Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Archive Fever

Marianna Torgovnick recently wrote about archives in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Volume 55, Issue 2, Page B1). We cover archival research in chapter 10.

In her article, she reviews books, exhibits, and video materials and their use as archives. Her view of archives goes beyond our coverage of archives as sources of data for research.

She notes that Foucault's, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language and Derrida's, Archive Fever both note how dependent all of us have become on culturally-based archives such as driver's licenses and visas.

Torgovnick notes how much more archivally creative we have become in our electronic era. The ease by which all of us can now create video materials and post them on the Internet via YouTube and similar outlets has led to an explosion of new archival material.

In addition to these new archival outlets, she points out another phenomenon--pseudodocumentaries, a genre as old as Swift's Modest Proposal and as new as Borat.

So, archival research is much more than simply locating an archive and mining it for its data. On top of that, archives are disappearing too. Torgovnick shows that the usual suspects for the loss of archives, "fire, flood, war, and the passage of time" are also accompanied by other sources of loss such as the unrealized greater fragility of microfilm and microfiche compared to paper. The losses are compounded by the necessity for researchers to sift out "real" archives from those, somehow, less real.

Researchers desire archives that harbor no fiction, and such archives exist. However, lack of fiction is not the same as truth. Torgonovnick shows that people are a necessary link to archives and the story they tell. She worries what false truths our archives might reveal were we no longer around to interpret them.

Like other types of research, archival research requires a careful and diligent research to illuminate the data uncovered and to show what has not been uncovered or what still remains to be found.