Coffee & Viz: Visualizing the Archive - Actors, Agency, and Infrastructure

2 Broughton Drive,Raleigh NC 27695

15 April, 2022

Description

Please join us for this in-person event. Archives and special collections across the world have their own complicated history, as archivists and researchers interact with and even alter the archives either purposefully or accidentally. One such archive is the Ancient Petitions of the UK National Archives, a collection of hundreds of medieval and early modern manuscripts dating from the 13th to 17th centuries. While the Ancient Petitions are often used for research, centuries of mishandling, spotty record-keeping, and ill-advised attempts at reorganizing the petitions created challenges as the collection evolved. Many literary scholars and historians have seen these challenges as invitations to “fix” the structure of the collection by working to restore it to its original order. In this presentation, Dr. James Harr will argue that network visualizations can help articulate the incredibly complicated history of these archives. Visualizing these archives can provide a window into the life of a collection, and more importantly, give insights into how history was constructed by archivists. Furthermore, by not viewing these moments in archival history as antiquarian missteps, he asserts that we can begin to understand these shifts as contributions to the scholarship of media history and the archive.