More Information
Thank you to Jared McBride, Anne Gilliland, Michael Rothberg, and Patricia Arroyo Calderon for inviting me to present MEAP to their Cluster 48 class: Political Violence in Modern World: Causes, Cases, and Consequences.
The presentation and activity described below were aimed at a class that had spent over 15 weeks exploring instances of political violence around the world. The examples I highlighted from MEAP collections reflect instances of and responses to political violence. But, I have tried to make the structure here more universal in purpose as MEAP collections can be used to highlight different kinds of primary sources as well as the structures that enable archival access.
The goal of this exercise is to highlight how archives are shaped by human decisions regarding what gets preserved, what gets digitized, and what terms are used to represent these materials. At the same time, archives are also shaped by institutional and infrastructural priorities that similarly impact what gets preserved and who has access to those collections. My goal was to encourage students to consider why they have access to some kinds of sources, how that access was created, and what that means for how they know about different historical experiences.
I started the presentation by highlighting these three points about archives, underscoring how access to primary sources is limited and often limits whose perspectives are included in scholarly or public discourse.
- Archives are built through conscious effort. This includes an attention to the labor and funding realities at institutions as well as the intentions behind controlled vocabularies and descriptive practices.
- Those choices and those structures result in archival gaps. Sometimes gaps are deliberate erasures, sometimes they are not. Note: MEAP funding often does not allow project teams to digitize the full breadth of a collection, so the team prioritizes. As a result, some materials are accessible digitally and some are not.
Open access does not mean we can see and find everything. There are limits to what we can access and it’s essential that we recognize how digitization and online access is not a solution for finding all there is to know about an events. Many collections and key perspectives are not right for open access or have not yet been digitized.
Getting Started
Exploration of Sources
Ask questions that invite students to think about what they have read and worked with in the class:
- What are some of the sources that you have looked at or considered in this class?
- Where did the sources come from?
- Were they created during the period of violence or after?
- Who was responsible for collecting them?
- How did you access them?
- What would you say is missing?
Introduce Archival Structures
Explore the concept of archives with students and introduce them to the technical components of digital collections.
Archive as Infrastructure
Why are archives collected?
How are they funded?
Who makes decisions about the collections?
Description + Context: Metadata
What is metadata?
Who describes the material in an archive?
What kinds of knowledge are prioritized in the catalogue?
What language is data created in?
Who has the ability to search and understand?
Considering Gaps and Silences
What kinds of materials get saved?
How much is destroyed or lost - materials, knowledge, relationships? Consider the loss and disruption or war as well as the challenges of displacement. How are communities able to maintain collections or cultural heritage?
Who do communities trust with their cultural heritage?
What materials are private or sensitive? What can be shared?
When are there instances of deliberate erasure?
MEAP Framework
As students shift to looking directly at digitized archival materials through the UCLA Digital Library(opens in a new tab), it's important to note the context in which these collections were digitized.
MEAP projects are community-led. This means that project teams define which collections are selected and which materials are prioritized for digitization. Project teams also create the metadata and define subject headings.
MEAP is an open access program. This means all projects must publish their digitized collection for free, open, global access. Not all collection materials are right for this kind of access and project teams will select only material eligible for open access to digitize with MEAP funding.
MEAP funds endangered collections. This means that the material digitized with MEAP funding might not be the most relevant to a certain topic or the most used at an archive, but is in physical danger of deterioration. This is another criteria related to selection and what is now accessible online.
Invitation for Close Analysis
In the Political Violence class, I invited students to look at one object from one of the following three MEAP collections:
- Archives for Justice and Peace: The Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) and the National Reconciliation Commission (CNR)(opens in a new tab) (Guatemala)
- Posters from the Centro Cultural Tallersol(opens in a new tab) (Chile)
- Organizational publications and newsletters from Memoria Abierta(opens in a new tab) (Argentina)
They had 10 minutes to look at the object, read the metadata, consider any other contextual information, and talk with a neighbor. We used these questions to spark discussion:
What are we looking at? What kind of material?
What do we know about this object from the metadata?
What is missing? What else would you want to know?
What language is the document in?
What language is the metadata in?
What do you learn about the object? What do you learn about the context?
What questions come up for you while looking at this material?