Welcome to Issue Six of Related Materials
where we're dreaming in archives
Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher.
Related Materials is a newsletter where I discuss wider culture and how it intersects with archives. It's supposed to be monthly but in January I had a holiday abroad for the first time in a couple of years and told myself I was going to write my newsletter on the plane. Reader, I did not write this newsletter on the plane. Instead I ate my own bodyweight in snacks and watched some really bad films.
So, slightly, belatedly, happy new year and welcome to Issue Six!
Reading: James Fallows - Living With A Computer [paywall - or try this link]
I came across this fascinating 1982 article via Dave Karpf's excellent newsletter looking (mostly) at back issues of Wired magazine and what the future looked like in the 1990s. The article is pretty much exactly what it sounds like from the title - a first hand account of what it felt like in 1982 to own and use a personal computer. Fallows describes in great detail why he bought a computer, how he went about choosing a system, the various little workarounds he has to do to get it to function. All of which, of course, now sounds incredibly archaic except the bit about it taking a minute to print a page, which I think is probably faster than my bottom of the range 2010 Epson.
You'd think that as an archivist dealing with late 20th century papers I'd have a reasonably good idea as to what it must have been like to have a computer in the early 1980s but, aside from own personal experience (my dad was a computer programmer so I grew up around them in a way that few 80s kids did), it's one of those things that's surprisingly unrecorded in the archive. In general archives rarely hold detailed accounts of how it felt to experience and use new technology because often no-one at the time realises what a dramatic shift it's going to turn out to be. Most change is incremental and tangential and it's only in retrospect that we can see its impact. This is particularly clear in this article when Fallows writes 'the best known small computer is probably the Apple' and we laugh and nod in recognition, and then he proceeds to spend far longer talking about the Osborne I, which obviously doesn't share the same brand recognition today.
Archives are not full of people writing down big important thoughts about the contemporary, but instead people going about their daily lives and leaving fragments and traces of activities that we in the present try to piece together to talk about the past - either to narrate it or learn from it or draw new ideas from it. What we can never do is actually learn from the archive what it was like to be in the past. We can never get back there. In this way Fallows' article reminded of the classic paper by Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like To Be A Bat? which is one of the first things we read on my Philosophy degree. Nagel argues that we can never know what it's like to be a bat and to navigate by echolocation instead of our own senses. We can only imagine what it would like for us as humans to be bats. Similarly I think this article reminds us that although we can read a very detailed description of what it was like to use a computer in 1982, we can't really know what it was like, especially if we're reading it on a contemporary laptop (and via a link to the internet archive because we're too cheap to pay for the subscription).
Listening: Diana W. Anselmo: “A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood” on the New Books Network
The same way that some people claim we cry more when we’re on planes, I suspect I have a slightly stronger emotional reaction to podcasts about archives if I listen to them while I’m working alone in weird spaces. I listened to this while cataloguing a autograph albums in an unheated warehouse over Christmas, and it genuinely helped me to see the collection in a new light.
Anselmo talks about how she went about identifying the records for her study, through a mixture of eBay purchases and looking through the archives of women-only colleges in the States, often requiring detailed discussion with the archivist. Through these disparate objects she starts to build up a picture of how women responded to early Hollywood stars through scrap-booking and creative writing, with a focus on non-heteronormative identities. The line between wanting to be the actress and wanting to be with the actress is often blurry.
One of the aspects of the podcast that particularly struck me was when she discusses being in contact with the families, many of whom have sold or donated the material while they are still grieving. These are conversations that archivists are used to navigating but academics less so, and Anselmo makes the point about how young she was when she started this project and unprepared for some of those emotions. While some relatives would be delighted to know that someone was interested in their relative, others would be happy until they heard the word queer, and then they would shut down. Although Anselmo was describing their relative’s attachment to a movie star one hundred years ago, and not how they might have self-identified, or lived the rest of their life, these words have a different resonance outside of academia.
It’s still exciting to see researchers approaching the archive with different questions and strategies to the usual biographies and historical approaches that we expect. For the performance-based collection I’m currently working with, this episode really shifted how I looked at some of the objects within it. Historically, the performers within the archive had been prioritised, especially when it came to cataloguing. But performers are nothing without an audience, let alone the whole eco-system that surrounded them of venues, promoters and writers. Considering these perspectives helped me to re-consider the value of some of the items in the collection and how we can bring out these other stories.
Reading: Savia Palate : In the Scale of a Reference Number
Part of a series of writings on scale commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, this very short piece considers the role of the archival reference number sitting as an intermediary between the creation and collection of an archival object and the multiple uses to which that object is put in subsequent research.
One of the interesting things about freelance work so far has been how often I've found myself having to explain aspects of professional practice that I take for granted. Until 2022 I’d only ever worked in teams of archivists and so I’d never given much thought to the purpose of reference numbers before. They were just something we did. Now I find myself regularly having to justify to non-archivists why they will make their life easier, especially with one memorable project that involved 120 ever-so-slightly-different ceramic tiles.
While I’d not considered their function, I've always really enjoyed the act of writing archival references on documents - partly because of the illicit thrill of writing on the documents, not going to lie - but also because of the sense of finality. Arrange, describe, number, put into a box and onto the shelf. So I was interested to read this conception of the reference number less as an end point and more as a beginning - as part of creating an ongoing constellation of references in research.
There was a report produced in 2018 that looked at the potential for creating a model for the creation and capture of archival citations, so archives would have a better idea of how their collections were being used in research. I’m not holding out much hope of seeing this come to fruition during my remaining working life, but I may yet be proved wrong.
Bonus track: Fletcher Henderson - Queer Notions [YouTube link]
A classic jazz big band track that will have you dancing round your living room/office/train carriage. The young Sun Ra played in Fletcher Henderson’s band before leaving to form his Arkestra, with whom he would regularly perform Henderson’s arrangements. And anything that’s good enough for Sun Ra is good enough for me.
That’s all for this month; issue 7 will be out March….ish.
Anna