The Archive Of Lost Context attempts to expose the invisible — often deliberately obscured — organizational logic behind the construction and organization of archives by applying their logic to a private collection of photographs.

These are photographs selected from a family’s unorganized personal collection because of the unknown information about the photographs: the subject or time of the photo, the person responsible for taking it, or the motivations for its preservation. Because the selected photos range from the 1960s to the late 1990s, they play with the short-term nature of human memory: photos from as late as 1994 are presented without the requisite information to understand their context.

The interest in this collection is in the “cards” for each image (in this format, the posts associated with each image): their labeling is erratic because of the different types of information available for each object. The cards are also speculative: they draw attention to the subjectivity involved in their own creation. In interrogating the material as thoroughly as they summarize it, these labels no longer privilege the “known” information over the unknown, and the coexistence of different types of information draws viewers to think about the nature of knowledge.

The “call numbers” in the archive were determined by a personal logic. This logic will be completely opaque to other viewers/researchers (although I will say here that factors included the suspected photographer, the subject type of the poem, its location relative to other selected items, and my relative certainty about each of the previous factors.) This in some respects highlights the initially difficult internal logic of an individual archive — with its own private oddities, systems, and rules — but ultimately reclaims this “public” presentation of material as a personal collection.

The archive’s header quotes Virgil’s Aeneid: it will please us someday, perhaps, to remember even this. If an archivist’s goal in the digital age tends towards totality — or at least a broad swath — of preservation, the realm of personal memory is still one organized by whim, nostalgia, and inevitably loss. We preserve objects from our family history despite our shrinking contexts for the items; the sense of gradual loss surrounding them is part, ironically, of what gives them value.

 Archive of Lost Context

Some technical notes on this archive’s form:
–My decision to locate this archive digitally, and therefore semi-publically, resulted in the elision of most (full) names. Instead, I tended to describe people relationally: “my godmother,” “my grandmother.” While originally this was a presentation concern, the rather satisfactory effect of it is that the personal investment of the archivist (that’s me!) is highlighted.
–A larger “finding aid” was intended but turned out to be difficult in digital format, although I had a rough start on it in analog form. This is due to nothing more interesting than “technical limitations (in this case, skill gaps) prevent the adoption of certain features in an archive.” jQuery and WordPress is hard.

For my collection, I ventured out on the T (for many, many hours) and collected oral histories from riders about their oldest memory in life. I set out to create a collection that reflects the diversity of the T–a place where people from all ethnicities, ages, and socioeconomic statuses collide amidst the rattle of the tracks, the seats with ’80s upholstery, and the booming voice of the conductor.

Being an introvert, the longest portion of this process was the time it took to muster the courage to approach people and ask them an intimate detail of their past before even knowing their name. Then, about half of the time I could actually get the words out of my mouth, the answer was, “No.” After several hours of working on the collection, only asking people who sat down next to me, or stood by me on the platform, I broke the set parameters of my collection. In reflecting on my partial archive, I realized that only white, American English speakers had sat/stood next to me and agreed to help me with my project. Since my goal was to capture the diversity of the “T,” I decided that I needed to focus on getting people from a variety of backgrounds with different voices to agree to participate, whether they sat/stood next to me or not. So, through many, many, nos, I finally landed with a group of diverse voices telling their stories. Some groups, such as those whose English isn’t entirely fluent, are absent from audio archive, as I couldn’t seem to convince any of them that their English was, in fact, great.

Another contributor to my goal of a diversified collection can be found in the anonymity of the collection.  Out of the 17 “T” riders who agreed to share their stories, I only learned the names of a few, and the greater story of the rider’s life from even less. I purposely didn’t record names, take photos, or elicit extra information from the subjects because I wanted these stories to be universaliz-able, in a way. I believe hearing a person’s story, however small, can promote empathy, and a feeling of connectedness between strangers, even if they don’t share the experience. Thus, the anonymity of the collection is intended to allow the feeling of connectedness created by stories to go beyond the speaker in the audio clip, and be applied to fellow riders. Essentially, after listening to the collection, you are able to board the T and wonder if the story came from the older woman sitting next to you, etc., causing you (hopefully) to want to hear her voice to see if it’s the same as the storyteller’s, and thus produce a connection through conversation that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. I hope that the collection will, in some small way, remind people that, when we all board the T as if in our own little bubble, we each have stories to be told and can all find connections in some way.

Some of them are funny, some sweet, and some tragic. I hope you enjoy!

OLDEST MEMORIES FROM THE T

I work at Merck: a large pharmaceutical company. Here, in Boston, research is conducted to find treatments for cancer, asthma, arthritis, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis. The records that are kept, for the most part, preserve the characteristics of the company (financial records, receipt records, inventory, protocols, etc.). They are representative of the actions of a corporate entity, but not of the thousands of people that allow the entity to function.

When I first started collecting sticky-notes, I was interested in analyzing material that is easily disposed of in this age of digital storage.  As I collected, however, I realized that the easy disposal of sticky notes makes them material that is outside the purview of Merck. These handwritten reminders, directions, notes, and other ephemera, then, could represent the actual individuals within a corporation. (I thought about emails, but they would have been impossible to collect [protection of confidential information]).

After collecting these sticky notes from the seventh floor (the floor I work on), I decided that I wanted to maintain the materiality of this medium because it is the materiality that allows for the individuality I was interested in. So I pinned sticky notes and category labels to a cork bulletin board.

Poor quality photo, weak camera phone, hopefully you at least get a sense of what it looks like.

Cataloguing was a challenge. I could not decide on a way to organize that would accurately and fairly depict the individuality of the handwriting and content of each sticky-note. So, I chose to make a dynamic archive. The categories and the organization of the sticky notes within the categories can be constantly changed. Just as people’s writing, memory devices, and syntax are not easily categorized, so must the sticky notes avoid permanent categorization. For the time being, I have placed the sticky notes into four categories: directions, reminders, notes, and miscellaneous. I used strips of dry erase board for the category labels. They can be erased and renamed at any time and more strips of dry erase board can be used to create more categories. The sticky-notes themselves can be moved with the push pin that fixes them.

What can be drawn from this? It depends upon how someone interacting with the archive chooses to organize. If the sticky notes are arranged by color or type, then the information could be used by a sticky note company to discover what kinds of sticky notes are most popular (imagine this on a wider scale). If the sticky notes are arranged by context of the writing, then there is insight into the ways in which people go about their day within a corporate entity—how they work, how they remind themselves, how they interact, how they express themselves, and how they connect to each other.

Practically, this is not an archive that would normally be saved. This archive reflects more of what we throw out than what we keep. It’s a neglected collection that includes aspects of the personal that cannot be seen in company records. It eliminates the impression of a singular autonomous company voice and produces many voices that are often silenced by a paycheck and subordinated by the hierarchy of a large company.

The archive can also act as an exploration into the merging of a dynamic and material archive. What are the consequences of an ephemeral archive that is categorized by the viewer? What is lost? What is gained? Is there a place for it?

I have to say that I was not intend to do the train tickets collection at first until later I saw some interesting photos of train tickets in the past. It suddenly occurred to me that I can collect train tickets in different time periods and make an archive of them. Those tickets of different countries have their own characteristics and reveal the history and the development of railway technology. I’d love to look into different designs of train tickets all over the world and various stories behind these tickets. I find out that many people just throw the tickets away after they finish their trip, but if we can keep all the tickets recording where we’ve been and where we’re going, I believe that will be a wonderful experience.

The collection mainly consists of photos, taken from Google and social networks, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as others and all the original links and related information of these photos will be noted. This TRAIN TICKETS COLLECTION is categorized into three time periods: 1890s to1970s, 1970s to 2000s and from 2000s till now. The images of train tickets are shared by people all around the world. This collection offers a way of scrutinizing the past and present. The patterns and designs of some tickets change a lot over centuries, but the basic information, like date, departure time, name of the holder and destination, etc. are always included. The size of some tickets are really small, while others are apparently not. Many people love to share their trips and document their tickets on social networks, which have become an essential part in the process of collecting the tickets. This archive allows viewers not only to accumulate their memories, but also to examine the evolution of train tickets and the history in the past.

http://trainticketscollection.tumblr.com/

The digital form of this archive is still under construction. This link (wave1 ) represents in-process work.

I’ve proposed to collect waves, which has resulted so far in a mass of digital video. The video, shot in the surf, captures ocean waves breaking along the east side of Block Island, RI.

In some ways the video documents waves, but what is also present is an encounter–meeting the wave in its breaking state. What’s captured by the video is a temporal window, a loop of that encounter.

How to catalog this collection presents the most significant challenge to the project. Physical attributes of the waves might be logical limits for a catalog, as well as location, and maybe even duration—the time elapsed from the wave’s peak to the veil of foam that reaches the beach and finally recedes back towards the ocean. 

However, the experience of being in the wave–having it pass over one’s body, or collect (catch) the body in its forward momentum–seems to so far delimit this archive.

This project proposes to explore what it means to collect something that resists collection.

Are the videos here simply part of a larger (continual?) energy transfer?

Since a wave is not a thing, but rather a disturbance or oscillation that moves through matter or space can that immateriality inform the archive’s catalog.

What does the wave have to do with origin?

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to convert the bin # to text

all Olson references are from the the first page

The two readings from this week had me considering several things about audiovisual installments in both traditional and digital archives. On page 90 of Digital Memory and the Archive, Ernst reiterates Volker Kahl’s idea that “…electronic communication ‘is based on time. It leaves no traces apart from the result, which lies outside this process, unless traces are deliberately laid…’ Audiovisual media art is, by its nature, transient and unarchivable.” Applying this idea to film archives, such as the Scottish Screen Archive, discussed by Roscaroli, Young, and Monahan, seems to become particularly problematic (252). For, if audiovisual media art is “transient and unarchivable” then a film is, in essence, a highly incomplete text, missing not only the process that led up to the resultant film, but the contextual data—political, historical influences and the like—that spurred on the creation of the film before the process even began. Thus, what exists in the film archives is (contentually, not materially) a single version of a film, vacant of the multiplicity of narratives that were involved in its composition; it is a captured moment in the transient process that has been archived and considered the totality of the film, a “latent archive” (Ernst, 82). Thought of in this perspective, brought about by Kahl and Ernst, can it then be said that the film archive is merely a great collection of last pages torn from thick manuscripts? There is, of course, the possibility of bridging this incompleteness with written documents to scaffold the unseen/unheard political unconscious, and to supply for viewers deliberately laid traces of the process. Would this not, though, disrupt the precedent of the films in the film archive, making traditional documentation of equal importance in the archiving of the films, and thus transforming the film archive into more of an archive that contains some films, amongst other things?

The second main idea I was forced to contemplate with these readings was the idea of YouTube as an archive (Roscaroli, 252). Brought up by Roscaroli, Young, and Monahan, I quickly began to consider the immateriality of the site’s archived videos. Like the three authors also discussed, digital records in past forms, such as reels, VHSs—even on the personal level—are collected and archived for both their form and content. Items like these—and like someday soon, I’m sure, the floppy disk and CD-ROM—are not recognized for their formal archival value until they are part of a closed historical era of technology. For, in the yet-open present, they cannot be recognized or known as something that will soon pass away in light of the next technological advance. In the case of websites like YouTube, however, how should such an archive be preserved in an open present? And, when it is a member of a closed historical era, won’t it have progressed to the then-present, disrupting the data and metadata of its archive as a representative of the historical moment of the then-past? Obviously, as Ernst notes, the Internet is transient along with its audiovisual content, but if something, like YouTube, is to be named an archive, should it be made latent at some point before potentially valuable archival material is lost? If so, would this mean recreating YouTube ever few years, or is their no proper answer for the transient, archival site, but to let it continue moving through time with little trace of its origin and process?