In Writing the Archives: Context, Materiality, Identity, I develop a theoretical and methodological framework for studying archives as institutions that reproduce the rhetorics and identities of particular cultures. This framework includes four key arguments: 1) Archives are constituted through a selective and subjective process of appraisal; 2) What counts as "historical" or even "archival" depends on the attitudes and values of the cultures that create archives; 3) Archivists depend on communicative processes such as writing in order to organize and frame the materials in their care. These processes are culturally-situated and are not the same across all archival spaces; 4) Archives are material spaces that bear very little resemblance to the metaphorical notions of "The Archive" developed by theorists such as Thomas Richards, Diana Taylor, Michel Foucault etc. Central to this framework is the idea that all archives are different since they are constituted by communities whose experiences in the world are unique and different. I argue that my framework for understanding archives would allow us to create better archival research methodologies and also help us better train students who are interested in archival research at the graduate and undergraduate level.I employ a mixed method approach for understanding the role of archives in the constitution of communities and identities. These methods include oral history interviews with archivists who have worked at sites such as the archives as the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and the Lesbian Herstory Archives. A close analysis of these interviews and these sites reveals that archives are built in order to produce particular kinds of communityengagement. Decisions pertaining to the materials collected by these archives and access to these materials depend on the communal and identity politics of these institutions.Additionally, I closely analyze finding aids from the above archives in order to show how they communicate the original context surrounding the production and circulation of archival records. I argue that that the contextual information offered by archival finding aids is always partial in nature. As such, finding aids are rhetorical artifacts because they build histories and identities for archival materials that affect the way in which these materials are read and interpreted by researchers. Finding aids frame researchers' knowledge of archival collections since they provide contextual information about how and where records were produced. I further demonstrate how western models of archival finding aids have been complicated by GLBTQ communities and indigenous communities; these communities argue for more egalitarian finding aids that acknowledge multiple record creators and stakeholders.Lastly, I analyze the digitization practices of two digital archives, namely the Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives and the Blake Archive. I draw from the work of digital humanists and archivists to argue that in the context of digital archives, digitization of records is a cultural process. The manner in which we choose objects to be digitized reflects our biases, and it is never an "objective" process. As such, I argue that digitization is a rhetorical process because it creates culturally-mediated representation of a material object. I also point out that digitization does not necessarily mean that an archival record has been "preserved." All digitized records have unique identities and histories that need to be preserved as well. Therefore, I argue that archival digitization should attempt to connect records with their material counterparts in order to create a holistic representation of the original context in which records were produced and circulated.
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