Welcome to Issue Two of Related Materials
where we think about archives in their expanded sense.
Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher.
I’m writing this newsletter during a September heatwave in England, with temperatures currently 11°C above historical average. So it’s not surprising that two out of three of this month’s recommendations having a connection to climate change (strong Do Not Recommend).
Novel: Vehicle: a verse novel by Jen Calleja (Prototype, 2023)
Jen Calleja is a writer and translator and this is her debut novel. I’ve been following her for several years on the platform formerly known as Twitter, and I’ve been lucky to take part in a couple of her translation workshops, so was already super-excited for this book before she announced that the story (partially) revolved around an archive. I’ve never pre-ordered a novel faster.
It begins with a group of researchers on a funded residency at an archive - only that turns out to have been a trick to get them to discover the information that the government wants wiped from the historical record. They go on the run with what they can grab, and while in the van discover that they are all working on the same historical figures. They recount their research to each other, through documents, memory and imagination, piecing together the story of musician, translator and spy Hester Heller, and the Isletese Disaster, when a roaming archipelago was overcome by a climate catastrophe.
As a reader, I absolutely loved this novel. It is far more gripping and pacey than experimental writing has any right to be - you can get a sense of the style from this extract on lithub.com. Even though the chapters are short I found I had to - and wanted to - inhale it in giant gulps. By the end of the book if you’re not at least a little bit in love with Hester Heller then frankly I don’t think we can be friends.
As an archivist … there was definitely a bit of cheating going on with the idea of a story ‘retold through documents’. It required the archive to have a suspiciously high number of conversations recorded verbatim in order to move the plot along. But while my professional eyebrow may have raised slightly while I was reading it, ultimately I didn’t actually care. The novel as a whole conveys the glorious, messy, scrappiness of archival research in a way that I’ve seldom seen elsewhere and I’ve already gifted 4 copies of it as birthday presents.
Report: A Green New Deal For Archives by Eira Tansey (CLIR, 2023)
Moving back to imminent climate collapse in the real world, Eira Tansey’s A Green New Deal for Archives came out in July and I finally had time to give it a proper read this month. Tansey has been a consistent and important voice on environmental issues within the archives profession since the publication of Archival Adaptation to Climate Change [pay-walled] in 2015, and this year she moved to working full-time on this area through her consultancy firm Memory Rising.
Focusing on the US context, A Green New Deal For Archives looks at the risks that archive collections face through increasingly hostile and unpredictable weather patterns, the role that collections can play in assisting people who have lost their documents in floods or wild fires, and how these interrelate with the chronic under-staffing faced by archive services. The second section of the report then looks at historical precedents for funding archive projects - such as the New Deal-era Historical Records Survey - concluding with reiterating the importance of the archival workforce - “Archives without archivists are simply storehouses of material”.
Tansey gives examples of the type of historical records that might be needed after a disaster - birth certificates, property records, board minutes - and, while I’m sure that these were chosen to be clear-cut examples for non-archivists, I have a niggling concern about demonstrating the value of archives through their evidentiary properties. Partially because we can’t always predict what records might be useful, but also because the vast majority of archival documents - and frankly, all the fun stuff - starts to look fairly worthless based on this criteria.
However by drawing on the Historical Records Survey et al, the second section of her report demonstrates what to me is absolutely core about archives - the ability to dive into the past in order to shape the future. I was recently involved with a research project using a business archive to develop environmentally-friendly packaging. The project was originally conceived as directly taking historical examples and reproducing them, but those packaging types had been superseded for a reason. Instead I focused on *why* non-sustainable packaging had been adopted - was it their weight, their disposability, their flexibility? - and recommending those properties were designed into new packaging, rather than trying to pretend that plastic never happened and that the past was a better place. Archives contain many opportunities for us to approach the future differently.
Eira’s report should be a rallying cry for archivists on both sides of the pond and an opportunity to think ambitiously for our profession; I hope it gets a wide readership.
Podcast: Video Game History Hour: Ep. 116: The First CD-ROM Game
Wait! Before you say ‘I’ve only really played Animal Crossing, I’ll skip this one thanks’, this podcast should really be titled ‘how to frame a research question’ or ‘the total impossibility of finding any kind of First in the archives so please don’t ask’.
The Video Game History Hour wasn’t a podcast I’d heard of before but this episode is an interview with Misty who runs the digipres.club Mastodon server (thanks Misty!) where I go to moan about the floppy disks that are seemingly breeding in the archive I manage. It’s based on an article that Misty wrote on her blog so you might want to look at some of the screenshots on that while you’re listening, although the podcast is more extensive (and funnier).
Although I only know little about video games, I find them really helpful for thinking through some of the issues around digital preservation. Trevor Owen’s The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation makes extensive use of them as examples because it helps you to visualise what you’re trying to preserve - is it the experience or the information? - and the extent to which digital records are hardware dependent.
Misty explores the difficulties of defining the question ‘what was the first CD-ROM game?’: is it the first game that was made specifically for CD-ROM or the first game that appeared on CD-ROM although it was designed for different media? Or the first game that uses the CD-ROM technology in ways that a cartridge or floppy couldn’t support? And why design a game for CD-ROM at a time when few people even had CD-ROM drives?
This chicken and egg situation reminded me of working on a project to restore the first place in the UK where moving image was shown to a paying audience. The building wasn’t a cinema (although it later became one) since the first place to show film can’t ever be a cinema - because you need to invent film before you build a cinema. But then what do you call a building that’s showing films but isn’t a cinema?
This podcast episode does a great job of demonstrating how there’s rarely a big jump in history but more a successions of incremental nudges, and why looking for any kind of first with a capital F is largely nonsense. Also the next episode is about the Nintendo knitting machine so I guess I'm subscribing now.
Bonus track: Kaho Nakamura: スカフィンのうた
I first came across Kaho Nakamura as the voice of Belle in the 2021 anime of the same title by Mamoru Hosoda. Her own recordings are more jazz and electronica inflected than that film’s soundtrack, and I’ve had her most recent album NIA on constant play this year. This ridiculously catchy song was produced to advertise a new returnable bottle campaign by Japanese soft drink brand Pocari Sweat, and the link above takes you to the animated promo video. And while, yes, I know recycling alone won’t save us; it is exceedingly cute.
Thank you for joining me for this second issue and a huge thank you to everyone who shared or recommended the first issue! If you have any suggestions for materials you think I might enjoy, please get in touch - links to my email and social media are on my website.
Anna