Welcome to Issue Three of Related Materials
where we think about archives in their expanded sense.
Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher. A warm welcome to all new and returning subscribers, and I hope you are experiencing seasonally appropriate weather, wherever in the world you are reading this.
As usual I have three recommendations for you of things that have caught my professional attention this month, so let’s dive in.
Reading: “Terrible Letters”: Bad Handwriting and its Implications, 1020–1220 by Elaine Treharne, Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature vol 28/1 [Peer-reviewed, Open Access]
Ok, so an admission here. I read the title quickly and clicked because I *thought* it said 1020-2020. However it turned out to be a fortuitous mistake because this article is not just about bad handwriting, but about the cataloguing and description of bad handwriting, and is therefore absolutely in my wheelhouse.
The initial portion of the essay discusses a manuscript at the British Library (Harley MS 104) which emphasises the role of the scribe in conveying, and making permanent, a sermon that was originally delivered orally by Pope Innocent III. However in order to access Pope Innocent III’s words today, we have to navigate two intermediaries: not only the scribe but also the cataloguers who have described the manuscripts. And this is where things get interesting.
Treharne quotes from a 1957 Catalogue of Manuscripts by Neil Ker which describes handwriting as ‘badly written’ or ‘badly formed’ but with no indication of what standard sits behind these statements. Treharne describes this as an “inherent value judgement where systematicity is absent and subjectivity is explicit but usually inexplicable” - a feeling that I’m sure many archivists will have had when reading catalogue descriptions written by their predecessors. There are further examples of how the gender of a scribe seems to have influenced cataloguing descriptions of their hand, with only work by a female scribe described as ‘pretty’.
While the catalogues which Treharne quotes from were written 70 years ago (or more) and can be expected to contain outmoded language, they are nonetheless still in use. Their value judgements end up being internalised and repeated by present day scholars. While archivists have been starting to reckon with the language in catalogue descriptions, I’m excited to see researchers paying more attention to them as well. The 2020-2023 Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice project demonstrated how this kind of scholarship can raise the profile of - and ask questions about - the role of heritage workers. The successor project - Critical Cataloguing for Digital Preservation - is currently recruiting a cohort of UK-based GLAM workers for training, support and advice. Applications are open until 10 November.
Reading: I Spy With My Typographic Eye (issue 10) by Pooja Saxena aka Matra Type
Sticking with aesthetic considerations, this fantastic newsletter by Pooja Saxena looks at typefaces, design and visual culture with a primary focus on India. While I can’t read Indic scripts, I enjoy Saxena’s description of the letter forms, and the history and cultural considerations around them.
Issue 10 is an interview with researcher Karthik Malli on the Devanagari script and its interaction with printing technology. The script had to be simplified in order to be legibly reproduced by printing presses, so mechanisation led to modernisation of the script. However the material from printing presses had a largely local circulation and so different script simplification occurred in Calcutta and Bombay. Through its port, Bombay type began to be influenced by Modernist typefaces from the West, and eventually came to be seen as more modern than the Calcutta letter forms. When the script was officially standardised Bombay letter forms dominated, even though there was “nothing objectively more modern, rational, or economical” about them.
When working with students, I’ve encouraged them to consider how technology impacts the existence or non-existence of archives. For example, conversations by telephone are largely absent from the written record while with email you can preserve both sides of the correspondence. This is particularly noticeable as I’m working with personal papers where changes in communication technology are coming in thick and fast during the 1950-2019 period covered by the archive.
However the Devangari example emphasised to me how the technology doesn’t just effect the creation/non-creation of the archival record, but can convey a considerable amount of contextual information. While cataloguing individual typefaces is likely to be inappropriate for most archives, working with a hybrid archive is making me more alert to what information might be meaningful to researchers. For example, the editing capabilities of a traditional typewriter vs an electronic typewriter vs word-processing software are likely to have had an impact on the revisions of a text and so could be significant information. Reading interviews with researchers like Malli who are engaging with archives in atypical ways helps me to think about how best to support pluralistic forms of research.
Exhibition: Constance DeJong: On a Continuous Present at Chelsea Space, London, UK (closes 8 Dec 2023)
Constance DeJong is an artist, writer and performer, associated with the 1970s and '80s New York City downtown art scene. This new exhibition at Chelsea Space presents works from throughout DeJong’s career, including archival material, digital prints, and a particularly arresting audiovisual piece from 2019 called Bedside that I listened to half a dozen times.
The title of the show relates to Gertrude Stein’s notion of the ‘continuous present’, here exploring how DeJong’s work “emphasises writing and reading language as a simultaneous experience”. Stein herself had studied with philosopher and psychologist William James who wrote that “To think of a thing as past, is to think of it amongst the objects which at the present moment appear affected by this quality”. That is to say, things are always perceived as being past from the point of view of the present; and thus our knowledge of the past exists only within the present moment. Stein argued that writing should move away from chronology and focus on the now; DeJong’s work similarly plays with the notion of narrative structure and the notebooks within the exhibition’s vitrines give a glimpse into how her writing process unfolded.
The idea of the continuous present seems, to me, to be a perfect expression for understanding archives. Archives hold traces of thoughts and events inside a physical bubble where we attempt to slow down time, enabling them to be retrieved by researchers outside of their chronological narrative. I went to Chelsea Space expecting to write about the archival traces of performance, but was drawn to a line in the (excellent) accompanying booklet, where curator Karen Di Franco relates her initial encounter with DeJong’s work. “The encounter was textual, with her words located in a collection of five identically covered and bound books contained in a folder in the archive of the American writer and critic, Barbara Reise, held at Tate.”
Reading this led me to look again at the archival material on display. That an encounter in the archive had ultimately led to this exhibition raised the possibility of the material in the vitrines also generating new work; of existing in the present rather than the past. Rather than seeing it as proving historic context for the newer work, I now saw it in dialogue. The 50-year old flyers don’t get me any closer to attending the events in the 1970s but what does it mean to see them in 2023? Why have those ideas and events resurfaced now and what does it tell us about today? It also, again, prompts questions for me around how I can catalogue archives in a way that encourage these kinds of encounters to occur. How do you get the researcher to the thing that they don’t know is there?
Bonus track: Rachel’s - Handwriting [link takes you to Bandcamp]
The final track on the Rachel’s album of the same name, Handwriting sounds like the closing scenes to the most devastating film you’ve never seen. Rachel’s were fantastic but difficult to explain; they tend to be described as a chamber music band (as if that’s a thing!) and were often lumped in with the post-rock movement by virtue of not having vocals. I kind of forget about them every summer but as the nights start to draw in they’re back at the top of my playlist. I can highly recommend their The Sea and The Bells album if you want to know what an immersive Moby Dick experience might feel like.
Thank you for joining me for this third issue! If you have any recommendations for materials you think I might enjoy, please get in touch - links to my email and social media are on my website - I’m also now on Bluesky as @annamcnally.bsky.social
Anna