analysis phase to one
of subsequent reuse .
Archival repositories of historical knowledge form part of the essential organizing
practices and information infrastructure for research dating back at least to the time
of the French Revolution. As a form of research infrastructure, archives are
‘transversal’ in nature ; serving numerous disciplines but seen as
particularly relevant and scoped for the humanities. In the scholarly communications
lifecycle, the archive (as place and as collection) is the
research laboratory, the source of knowledge that underlies and
supports the humanities and its sub-disciplines . The
Society of American Archivists A Glossary of Archival and Records
Terminology defines archives as Materials created or received by a person,
family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and
preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or
as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator, especially those
materials maintained using the principles of provenance, original order, and
collective control; permanent records. - 2. The division within an organization
responsible for maintaining the organization's records of enduring value. In constituting an infrastructure for the humanities,
the archive is viewed as substrate, situated in a support role for the research agenda
of others. This manifestation follows earlier instantiations of the role of the archive
through history – the paradigm of the palace archives of late antiquity and the early
Middle Ages, the archive as the treasure chest of legally valuable records of the
medieval period, and the archive as a tool for political administration and keeper of
government (state) authority as manifested in the state chanceries and record-keeping
systems of the early modern period . The notion of the American archive
today embodies and encodes that part of the American psyche that seeks to connect with
history and culture, to strengthen community and a sense of belonging, and to protect
people’s rights and entitlements.
The infrastructure of the archive can be understood in terms of its various modes of
existence - intellectual, physical, and informational. In pursuit of professional
legitimacy, the intellectual infrastructure of the archive has been developed as part of
a push for autonomy from the discipline of history; a concern to have a distinct
knowledge base of archival theory and practice. The goal of professionalism is
manifested in archivists’ concern for standardization and the creation of consistency in
norms, rules, values, work process, and product. As a physical infrastructure, the
archival edifice and its work, storage, and research spaces are cocooned within building
and environmental standards for materials security and management, disaster
preparedness, and facilities expansion and renovation . Its
digital infrastructure enveloped within audit and certification standards for ensuring
the trustworthiness of the repository in terms of its organizational structure, digital
object management, and security risk management. As an intellectual base for research
today, archives are the centralized and distributed conduits to analog and digital
documentary by-products of past human activity – personal, organizational, and
governmental. While the data archive is the primary home for surveys, enumerations,
public opinion polls, and the like, the archive is the storehouse of information and
evidence about social life and social institutions that elements of society deem
valuable to preserve. Operated by archivists, the archive is the place to go to gather
firsthand facts, data, and evidence from analog and digital primary sources that run
the gamut from letters, reports, notes, memos, and photographs to email, database files
and twitter feeds. NARA, What’s an Archives,https://www.archives.gov/about/info/whats-an-archives.html.
As a form of knowledge infrastructure, archives in the United States were funded
initially through private enterprise vis-à-vis membership supporting historical
societies. The largesse of public monies was later infused in state, federal, and city
run archives through means of government appropriations, with the higher education
sector supporting archives with public money funded through state taxes. In the process,
archives were entangled with powerful political, economic, and social forces with
constraining and enabling effects on their utility and function. The chief technical
function of the archive is to move recorded information across time and over distance
for current and future generations. Grounded in time and place, materials are held and
made accessible within the archive so that people can come to an understanding of the
past. In the process, as Tom Nesmith says, users of archives invariably want to look
straight through archival institutions, their work, and their records, at something else
in the past of greater importance and interest to them. Yet
overlooking the archive obscures the fact that access to the past and its traces is both
limited and incomplete; populated from and embedded within societal frames that serve to
control, amplify, and reproduce elements and ideologies of society.
In the United States historians were the initial system builders. Transferring and
adapting European practices they advocated for the construction of the infrastructure of
the archive, culminating in its modern form in the early twentieth century. In the
nineteenth century, historical research was constituted around a set of inculcated
collective practices; a distinct scientific method that sought to cement and legitimize
the work and its place within the academy. In this imagining, the historian sought to
usher in the notion of the archive as the source for data for a
new scientific approach to history; mastering the archive by amassing facts and evidence
from whence he (and it usually was a ‘he’) impartially and rationally constructed a
scientific account of past reality. Yet by the 1930s the still
nascent American historical profession had sloughed off its responsibility for managing
the archive, with the occupation of the archivist emerging as the labor to configure the
techniques and technologies necessary to support, develop, and sustain this information
work .
Throughout, history demonstrates that archival work is service work; work in maintaining
the information infrastructure for others, whether it be for bureaucracies,
administrations, or researchers and their orderly pursuit of knowledge. In this latter
scenario, the archivists serve as the defacto ‘information intermediary,’ helping
researchers as they approach, consider, and make sense of information. Yet, as noted previously, the work that the archivist performs on the
historical record moves the profession beyond intermediary to that of mediator. As
Latour notes, mediators are transformative – working to transform, translate, distort,
and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.
Analogies and metaphors in the archival literature are rife with references to these
distinctive understandings of archival infrastructure and archival work. These
understandings align with Star’s concept of the master narrative, an encoding or work
which involves the reduction of the infrastructural actor to the unconscious center,
the pseudo-inclusive generic.
The Alignment of the Archive to Maintenance Work
Maintenance is a war – maybe the war – with entropy
In the discourse of the digital humanities, an appreciation of the agentic role and
orientation of the archive does not always resonate or align with the expectations and
carefully crafted identities of stakeholders external to the archival profession. In the
digital age, prevailing forces revolve around the need for humanities scholarship to be
innovative, boundless, and future oriented. The archive with its perceived adamancy,
physicality, and rootedness complicates that image leaving stakeholders to adjust
archival representations to suit. One option in situating the role of the archive and
the archivist in this new endeavor is to recast the archivist in a decidedly backstage
role and one directed by the wisdom and experience of those served. As Drucker
describes, information professionals do well to remember that their role in
infrastructural development is that of builder or architect, always working at the
behest of the client - the humanities scholar. For Drucker, the way that the humanities
scholar understands knowledge and their tasks as scholars should be the primary
drivers as scholarly environments are designed .
Regardless of what role humanities scholars ascribe to it, the archival profession has
always had a strong sense of its own autonomy; an autonomy that is constructed and
reconstructed as it comes into contact and under the influence of various disciplines –
history, library and information science, and more recently, computer science. Yet the
archival profession has waxed and waned in its understanding of the power inherent in
its structures and in its labor, and the degree to which it is comfortable revealing or
hiding this capacity from others. Early metaphors of labor, servitude, and care abound
as applied to the profession of the archivist. Given that writing was first developed in
the process of keeping account of the land and its produce it seems
fitting that a predominant image is that of agrarian toil in service of others with the
archivist preparing the way for the scholarly process to come.
In the late nineteenth century, Canadian archivist, Douglas Brymner equated the
archivist to a settler working to clear the land in readiness for cultivation by the
historian: the archivist must not forget that he is only the pioneer whose duty is to
clear away obstructions; the cultivated fields will follow. Later, Hugh Taylor characterized archival work as more in tune with
well-rounded husbandry; with records and the information they contained needing to be
cultivated and tended by archivists if there is to be a fertile crop of knowledge and
wisdom forthcoming. Pioneering English archivist Hilary Jenkinson
compared the archivist to a beast of burden; an ox in servitude of man, entitled
occasionally to partake in the spoils of his own manual labor .
The examples from Brymner and Jenkinson are provided in Nesmith .
Distinct from the agricultural frame, the analogy of the archivist to that of a
paleontologist surfaced in the Dutch manual of Muller, Feith, and Fruin; an early
attempt to wrap archival labor in a mantle of professionalism and scientific legitimacy
. This mantle reemerged in the digital age with the idea of the archivist
as digital archaeologist, unearthing, excavating, and preserving important digital
objects inscribed on obsolete storage media .
Perhaps the most enduring modern archival metaphor is that of the archivist as physical
and intellectual custodian or guardian, whether it be of the material under care or of a
creator’s or donor’s legacy . Indeed, Terry Cook has equated the
archival profession to that of an invisible caretaker, a docile handmaiden. Yet, from a postmodern perspective, the archivist, and their workplace, are
understood as more consequential than such a supporting role implies. Brien Brothman’s
notion of the archivist as custodian or groundskeeper is one in which
the archival ‘ordering’ and ‘tidying up’ of physical and intellectual spaces is creative
and consequential. Mediative so to speak. Indeed, the archival designation and removal
of information that is deemed ‘dirt,’ ‘rubbish,’ ‘weeds,’ or ‘debris’ is seen as a form
of axiological othering; what Brothman deems socially determined exclusion. Thus, the archival essence is to theorize about and to engage in acts of
qualification and disqualification. The resultant selective knowledge transfer is
accompanied by the equally far-reaching effect of archival ordering and representation
via the processes of arrangement and description; acknowledging that the archivist is
not only selectively moving information through time and space but co-creating and
situating it in the process . The idea of the archivist as
‘someone who protects’ has also been lately realigned; this time with carceral and other
metaphors of imprisonment. This reimagined metaphor confesses the archival role in
controlling and consigning the record and in surveilling, monitoring, and policing the
researcher who enters onto the archival premises . It is
an acknowledgment that the archive, like other infrastructural forms, can bend human
routines and material practices to its will.
Drawing from the work of feminist theorist Judith Butler, recent archival scholarships
also home in on the metaphor of performativity. In such a scenario archival work is
described as ritualized labor within a performative space with archivists acting as
performers in the drama of memory-making. Linking
archival work to that of performativity is an acknowledgement and a call to
consciousness that standard archival procedures exist as inherited scripts; ones the
profession is capable of embodying but also rewriting or otherwise setting aside. Here
Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz foreground the archivist as an actor, not a guardian; a
performer, not a custodian. In doing so the work of the
archivist is deliberatively moved from a backstage to a front stage perspective. A
similar metaphor is introduced by Gabrielle Dean who rejects the notion that
the archival encounter is solely that between researcher and source. Instead, she
heralds the archivist as part of a cast of characters, conjuring these relationships
within the archive as more a barn dance than a pas de deux.
In the newest twist on agentive understanding, the most militant archival metaphor is
ecological in origin, serving as a potential corrective to the various anthropocentric
takes on archiving that have been discussed to date. Reorienting the archival
perspective, Dani Stuchel leads from the premise that not all agents or
entities responsible for material changes in the archive are human, and thus the
archive should be understood as more than a human institution about human history.
Directing the archival profession to theories from the fields of new materialism and
critical plant studies Stuchel reveals the often hidden but vibrant life force and
material reality of things in the archive; formed in a complex web of people, societies,
cultures, technologies, and the natural world with aims that can be independent of our
own . This is a worldview in which archives are understood as agential
material assemblages characterized as much by the actions of dust, moisture, and plant
matter as they are by human records and labor.
Returning to the central notion of this article - that of aligning the role of the
archivist to infrastructure and the installation and repair of systems - we can see that
this idea was first explored by Canadian archivist Hugh Taylor in the 1980s in his use
of the metaphor of the archivist as plumber . Taylor compares the inner
workings of the archive to a network of pipes; conduits through which information flows
along distinct channels, with descriptive finding aids acting like taps to deliver
information to the user. In this metaphor, archivists’ bedrock concern is maintenance:
that our storage tanks do not leak, our taps work, and the information comes out in a
nice steady stream. Playing into the image that later evoked concern
from digital humanists, Taylor characterizes such long-established archival information
systems as staid, inward looking, and rather monopolistic in outlook. Yet, tying the
archivist to an image such as the plumber is critical to rendering the archive as a
material entity (human and non-human); showing it to exist as a socio-technical (as well
as ecological) space through which information flows from creating entities through the
archivist to the humanities scholar, while surfacing the ‘on the job’ labor that makes
the process possible.
Whatever the ascribed metaphor, the notion that archivists merely work (whether
efficiently or not) at the behest of the client plays into the notion of humanities
scholarship as an individualistic and self-contained endeavor. It is a viewpoint that
undermines or at best downplays the cooperative if sometimes fluctuating efforts
involved in the practice of humanities scholarship, including the many dependencies and
interdependencies between the creator, the scholar, and the archivist. It seems
expedient to reiterate here that the work that goes into imagining an infrastructure
into being should be accompanied by the work that goes into maintaining it long term and
ensuring its future. Indeed, the combination of infrastructure and the scope of human
and of historical time should invariably and inevitably lead to questions of upkeep.
Upkeep is a state of being, an act, a process, a form of care taking or aftercare, and
sometimes a means to an end. In the research literature ‘upkeep’ is synonymous with the
concept of ‘maintenance.’ In academic disciplines and professional practice, maintenance
is a lens (a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause)
that grounds our experience of a world in which the breakdown and repair of
infrastructures (political, civic, physical, social, natural etc.) are commonplace
.
As Edgerton notes, maintenance lives in a twilight world, hardly visible in the formal
accounts societies make of themselves. In a blog post on the
Maintainers website, the authors ruminate on the
reasons why maintenance and maintenance work are neglected at all levels of society;
factors with a clear resonance with the discourse around the future of the humanities.
According to Russell et al. , the psychological disposition of
people today shows a preference for novel things in the environment, with such a
cognitive bias coexisting with a desire for proximate rather than distant outcomes.
Moving from the individual to the societal and cultural level they see an attunement to
and mythologizing of innovation and short-term growth to the detriment of caring for the
established and the operationalized. The authors note that economic incentives factor
into whether organizations approach maintenance in a proactive or a reactive and
repair-focused manner, with notions of profitability and performance often formative
conditions. Here the idea of status, interest, and power are also prevailing forces,
impacting which public and private infrastructures are deemed worthy of maintenance,
with the identity markers of maintainers, including that of gender, positioning this
occupational role low in the established social hierarchy. From the perspective of the
maintainers themselves, temporal and social pressures mean that a delicate balance or
set of tradeoffs are always in play when it comes to fixing things under their care.
Fixes can be patchwork, hasty, and short lived or systemic, methodical, and long-term.
In the first case the bet is on making something better quickly while setting aside the
issue that it will continue to get worse in the long-term. In the second scenario the
fundamentals of the situation are addressed over time, even as the situation may
deteriorate in the short and medium term.
These reasons for the neglect of maintenance and maintenance work resonate in the
archival profession today. Indeed, the difficulties of maintenance have long been seared
into the archival imaginary . Arguably, the story of the archive in the
United States has been one of ongoing conditions and acts of maintenance and of repair
conditioned by the framework of fragility. The changing nature of institutions,
technologies, social arrangements, and stakeholders means that all infrastructures are
fragile over time . Yet the archival notion of fragility is
particularly tied to conditions that drive toward notions of failure and degradation,
including the impossibilities of maintaining a material and intellectual infrastructure
that the archival profession has closely tied to a bedrock principle of permanence. Time
here is the constant that leads to breakdown. It is the recognition that the archival
infrastructure is not and cannot be an adamantine structure. In such an open-ended
scenario, durability is only possible when there is immediate and ongoing care and
maintenance of individual components and the links between them.
In a distinct yet related sense, the notion of infrastructural fragility is also bound
to the societal level and to the constant uncertainty whether the financial resources
necessary to sustain the archive will be forthcoming . Indeed, the archival infrastructure has long been subjected to political
buffeting as society struggles to understand and accept the archive as an
administrative, economic, or social good. The ongoing battle for
resources and the conditions of scarcity that result, are tied to the lack of social
resonance to that which the archive clings - to the past, to history and the humanities,
to the study of human culture. The feminized nature of the profession serves as an
additional point of perceived fragility, providing little of the needed social and
political cover or cachet to enhance the status of archival labor. The lived experience
of scarcity is thus defined by and embedded within women’s maintenance work.
A vignette from the story of the emergence of the archival infrastructure in the United
States demonstrates the fragility inherent in organizations with low social visibility
as embedded in different societal layers. The case of the official repository of archival records for the U.S.
state of Georgia
serves as an exemplar here, highlighting the cyclical political and social forces of
administrative and bureaucratic reform that continually undermine the survival of this
and other state archival agencies over more than a century of existence . On the first day of January in 1919 the Georgia Department of Archives and
History began its life in the state capitol building in downtown Atlanta operated by a
staff of three - the first state archivist, Lucian Lamar Knight; a stenographer; and an
African American porter, Charlie Justice. Speaking to the hearts and minds that
glorified a history of the elites and of white southern exceptionalism, the archive yet
struggled to endure in a state system in which value adhered overwhelmingly to those
contributing to the narrative of capital rather than historical accumulation. Two years
after operations commenced, Governor Thomas W. Hardwick (1921-1923) singled out the
Department for closure under the aegis of a state retrenchment plan. With a focus on
pruning state agencies of an educational, humanitarian, and charitable nature
(categories which Hardwick believed fell outside of the purview of legitimate state
business), Hardwick set in motion a plan of economy and efficiency that echo in the
halls of state government a century later .
While supporters of its historical mission rallied to defeat the first onslaught on the
infrastructure of the Georgia state archive, its second and third decades are a textbook
case of how macro and meso level economic prerogatives for maintenance abide with
localized micro-level ones. Indeed, the story of the second state archivist of Georgia,
Ruth Blair (1925-1937) highlights how the struggle to maintain infrastructure is often
part of the gendered division of labor. As Denis and Pontille note, maintenance work
participates in a care of things. Blair’s story is one
of infrastructural care work; work in which she gave her practical labor to ‘patch up,’
‘set right’ and ‘keep going’ an infrastructure still in its infancy. This commitment to
holding together the archive was put into practice when Blair secured the removal of the
Archives Department from the cramped conditions at the State Capitol to Rhodes Hall, a
Romanesque revival style twenty-two room mansion on Peachtree Street in Atlanta,
formally known as ‘Le Rêve.’ While the legislature appropriated $5,000 to repair the
building and install shelving, the economic conditions of depression-era Georgia
provided cover for a situation in which the specificities of care could be neglected.
Thus, no state money was appropriated for the ongoing maintenance of the building, an
expenditure estimated at $1,500 annually (the cost split between employing a porter and
paying for heat, light, water, and incidentals). With the state abrogating its duty as
maintainer, Blair took on the responsibility to pay for the upkeep of the building, an
undertaking that cost no less than $1,800 before the situation was resolved .
In a classic case of the fact that, as Berlant says, resilience and repair don’t
necessarily neutralize the problem that generated the need for them, the Georgia Archives continues under a perpetual shadow of scarcity a century
after its founding. In the latest incarnation in 2012, Georgia Governor John Nathan Deal
and Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp waged their own campaign to shutter this
administrative unit of state government. This even though expenditures on state archives
and records programs were later established as below one-tenth of 1 percent of total
state expenditures . In this instance the fragility of
the archive was once again bound to rhetoric in the United States that champions
government frugality and retrenchment, aimed solely at a program and services deemed
superfluous to the core functions of government . And once again it was only
in the mobilization and deployment of concerted countermining weights - in this instance
the longevity of the archives installed base and the ability to marshal historical,
heritage, and genealogical organizations to its cause – that crisis was diverted.
The Archive and the Labor of Information Maintenance and Repair
The upshot is that millions of people go to work each day to do
things that almost no one but themselves understands but which large numbers of
people believe they know enough to set policy, offer advice, or redesign. Work has
become invisible.
Still, it is not just the physical or hard infrastructure of the archive that must be
maintained for the research process to function. Like Barley and Bechky’s study of
technicians in scientific labs, archivists, as technicians for the humanities, manage the
interface between a larger work process and the materials on which the process depends. In the language of goods and services, the archive exists
as an infrastructure of information production, distribution, and consumption. Embedded
in the notion of the archive is the idea of a steady flow of information that resides
within and moves through socio-technical systems - from the creator to the archivist to
the researcher. Maintaining this information flow subtends and is given expression in
the archive through the backstage and normalized act of archival processing. Archival
processing is connective and coordinative work; the ‘articulation work’ ,
so to speak, that the archivist does as a middle actor to link and mediate between past,
present, and future.
The phrase ‘archival processing’ is a stand in for the work that allows the archivist to
gain intellectual and physical control of archival materials through the activities of
accessioning, arrangement, description, and preservation. This work includes arranging
or rearranging archival materials into recognized groupings (the evidentiary layers of
record group, subgroups, series, and files), while also stabilizing and inscribing
context in a descriptive finding aid for the collection ready for the user to discover.
The rhetorical strategy of the finding aid works to hide the agency and emotion of the
archivist from the process and from the associated narrative presented to the reader
. In this way, archival processing demonstrates how the act of
mediation can be embodied but at the same time rendered invisible through tools .
Archival processing exists within a system that is broadly characterized by its
modularity; modularity being an ‘ordering concept’ used by information disciplines and
professions as a strategy to manage information under their control . In
the archival system, processing of materials takes on the characteristics of a core
module, being standardized across collections and interchangeable among them. Processing
also demonstrates modularity in its ability to coordinate and manage complexity; to
black-box the messy internal details of the system and thus bring efficiency and
order” to a complex socio-technical system. Processing is also
a sign that data does not automatically flow along the archival pipeline; it requires
what Leonelli describes as careful and standardized packaging to be transported from
the context of production across the research infrastructure with the ability to serve
as potential evidence at the end of its journey .
The conditions for processing are closely tied to notions of evidence. According to
Downey, information labor exists to make information useful, in the process working to
set information in motion so it can circulate from one context to another .
In the archive, the collection level maintenance work of the archivist exists in what
Barley and Bechky call an act of ‘brokerage’ - a four-way
relationship of creator, archivist (as technician), user, and the record. Mediation is
necessary because the traditional impulses of historical methodology, buried within
colonialist and capitalist frames, are inherently extractive. For archivists, analog and
digital records exist as technical artifacts to be curated when removed from their
creating context. Archivists respond to the act of extraction by engaging in ongoing
restorative labor – backstage work to recreate the context of creation for subsequent
users of the archive . If the goal of social science data
curators is that the artifacts be pristine to be reused , the goal of the
processing archivist is to resettle the artifacts as evidence in place, but to do so
within the confines and limitations of the archive .
An elemental concern for setting information in context means that archivists strive to
maintain the link between the records, their creators, the functions and activities that
brought the records into being, and the recordkeeping structures in which they were
originally stored. This maintenance work is methodologized through guiding principles
and conventions of practice; these are the base layers of infrastructure as noted by
Bowker and Star . In the analog realm these conventions of
practice center on cognitive and physical skills which archivists deploy to review,
analyze, sort, organize, and present information in context. In the digital realm of
small and big data collections, these same skills are utilized in tandem with forensics
and computational methods - including machine learning, natural language processing, and
data mining - to inform, enrich, and augment digital preprocessing and processing tasks
attuned to notions of contextualization .
Birthed in ideas from the profession’s European antecedents, American archivists draw
from two fundamental principles under the banner of ‘provenance’ to steer archival work,
and the performance of such, away from hazards that could decontextualize the
information under its control. The principle of respect des fonds
dictates that records of different origins (provenance) be kept separate to preserve
their context. The principle of original order dictates that
the organization and sequence of records established by the creator of the records
must be maintained . While once static and tightly
circumscribed, the impact of ongoing technological, societal, and disciplinary
development has extended archivists’ understanding of these concepts over the past sixty
years. The result is an expansive set of entity relationships to be explored and
described tying analog and digital records not only to bureaucratic and administrative
structures, but to networks of surrounding and contextualizing forces and behaviors
including the social and technical practices in which records participate; the
communities, cultures, and subjects that co-create and locate the records; and the
archivists, readers, and other users who animate the record bringing it once again
to life .
In the analog and the digital world there is a distinct physicality to all aspects of
processing, although this work is obscured or rendered invisible from public view,
happening as it does in the private staff areas of the archive. In this private space,
processing acts as what is called a ‘concealed tool,’ part of a long-established
tradition of maintenance and repair . In terms of preservation,
repair is a bench activity for analog materials and a technical and forensics process
for objects born within digital space; the site of repair taking place at the processing
workbench and the digital archive workstation, respectively. In the work of repair, as
Stuchel notes, the emphasis is on human purposes, a stance that neglects the reality
that objects change in ways proper to their materiality without regard for our desire
to remember and prove. Indeed, Stuchel’s work highlights
the tendency for archival things to be viewed as resources to be fixed and mined, rather
than as part of vibrant and diffuse other-than-human components that engage and
influence the world. It is the difference between a values-based approach that seeks to
preserve the past by mitigating depletion and loss and a living heritage approach that
sees change as a fundamental aspect of continuity . In effect, the idea of
decay exists as dueling notions - as a natural state of being in the world and as an
imperative that archivists strive to subsume through maintenance and repair
strategies.
In the bench work that has traditionally encompassed repair, archivists engage in
micro-processes, physically inspecting the records and carrying out technical
preservation and conservation treatments to minimize deterioration of materials (and the
information they carry) and maximize their projected life span. Co-opting the words of
Dant, this benchwork shows that the work of repair takes ingenuity in identifying the
problem and then a wide range of skills and tools to make the object useable again; it
involves a mixture of perceptual, cognitive and manual skills that are normally
associated with handcraft. The notion of repair is so ubiquitous in the
digital realm that systems are designed to supplement the work of the archivist in the
form of automatic self-repair indicating when digital
files are corrupted, in need of restoration or replacement. The job of maintenance – of
arresting a cultural object in time, maintaining it as closely as possible in the state
in which it was created - is especially critical for digital objects
given their volume, complexity, and fragility. Indeed, as Trace and
Galloway note, the work of maintaining digital objects requires the
archivist to get below the digital interface to the mechanism, documenting and
preserving the hardware and software contexts that shape digital objects and give them
life.
If, in order to operate over long periods of time, old infrastructural designs must be
constantly retrofitted to meet new contingencies, the ascendency
of born-digital materials shows how the archival infrastructure alters and improvises as
archival labor flexes its creativity in response to technological provocations. Deciding
which version of a software environment to document is a particularly complex problem
given that elements of the originating software and hardware stack likely evolved at
different rates over the life of the digital object . As Galloway
indicates, the practice of maintenance under these conditions requires
craft work attuned to preserving both the digital output and the human input into legacy
systems. In the first sense this entails homing in on the set of rules or standards that
best represents the originary (or temporally situated) software environment and
installing it on legacy systems for testing. In the second sense this craft work entails
untangling interpellations, including the shaping of the user by the machine; the
complex conversation in which actions can be read not just from the machines
themselves but from those who made them and those who use them. At
a broader level, archivists have also responded to the digital transition by retuning
descriptive practices to model the multifaceted contexts in which digital information
resides; contexts that are increasingly understood as dynamic and unbounded, best
architected in networked form. Such ongoing adjustments to archival processing are
evident, for example, in the newly released
Records in Context
conceptual model and ontology; work that comes out of the Expert Group on Archival
Description (EGAD) established by the International Council on Archives (ICA).
In all this work archivists not only seek to fix the material object but the negotiated
order around it. The notion of an attempted material and social repair is ever present
here. Archivists understand that the creators’ original recordkeeping structures atrophy
when removed from their original context, and materials themselves succumb to the
elements and degrade over time. In their mind, archival maintenance occupies and
constitutes what Jackson calls an aftermath.
The repair in this instance is an attempt to heal the rift in space and time that has
opened between the materials as created and the materials as archived and used. It is an
attempt to connect the materials to a creator, an activity, a place in time, and to a
condition where they have the most meaning, allowing them to be brought to life again by
those who frequent the archive. Throughout this physical and intellectual process,
material traces of the repair explicitly and implicitly recede from view, an
instantiation of the professional role ceded to and negotiated by the technical workers
in the archive as it exists in a delicate balance between discretion and legitimation.
While the agentic work of the archivist is pellucid in the processing manuals and
descriptive standards documentation that accompany the work, the professional
containment of such skills and knowledge means that it often goes unnoticed and
unacknowledged by the scholarly communities that archivists exist to serve.
Conclusion
In 2020, AI researcher Timnit Gebru and computational social scientist Eun Seo Jo called
for the creation of a new specialization within machine learning to focus on the ethical
collection and annotation of socio-cultural data for AI research and systems. In this
scenario, archives are given recognition as the longest standing communal effort to
gather human information with the language and curatorial procedures honed by the
archival profession said to demonstrate the sophistication necessary to serve as the
framework for this initiative . Yet, the same respect for the archive
as infrastructure and for the intellectual and physical labor of the archivist attuned
to infrastructural maintenance and repair has been largely absent from scholars in the
humanities.
In talking about humanities infrastructure, Anderson reminds us that if research
infrastructures are to contribute to the transformation of research then it is important
that researchers working on histories, literature, culture and other aspects of what
makes us human understand the value of these infrastructures for their own practices and
how they operate to facilitate and to enhance the production of their research. This article has set out to review the key reasons why historians
and other humanities scholars should continue to pay attention to the infrastructural
and maintenance work of the archive as it supports and extends humanities research into
and through the digital era. Co-opting Downey’s insights into the nature of cultural
heritage work, we can say that the importance of the archive and of archival information
labor lies in its ability to allow analog and digital information to continually
circulate and have value in society. It does this by providing information – cast as
data, content, or knowledge — with a way to jump contexts across time, space, and
disciplines, transposing information from the past into the future, from one kind of
institution or intellectual domain to another, and from one kind of cultural and social
milieu to another . It is an acknowledgement that the humanities have
meaning broader than innovation, with an emphasis on articulating how the archive
sustains the notion of the humanities-in-use.
In a 2018 article, Russell and Vinsel asked us to consider:
Where is maintenance work performed? What is being maintained? How is maintenance work
organized? Who are the maintainers? Who pays for maintenance? Who benefits and who does
not? This article has drawn attention to the nature of archival life as it helps to
create and exist in and alongside the infrastructure of the humanities. It is a reminder
that archivists are the workers that seek to maintain and repair an infrastructure in
service of others. It is a reminder that it is archival labor that enables key processes
required of humanities scholarship, including authentication, contextualization, and
preservation of primary source material whether analog or digital in nature. It is a
reminder that in the resource-constrained discipline that is the humanities the
resilience of its research infrastructure is performed by the archival community despite
the often fraught and precarious nature of maintenance and repair work.
To look into the future is to conceive of what could be and what can be brought to pass.
The archive and the archivist have always taken the long view, imagining a future in
which the archival record, no matter its underlying technology and lineage, is secure in
its context, permanently available for whatever use a person can conjure. Humanities
scholars are long overdue in joining the archival profession in this imagining. It is
time to think about what the future of the humanities could look like if the archive is
recentered as the enduring mechanism that drives humanities work and scholarship and
whose longevity, endurance, and transformation archival labor has long sought to
guarantee.
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