July 2022 – Public History at UMass Boston

July 29, 2022Rebecca M Beit-Aharon 1 Comment

Internship: No Such Thing as a Perfect Interview: Artists-in-Residence at Historic Sites, no. 2

By Rebecca Beit-Aharon

Hello again!

In my first post, I talked about the origin of the research project I’m working on, including how we identified artist-in-residence programs at historic sites across the country. Of course, knowing programs exist—or existed—isn’t enough.

As you might have guessed, connecting with the sites we identified had mixed results. In many cases, my supervisor Ken Turino had personal connections thanks to his extensive public history career. I was able to connect directly to a few contacts of my own. In Professor Jane Becker’s public history practicum in Spring 2021, I worked closely with Eric Hansen-Plass of Boston National Historical Park, who confirmed that there hadn’t been an artist-in-residence program there for years. Over the summer, a colleague at the Old North Church clued me in to Ryan Ahlwardt’s song “Granary” about Paul Revere. While not a result of an AIR program, the song and music video are still fantastic examples of public history by a contemporary artist.

While some site administrators did make introductions, I mostly reached out to site personnel cold through emails, phone calls, and contact forms. I was impressed by how many responding staff were interested in our work—the ones that weren’t were generally closed or understaffed due to the pandemic. I’m particularly sorry to have missed out on interviewing staff and artists from Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, which was closed along with the rest of the Diné (Navajo) Nation due to the pandemic; I was hoping to learn how a site that prioritized Native artists—and functioned under multiple governing bodies—ran an AIR program.

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We began the interview process by creating two parallel sets of questions: one for artists-in-residence and another for site administrators, curators, and other historic site staff who worked with AIRs. These questions were broken down roughly in terms of the timeline of creating/participating in an AIR program, starting with questions about the genesis of the program, moving on to selecting an artist and the residency itself, and closing out with final products, evaluations, and lessons learned.

Overall, we interviewed twenty-five site administrators and twenty-two artists from twenty-two sites across the country. These sites ranged in size (both physical and budgetary), but there was a notable concentration of sites in the northeast—a huge bulk of our interview sites are in New England or New York. We’re not sure if this actually reflects reality or results from our northeastern network.

A graph showing the number of full-time staff at interviewed historic sites.

Interviewing artists and site administrators—in other words, growing my network!—was a pleasure. I love talking to people about both art and history, so learning about that in tandem both practically and creatively was a joy.

While there’s no such thing as a perfect interview, certain practices helped them go smoothly. As a stickler for structure, I generally sent the interview questions in advance and followed them closely. While a more conversational style would have been more natural, I didn’t want to miss any questions. No one I spoke to had answers to every question, whether because some weren’t relevant or because institutional knowledge had been lost over time. My notes, at least, were extremely easy to organize and analyze once we hit the data analysis phase.

I spoke to people from all sorts of sites, and I ended up interviewing just about all of the artists and administrators we spoke to connected to the National Park Service. As a government institution, there are more regulations to deal with, but some of the near-universal traits of NPS AIR programs were, frankly, mind-boggling. For example, a much higher percentage of NPS sites treat AIRs as volunteers than other historic sites do (and seem almost surprised that one might pay an AIR). There’s also a clause in very fine print on the NPS volunteer contract that gives the government rights to any artwork/etc created while volunteering.

The AIR-as-volunteer model has serious drawbacks. Unpaid artists must donate not only their work but their valuable time, and only artists with enough disposable income—which leaves out a significant portion of artists, particularly emerging artists and economically disadvantaged artists—can realistically participate. By not paying the artists, these sites reinforce the notion that art is not a proper profession: as one artist pointed out, sites pay professionals to restore woodwork, artwork, and more, and they pay them at professional rates. Not paying (and underpaying) artists devalues their valuable work. Sites lose out too. Minority artists are more likely to be economically disadvantaged. One of the benefits of AIR programs is their ability to bring new eyes to historic sites traditionally interpreted with narrow lenses. Minority voices are vital to expanding the stories told, and AIR programs are one way to reimagine sites, as Historic New England did with the portrait of Cyrus Bruce by Richard Haynes Jr. that I wrote about previously.

New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park’s AIR program provides a notable exception to this apparent “rule.” Here, the program is run by historic-site-AIR superstar Lindsay E. Compton, who created AIR programs at two other NPS sites: Congaree National Park and San Antonio Mission National Historical Site. New Bedford Whaling NHP provides an incredible example of a robust AIR program that pays its artists, taps into their community’s talent, and creates programming and art that speaks to varying and deep themes at the site and in the community. The current (when I interviewed Lindsay) artist-in-residence was doing a project on Polynesian women in whaling. Lindsay did in depth research to support the artist. For a more community-based example, April Jakubec, the AIR from January-March 2020, created four large portraits of women in the community who self-identified as having mental illness/struggles, sparking rich discussions around mental health. As an attached workshop, women were invited to paint a self-portrait and adorn the art with flowers, gems, and more to demonstrate different areas of healing (i.e. flowers over mouth: someone felt silenced).

A ground of women stand and kneel with painted self-portraits, many adorned with painted plants or flowers. — *April Jakubec’s AIR workshop in 2020. Courtesy of New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park.*

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Check back for the final installment, where I’ll talk about data analysis, preparing a panel agenda, and presenting at conferences for NEMA, Connecticut Local History Organization, and AASLH.

July 28, 2022Rebecca M Beit-Aharon 1 Comment

The People’s Congressman: Joe Moakley’s Mission for Peace and Justice in El Salvador

By Laura Kintz

My name is Laura Kintz, and I designed an Omeka site, THE PEOPLE’S CONGRESSMAN: JOE MOAKLEY’S MISSION FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE IN EL SALVADOR, as my capstone project for the Archives Track of UMass Boston’s History MA program.

The goal of my site is to display and contextualize archival materials that document Congressman John Joseph Moakley’s important work related to issues in El Salvador during that country’s civil war from 1979 to 1992, especially his career-defining leadership of the “Moakley Commission:” a congressional task force that investigated the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter. This project reflects my interests in both 20^th century American history and issues of archival access.

Congressman Moakley (1927-2001) was a Democratic South Boston politician whose career spanned the second half of the twentieth century. His papers are at Suffolk University in Boston, which is both my alma mater (BS in History, 2006) and Moakley’s (JD, 1956). The John Joseph Moakley Archive and Institute (JJMAI) at Suffolk University has digitized thousands of Moakley Papers documents, including hundreds relating to El Salvador, for use by off-site researchers; these are accessible via their online catalog. Fifteen years after his death, though, Moakley’s work related to El Salvador remains largely unknown. With one exception (Moakley’s biographer, Mark Schneider), historians have largely ignored Moakley and his career as historical subjects. The wealth of materials available in the Moakley Papers begs for further research, and thus far, no one has mined these materials and presented them digitally in a cohesive way. My goal in creating a digital exhibit is to change that. The site allows historical researchers and members of the general public to learn about a politician who worked tirelessly to help the victims of Salvadoran injustice.

This site includes a short sketch of Congressman Moakley’s life and career, as well as a timeline of El Salvador’s history, with a focus on the years of the civil war. The “Archival Materials” section comprises the bulk of the exhibit; it features correspondence, memoranda, press releases, government documents, reports, photographs, and other pieces of evidence that chronicle Moakley’s introduction to El Salvador; immigration reform; the 1989 Jesuit Murders and the Moakley Commission; the end of the civil war; and Moakley’s legacy. An “Oral History” section includes transcripts of interviews with Moakley’s family, friends, colleagues, and even with Moakley himself. A final section includes a bibliography and notes on copyright.

In crafting my site, I had nearly 500 digitized archival documents at my disposal. These represent only a small portion of the total number of documents in the Moakley Papers, but nonetheless provide significant insight into Moakley’s career. I selected documents that best support the overall narrative of Moakley’s work and then divided them into categories that reflect the general trajectory of this work. The narrative contextualizes the documents, but the documents also speak for themselves. Each document has its own accompanying identifying information, or metadata, that provides further details, including a general description of the document. In some instances, for presentation purposes, I have divided multi-page documents into separate PDFs; I have noted these instances in the metadata for the relevant files.

My work on the site aligns with my main goal as an archivist, which is to uncover history by providing access to primary sources.The complicated nature of Moakley’s work and of El Salvador’s history in general made this process challenging at times. Given these complexities and my desire to present the material in a succinct and readable way, there are certain aspects of Moakley’s work and El Salvador’s history that this site does not cover. The primary source documents that I have contextualized nonetheless illuminate the unceasing efforts of a United States congressman whose commitment to human rights in El Salvador defined his career and is an example to citizens of today’s world, politicians and civilians alike.

I would like to the staff, past and present, of the Moakley Archive and Institute for all the wonderful work they have done to digitize Congressman Moakley’s papers. This project would not exist without their commitment to providing access to their materials. I would especially like to thank archivist Julia Howington, whose advice and assistance were invaluable as I worked on this digital exhibit.

I would also like to give very special thanks to my advisor and mentor, UMass Boston Archives Program Director, Dr. Marilyn Morgan. Without Dr. Morgan’s encouragement, I may not have realized that archives are my true calling. Dr. Morgan’s support not only helped me create this exhibit, but also helped me learn how to be an archivist, and for that, I am immensely grateful.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, friends, and fellow students for all of their support during my graduate career. I would like to dedicate this exhibit to my husband, Rob Kintz, without whom I never would have been able to start, let alone finish, graduate school. He has always believed in me, and for that, I cannot thank him enough.

July 28, 2022Rebecca M Beit-Aharon 1 Comment

A Curatorial Tagging Case Study of the Blackwell Family Papers Digital Collection; Or, Making the Case For Archival Performance Transparency

By Katie Fortier

My capstone project uses the Blackwell Family Papers Digital Collection (BFPDC) as a lens through which to examine issues of archival performance transparency or pertinent contextual information that could enhance access points to digital collections.

Archivists have traditionally viewed themselves and their institutions as objective and impartial presenters of documents. In more recent decades, some have debated the agency and mediation that they practice in their profession, in terms of appraising, arranging, and describing archival records. Some have pushed the debate further, arguing that archival users should be more involved in these processes, particularly by generating descriptive metadata, as a complement or alternative to traditional taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, which some archivists have more recently scrutinized.

Philosophical discussions revolving around archival transparency address several issues; for instance, what are the means by which archivists explicitly outline their archival decisions and intentions? What role do archives play in constructing cultural memory and power? Can providing additional contextual information about archival methodologies prove useful to researchers? Can including additional context prove beneficial to archivists themselves by serving as an administrative tool? Lastly, and perhaps most difficult to assess, when instituting new practices, like tagging digital collections to enhance transparency and accessibility, is it possible for an archivist to consciously document his or her own biases?

In 2012, Schlesinger Library initiated a tagging project to enhance access and create new pathways between records in the extensive collection that had been fully digitized in 2014. The process and challenges encountered in tagging the BFPDC—inconsistency, the lack of objectivity, and the uneven distribution of curatorial tagging—provide insight into social experiments in archival description. Creating and applying tags to provide contextual information aptly highlights issues related to descriptive practices in general. My capstone outlines the type of information that the project generated and attempts to evaluate its usefulness. It also highlights the anxieties of tagging in this fashion in light of postmodern theory and its application to archival theory, particularly archival description. It argues for the transparency of descriptive practices as a means of communicating to users important contextual information about the custodial history of archival records, including trying to articulate the combinations of different methodologies with which archivists applied curatorial tags. It finally produces several decision-making documents that one might feature on their digital online collections, to aid researchers in understanding the way in which they are seeing digital materials.

Within the past 20 years, several archivists have made calls for contextual documentation of manuscript collections but a nomenclature for this action has yet to be standardized. My capstone uses the term archival performance transparency to describe a document or a set of documents that relay, explicitly, information outlining one, some, or all of these processes: custodial history of records; appraisal, processing, and descriptive decision-making (of the archivist and/or the repository); documentation strategies; archival methodologies; and personal or institutional biases. Archival performance transparency derives from the work of Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz who insist that “the archivist is an actor, not a guardian; a performer, not a custodian.” Archival performance transparency entails providing contextual information related to collections; it does not relate to discussions regarding the transparency of organizations and citizens’ abilities to access records.

My capstone builds upon the work of Michelle Light and Tom Hyry who, in 2002, appropriated the term colophon for the field of archives. The finding aid colophon, serving as an addition tacked onto a finding aid, translates into words the inevitable subjectivity of the archivist’s choices when making appraisal and processing decisions. At present, few, if any, archives or repositories have put the idea of a finding aid colophon into practice. My capstone proposes a reimagining of the colophon for the digital collections environment; an environment where digital records often suffer from lack of context. Using the Blackwell Family Papers Digital Collections as a case study, my project argues that the transmission of records from its original finding aid to its representation in an online digital collection environment necessitates the creation of a series of digital collection essays. Digital collection essays can be defined as archival performance transparency tools to be applied to an online digital collection that describe the transmission and representation of digital archival records. These essays integrate archival performance transparency as well as educational and navigational information to breathe new life into the archival colophon.