From work to text to document

International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 2013

This article offers a critique of the transfer of a technological-scientific paradigm of research infrastructure to the field of the humanities. This critique is informed by our experience of formulating user requirements for the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project, and especially by a series of interviews we undertook with user-facing archivists working at EHRI partner institutions. We argue that the archival voices we recovered during these interviews articulate a range of concerns that clash with some of the major assumptions which frame current discussions about research infrastructure. In particular, we demonstrate that archival research is currently heavily mediated by archivists. And yet, inter-mediation is a theme that is insufficiently explored in recent theorising about research infrastructure. Contextualising our findings within some recent trends in archival science, we show that an infrastructure such as the EHRI must be build around the complex re...

Archival Science, 2011

The INKE Team THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK and INTERDISCIPLINARY CONTEXT Our desire is to highlight not only the interpretive practices of archival research and the reading of documents, but also the contextual, associative nature of such reading. David Beard (2008) has suggested that the interpretive text arises from the interactivity of the users associations and contexts, and from documents whose meanings have already been constrained. Beard states that documents, unlike texts, "come to us inflected by the institutions that preserve them. Before the historian has put pen to paper, the document has meaning. The contest between the meaning created within the scholarly work and the meaning imbued by the institution begins" (Beard 2008, p. 255). The first step in understanding the processes by which researchers make meaning from archival records, and thus create a text from their reading of the document, must be to comprehend the archive itself as an active-and potentially competing-agent in the creation of meaning. In assessing the formation of the text, Beard's essay identifies the tip of a large iceberg. More than one discipline is represented in his essay-archives, of course, but also history, literature, and critical theory-and all are inheritors of the humanities' vast literature on interpretation. Roland Barthes's role in that literature four decades ago was to give voice to a critical school which sought a middle way between the socio-linguistic determinism of structuralism (of which Barthes was a practitioner in his early career) on the one hand, and the liberal man-and-his-work tradition of literary appreciation on the other. The post-structuralism that Barthes pioneered in the late sixties in literary studies, along with Michel Foucault in history, Jacques Derrida in philosophy, and Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis, challenged the traditional narratives that underwrote interpretive practices across the human sciences. Barthes's 1971 essay "From Work to Text" (Barthes 1977 [1971]), written in the heyday of this period, helped to ensconce text as a keyword for generations to come. For our purposes, the point is that texts may signify in ways that are multiple, unruly, contradictory, and amenable to readings that savour ambiguity over straightforward decoding. That is not to say, however, that texts have limitless meaning. Beard's characterization that "in contrast [to a canonical work], the text is constructed by the reader" (2008, p. 63) does not tell the whole story. While it is true that Barthes's and his school elevate the interpreter's agency in their accounts of interpretive practice, poststructuralist approaches to literature and history tend not to take the form of selfindulgent interpretation run riot, despite the excesses of some who appropriate the label. Poststructuralism and its theoretical antecedents have, if anything, drawn attention to the forces that constrain and authorize interpretation, and indeed shape the subjectivity of the reader. In particular, it is the reader who becomes the focal point of textuality and textual multiplicity. As Barthes asserts in his influential essay "The Death of the Author" (1968), "The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing [sic] are inscribed without any of them being lost;; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination" (Barthes 1977 [1968], p. 148). In this sense the reader does not construct the text, strictly speaking; it would be more accurate to say that only in the performance of reading can we perceive the contingency of texts. Meaning is less like a ray of light shining down from the heavens, and more like a constellation of far-flung stars only discernable as a symbolic figure from a specific point in space. MEANING-MAKING AND THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK Book historians today tend to be interested not just in the book as a physical artifact, but also in the array of social processes that intersect through that artifact. That has not always been the case in the discipline, but the turn to the social is essential context for our study's focus on exploring the dimensions of meaning-making. What we now call textual scholarship, broadly speaking-comprising bibliography, textual criticism, and scholarly editing-has its origins in the enumeration of books in libraries of the ancient world, especially Alexandria in the fourth century BCE (Greetham 1994, p. 14-15). The enumeration of copies of manuscript books inevitably raised the question of the reliability of specific witnesses, and to this day textual scholarship has been driven by a forensic imperative to determine provenance, authority, and value. In the academic world, this imperative has tended to take the form of scholarly editing projects, especially following the vast textual recovery project known as Renaissance humanism, but a forensic imperative has also driven antiquarian book collecting. (See, for example, Owen Gingerich's account of the world of scientific book collecting, which he navigated for his census of Copernicus's De revolutionibus; 2004.) An exception to the forensic imperative may be found in the textual scholarship of practitioners of the book arts-the printers, typographers, binders, and others who regard the history of books from a designer's perspective. This alternative tradition of textual scholarship takes the form of thinking through making, and runs from the scholar-printers of the first age of print, such as Aldus Manutius, Nicholas Jenson, and Christopher Plantin, to designers who reacted to the modern industrialization of publishing, like William Morris, Stanley Morison, and Eric Gill, to present-day artists, designers, and digital humanists experimenting with new textual forms (Drucker 2009; Galey 2010). Even so, twentieth-century bibliography established the forensic mindset as the dominant one in the Anglo-American academy for many decades. Only toward the end of the last century did we see approaches to the study of books that synthesized the perspectives mentioned above with the comprehensive influence of social and cultural history, and the interpretive influence of literary and cultural studies (Howsam 2006). It is worth noting that although the journal Studies in Bibliography published its first issue in 1948, the journal Book History did not appear until 1998, around the same time as new academic programs in book history, including the one from which this study drew its participants. With this shift, book historians began to regard books not only as forensic objects under the spotlight of empirical truth, but also as agents in textual cultures worth understanding holistically. That whole, or system, has been schematized in different ways by Pierre Bourdieu (1993), Robert Darnton (1982), and others. Darnton's map of what he calls the "communications circuit" (1982,

Textual Cultures

and new roles and training were established for those who cared for them. Toward the end of the monograph, we see the genesis of our own relationship to the archive: as housing contested histories, as physical structures that are at risk from both natural and political causes, and as a place in which the pull of archivists to protect and safeguard what has been placed in their care can be met with the equal pull of historians who wish to utilize the documents in a complex telling and retelling of our past to better know ourselves and our times.

Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 2005

This article, written from the dual perspectives of a scholar and an archivist, considers the impact of excessive archival restrictions on scholars who seek access to primary material in order to ensure the integrity and accuracy of their research. Ruth Panofsky's view is that of a literary scholar whose work is informed by archival research. Michael Moir's view is that of a university archivist who has facilitated scholarly access to York University's archival holdings. Together, they argue for access to fonds held in public archives and the need for archival institutions to provide and lobby for such access. In this article, author Panofsky draws on her recent work with the Adele Wiseman fonds, held in the Clara Thomas Archives, Scott Library, York University. Since that research was undertaken with great difficulty, the narrative that follows may dishearten some scholars. The eventual overcoming of the barrier of restricted access to archival material, which, for a nu...

Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2006

This article presents the construction of a research topic and the results to date of a study that is part of a current debate in the field of Information Science, involving the delimitation of its core subject matter: information – in its varied concepts – or the document – in its materiality, as part of the institutional order and engenderer of social effects (Frohmann). This study, of a theoretical-conceptual nature, tests the concept/hypothesis of the mode of accreditation and social distribution of knowledge (savoir), grounded in Pierre Nora’s distinction between memory societies and history societies. It analyzes the constitution, functioning and imaginary representations of writing, as a landmark and pillar of historical – or archive – societies, and lays the foundations of the document in processes of legitimation, authority and regimes of truth. This study looks for for the bases for the persistence of the document in the dominant processes of accreditation and social distribution of knowledge (savoir) – and power – in the western world, and thus contributes to enriching this important discussion within the field. It also demonstrates the progress made in research through the theoretical-conceptual contributions of the French school of discourse analysis, which restores the material and historical dimension of meaning, dispelling the illusion of the transparency of language – the basis of the information effect (evidence) and the founding myth of the information field.

Textual Cultures: Text, Contexts, Interpretation, 2019

and new roles and training were established for those who cared for them. Toward the end of the monograph, we see the genesis of our own relationship to the archive: as housing contested histories, as physical structures that are at risk from both natural and political causes, and as a place in which the pull of archivists to protect and safeguard what has been placed in their care can be met with the equal pull of historians who wish to utilize the documents in a complex telling and retelling of our past to better know ourselves and our times.

2007