WRITING THE ARCHIVES:
CONTEXT, MATERIALITY, IDENTITY
By
Madhu Narayan

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Rhetoric and Writing – Doctor of Philosophy
2013

ABSTRACT
WRITING THE ARCHIVES:
CONTEXT, MATERIALITY, IDENTITY
By
Madhu Narayan
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 UrbanaChampaign 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 community

engagement. 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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As this dissertation process winds down, I am excited about the next phase of my life as a
writer, teacher and scholar. I owe thanks to many people who have supported me as mentors,
colleagues and friends over the past four years. There is so much more I want to say to each of
these people, but for now all I can say is thank you.
First, I’d like to thank the members of my committee: Dr. Malea Powell, Dr. Terese
Monberg, Dr. Dean Rehberger, Dr. Trixie Smith and Dr. Daniel Heath Justice. Thank you for
your incredible mentorship and intellectual support. I would have been a very different kind of
scholar and colleague without you all.
I’d like to thank the archivists who agreed to speak with me and participate in this
dissertation project. William Maher and Joan Nestle: thank you for your time and patience with
my questions.
I would like to thank the Rhetoric and Writing program, especially our patient and
compassionate graduate director, Dr. Bill Hart-Davidson. Bill, thank you for being available
whenever I needed your advice.
I would like to thank the amazing staff in the WRAC office, particularly Melissa
Arthurton, Marsha Edington and Dianna Shank. Thank you for helping me navigate the various
bureaucratic systems at MSU and for always cheering me up. The WRAC office is definitely one
of my favorite places in Bessey Hall.
I am so grateful for my incredible community of friends and colleagues at MSU and in
other places. Thank you Matt Novak, Travis Webster, Caroline Wilkinson, Douglas Walls,
Lehua Ledbetter, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Katie Livingston, Casey Miles, Laura Julier, Stuart

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Blythe, Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Sarah Johnson, Donnie Sackey and Stacey Pigg. All these people
have taught me what it means to be a good friend and a supportive colleague.
I’d like to thank my parents, especially my mother for teaching me the value of a good
education very early in my life. I’d like to thank my smart sister for putting up with my moods
and tantrums over the years.
Finally, I owe a great big thank you to Ben Martin-Bean for going through this PhD
process with me, for his unconditional love and kindness, especially on days when I was a
difficult person to live with: Ben, I hope you know how much of all this you made possible.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
PRECURSOR: HOW I GOT TO THE ARCHIVES.......................................................... 1
A Place Where Old Things Live..............................................................................1
Understanding the Purpose of Archives ................................................................ 5
Learning the Language: A Brief Note on Cross-Disciplinary Engagement .......... 8
From “Archive” to “Archives” .............................................................................11
Oral History as a Site of Shared Authority ............................................................18
Locating an Interpretive Methodology for Lived Experiences .............................23
Defining Rhetorics, Culture and Archives.............................................................27
A Map to this Dissertation ....................................................................................30
CHAPTER 2
WE ARE WHAT WE (DON’T) KEEP: ARCHIVES, RHETORIC AND IDENTITY... 34
The Archives Versus Archives debate.................................................................. 37
On Archives, Rhetoric and Identity ..................................................................... 40
What The Archivists Taught Me........................................................................... 48
CHAPTER 3
FROM METAPHOR TO MATERIALITY:
THE RHETORICITY OF ARCHIVAL SPACE.............................................................. 65
August 2012: Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, New York ........................ 65
The Academic/Archival Divide ............................................................................ 68
January 2012: University of Illinois Archives, Urbana-Champaign .................... 70
On Rhetoricity: Or Why Things Have Meaning................................................... 72
August 2012: Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, New York ........................ 75
January 2012: University of Illinois Archives, Urbana-Champaign .................... 79
August 2012: Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, New York ........................ 80
January 2012: University of Illinois Archives, Urbana-Champaign .................... 83
August 2012: Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, New York ........................ 87
CHAPTER 4
WRITING THE ARCHIVES: CONTEXT, MATERIALITY, CULTURE................... 90
Creating a Record through Archival Description .............................................. 92
Complicating Archival Description and Decolonizing Archives ....................... 106
A Few Implications ............................................................................................ 112
CHAPTER 5
MOVING BEYOND THE ILLUMINATED SCREEN: ASSERTING THE MATERIALITY OF
DIGITIZED RECORDS .................................................................................................114
Kristine Blair’s Literacy Narrative .....................................................................114
Asserting the Materiality of Digitized Texts .......................................................119
A Brief Look at The Blake Archive .....................................................................126

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CHAPTER 6
AFTERWORD AND IMPLICATIONS..........................................................................131
The Curious Case of the Leale Report ................................................................132
Material Archives Versus Metaphorical Archives...............................................136
Is the Digital Dust-Free? .....................................................................................139
Three Strands for Future Research .....................................................................140
WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................141

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CHAPTER 1
PRECURSOR: HOW I GOT TO THE ARCHIVES
“Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is
to begin, to begin, to begin…”
-Donald Barthelme, 1977
“How do scholars see beyond the norms they use to frame the experiences
of others unless those norms are interrupted and exposed so that scholars
are vulnerable, seeing what they believe as possibly wrong, or at least
limited?”
--Greg Sarris, 1993
A place where old things live:
I can still vaguely recall my first brush with the term “archive.”
I was in grade school (or primary school, as they call it in India). Perhaps it was a teacher
or one of my parents who told me that the an archive was a place where “old things lived.” For
me, this explanation immediately conjured a vision of a place where forgotten things ended up, a
place where things went to die. For a long time, I associated the word “archive” with dead things,
things that were decaying and rotting. I was convinced that if I ever visited an archive, I would
never leave. And if I did, I would leave with the residue of its dust and decay on me.
I find it interesting that when I think of my first brush with the archive1, I immediately
travel to my first memory of the word and not a place. The archive is a place constituted of
memories and yet, paradoxically it is also constitutive of memory. Without archives, we cannot
recall memories: they have to be mediated through archives before they can be recalled. Our
power of recall is contingent on how well we’ve classified and preserved the past in our archives.
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1
I am trying to be very cautious in my use of “the” as a definite article when I talk about “the
archive”: I will proved a more nuanced definition of “archive” later in this introduction, but I
want my readers to be aware that I am not positing a singular concept of archives here. Indeed
that would be contrary to the argument I am making in this dissertation.
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My earliest understanding of archives was not entirely incorrect. It is in some ways a place for
old and forgotten things: archives are our cultural unconscious, a place where memories are
hidden or buried until they are needed again. And much like the Lacanian formulation of the
unconscious, archives depend on language to give form and organize memories.
In this project, I trace the connections between language, writing and archives: as Brien
Brothman (1991, 1999) contends, writing and archives work as perfect metaphors for each other.
Writing and archiving are ways of organizing our experiences so that they communicate meaning
and allow us to articulate our identities. Further, as an expression of language, writing is more
than just a tool within archives. Writing becomes a representational medium often standing in for
the materials of memory housed within archival spaces (Yakel 2003, Matienzo 2012). I argue
that when archivists write and theorize about archives, they are also in fact talking about the
complexities of writing: while archivists pay attention to how writing works a useful medium for
organizing materials, it is also a medium that is meant to make archives seem less “messy.”
Archives are places where fragments from the past are deposited often in a disorganized and
disordered form. Archival writing – as documented in various archival catalogs and finding aids
– gives form and shape to this disorder. However, writing’s ability to give form and shape is
simultaneously contingent on its ability to leave out things that don’t cohere or that seem out of
place. The production of meaning through writing within archives is always a process of making
things seem ordered, a process of making deliberate choices about what to include and exclude.
Given the fact that archives are constituted through deliberate choices, I argue that
archives are rhetorical. This argument, of course, has been made before within communication
and rhetoric studies (Biesecker, Morris, Finnegan 2006). Archives are also sites of social and
political power (Foucault 1972, Derrida 1996, Cook & Schwartz 2002, Burton 2006, Kirsch &

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Rohan 2008). They are sites that both enable and limit access to the materials of the past. They
reflect, enact and authorize the rhetorics of the cultures and communities that created them.
However, I argue that Rhetoric and Composition must pay more attention to the material realities
of archival spaces2. We need to create a better understanding of the material processes (such as
appraisal, authentication, description, preservation, etc) by which archives are created and
maintained. Such an understanding would allow us to articulate the cultural logics through which
archives are framed and composed.
In this project, I look at archives as material spaces comprised of material objects. I also
point out that there is a tendency in current scholarship to conflate theoretical notions of archives
(as exemplified in the work of Foucault, Derrida, Richards etc) with physical archives that house
the materials of memory. I argue that when we study physical archives through the lens of
discursive or theoretical archives, we risk homogenizing all archival spaces. Instead, I
persistently show that archival spaces are different from one another since they are created to
enact the rhetorics of particular cultures and communities. The material practices (such as
appraisal, description etc) that constitute archival spaces often differ depending on the needs of
the communities that created them.
In this project, I write about a range of archives, including a university archives (the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), a community-based archives (The Lesbian Herstory
Archives) and two digital archives (The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives and The Blake
Archive). I take a close look at the material practices of these archives: I particularly analyze
their descriptive practices as evidenced by their finding aids and catalog entries. In terms of the
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2
Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have already started doing such work: the recent edited
collection Working in the Archives includes extensive accounts of archivists’ material practices. I
discuss this collection more extensively in later chapters.
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two digital archives, I look closely at how they describe digitized or made-digital material. I
argue that archival writing – as exemplified by archival description – is a process of building
context for the materials of memory. While the content of archival records is certainly important,
a record as a physical object can be equally revealing: hence, building a history for the record
itself - by documenting the context of its production and use - can be of great help to researchers.
It would allow us to look beyond the content of archival records and think about how records
functioned as physical objects within a given cultural setting.
I further argue that archival researchers should understand artifacts like finding aids as
rhetorical: these artifacts create narratives about archival records that are never comprehensive or
complete. Researchers should engage in conversations with such artifacts and try to discover
what they exclude as well as include. Broadly, I argue that documents like finding aids are like
any other written products: they draw arbitrary boundaries around information and often only
represent a partial narrative about the items contained within archives. Such a view does not
make archival description any less valuable, but it does ask us to adopt a more critical lens when
we engage with documents such as finding aids. Indeed, in their suggested guidelines for doing
archival research, the Society of American Archivists requests researchers to point out mistakes
in descriptive documents such as finding aids and catalogs. Archivists are well aware that neither
finding aids/catalogs nor the people who develop them are infallible.
This project includes excerpts from my interviews with archivists: I reflect more deeply
on the interview process and my reasons for including archivsts’ voices later in this chapter.
However, here I will say that I wanted to assert the archivist as a material presence within
archival spaces. Often in the current scholarship on archives both within Rhetoric and
Composition and other fields (such as History, English, Anthropology etc), the archivist is either

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relegated to the background entirely or only appears as a shadowy figure, either granting or
denying the researcher access to materials. We rarely write about archivists as experts in the area
of long-term preservation of materials of the past. We rarely think of them as experts who can
teach us a great deal about how archival materials are put together and maintained. This
dissertation brings the blurry image of archivist into sharp focus. It looks to their views on
archival preservation as rhetorical and meaningful.
Understanding the Purpose of Archives
I am not an archivist. My interest in archives springs from a long-term fascination with
these spaces. Over the past decade, as I have moved from college to graduate school, archives –
much like the unconscious – have been a recurrent theme. Almost every class I have taken in
graduate school has included at least one discussion about archives. In these conversations,
almost everyone seemed to have a different understanding of “the archive”: sometimes, it was a
place for research, at other times, it was an instrument of power. On the one hand, archives were
often touted as a place where the past was revealed and on the other hand, it was also the place
where the past was concealed. Some argued that memories could be discovered within archives.
Others countered that archives were often the cause of cultural amnesia. Archives were static.
Archives were timeless. Archives were places where “everything” could be found. Archives
were places where only fragments of the past could be found. Archives were metaphors.
Archives were problematic. Archives were wonderful...
As a graduate student, I found myself smack in the middle of all these ideas. And while I
was fascinated by these views, I found that no one could exactly tell me what archives were. This
question seemed to elicit a cacophony of responses that were as vague as the very first
explanation I heard as a child: people talked about archives in terms of the past, or memory or

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power. They talked about archives as a place to visit and read things from a long time ago. I
found these explanations helpful of course, but I was never given an explanation that I could
really pin down. What was even more fascinating was that everyone I talked to or read provided
their explanation of archives with a sense of quiet certainty and conviction. It was as if
everybody knew instinctively what archives were based on their own experiences and therefore
no one felt the need to explain it in any other way.
It’s perhaps because I am afraid of forming conclusions prematurely or perhaps as a
scholar and as a human being, I have given up on the idea of certitude in general. Whatever the
reason, when I started this project, I found that I was unable to provide a reasonable definition of
archives to my dissertation committee. Indeed my initial proposal for this project was crowded
with ideas as vague as all the explanations I had heard in graduate school. I certainly do not want
to discount others’ notions and definitions of archives: indeed, some of the explanations I had
heard in my graduate coursework allowed me to understand archives as complex sites of sociopolitical power. But for myself, as a scholar interested in archives and archival research, I wanted
to move away (at least momentarily) from these grand narratives about archives. Instead, I
wanted to understand the material practices that constitute archives every day. I wanted to allow
myself to look at archives as material spaces wherein people work and make meaning on a daily
basis.
Methodologically, I took a leaf out Kathleen Stewart’s A Space on the Side of the Road
(1996). A cultural anthropologist, Stewart launches into an investigation of what she terms “the
Other America.” She travels to the coal-mining towns of West Viriginia in order to uncover what
lies beyond the grand narrative of America. As she argues, there is a consistent story about
America as a nation, a set of expectations and attitudes of progress that are characteristic of

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Americans as people. And yet, there must be a space wherein the grand narrative collides with
the material realities of people who live in forgotten spaces in the mountains or by the side of the
road. Stewart maintains that these are spaces that are literally left behind, forgotten by grand
narratives of progress. These are the in-between spaces that come alive through the stories told
by the people inhabiting them. In her work, Stewart also attempts to articulate a theory of
culture. As she describes it, culture is “not an end, or a blueprint for thinking and acting, but a
constant beginning again- a search, an argument, an unfinished longing. The very effort to
imagine it, then, is itself a continuous effort to reopen stories, and spaces of cultural critique, that
are just as continuously being slammed shut with every new ‘solution’ to the problem of culture
and theory” (6). Stewart’s theory posits culture, not as a singular thing, but as a process
constituted through practice. In her study then, Stewart turns to people in order to understand
how their practices constitute the culture around them.
As I set up this project, like Stewart, I learned to suspend my theoretical understandings of
archives. It appeared to me that the grand narrative of “the Archive” had a tendency to assimilate
and overwhelm the messy materiality of archival spaces. In extant scholarship, “the Archive” is
not a physical place, but an attitude, a mindset of singularity that is bent upon accumulating
information regardless of cultural context. In these formulations of “the Archive,” information is
assimilated in order to create a vision of homogeneity: this, in turn, becomes a way of closing off
difference. While I do believe these theories of “the Archive,” I would also argue that this
conception is markedly different from material archives that house actual physical objects. The
notion of “the Archive” is a theory about cultural discourses: it traces how these discourses are
accumulated, manipulated and then deployed as knowledge. This kind of accumulation is
different from the collection practices of material archives. When we deploy theoretical

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conceptions of the Archive to understand physical archives, we risk the loss of materiality. Since
theoretical understandings of the Archive are so focused on abstractions such as “knowledge,”
what gets lost is the materiality of archival objects.
The grand theory of “the Archive” has become a general solution, an easy way to ignore
the ideological and material differences that lead to the creation of archival spaces. Grand
theories of the Archive, much like grand theories of Culture close off the possibility that different
formulations of archives and culture can and do exist. “The Archive” as a concept is not a
“blueprint” after which all archives are modeled: instead, archives are cultural repositories that
enact the specific rhetorics of the cultures that created them. As a researcher then, I wanted to get
at the messy materiality of archival spaces. Each archival space is different, embedded in
cultures and communities that are equally different. I also moved to a theory of archives as
material spaces housing physical objects (I discuss this further in Chapter 4: “Writing the
Archives”). I realized that understanding archives as material spaces necessitated approaching
archivists. I understood archivists as people whose material practices constitute and maintain
archives on a daily basis. Therefore, I decided to interview archivists about their lived
experiences within archival spaces.
Learning the Language: A Brief Note on Cross-Disciplinary Engagement:
Whilst setting up my research design for this project, I decided to use oral history as my
interview methodology. The two archivists who participated in this project were William Maher,
University Archivist at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Joan Nestle, Co-founder of
the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA), presently located in Brooklyn, New York. Each of these
archivists have worked in two markedly different types of archives with extremely different
missions and collection practices. While William Maher is a professionally trained archivist,

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Joan Nestle was a self-taught archivist. While William Maher is still active in his job and
profession, Joan Nestle no longer works at the LHA.
Even before I set up this project, I was cognizant that no two archivists’ experiences would
be the same. I was also incredibly nervous going into this project given that I am not an archivist
and did not have the appropriate language/vocabulary to begin my conversation with archivists.
Learning the practices and discourses of another field of study takes time, but given the time
constraints I was working under, I really did need to set up my interviews before I had learned
everything I needed. Cross- disciplinary engagement, however, is fraught with difficulties.
Researchers do need to pay attention to the language/vocabularly they use as they speak to
potential participants. One of the archivists I contacted very early on tersely reminded me that for
many decades archivists have had strong professional standards, practices and a code of ethics.
She also noted that archives are very close to libraries and emphasize access through physical
spaces and online presence. She added that archivists’ professional scholarship and narratives
emphasize the archival profession’s desire to document all aspects of history and remove barriers
to accessing that documentation. She also wondered if I was aware of the several decades of
scholarship on archives and archival work that were available to me online and in the library. It
is not that I was unaware of this work and it is not that I hadn’t been making an earnest attempt
to read as much of this scholarship as possible (it is hard to catch up on about five to seven
decades of scholarly discussions in the space of a few short months), but I think what this
interaction demonstrated to me was that I lacked the language to explain myself clearly to my
participants. But then again, this was another reason I wanted to speak to archivists: to learn their
vocabulary and to understand the specific theoretical and methodological lenses they use to
speak about their work. I found myself caught in a double bind of sorts: how to ask archivists to

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teach me about their work without taking on the role of an “expert” and yet be able to show that I
had some knowledge of their professional concerns?
As I have made it clear, I am not an archivist and it might take me months, if not years, of
immersion in the field of archival studies before I am able to position myself as an authority on
that field. No, instead my challenge was to find a way to communicate my questions in a way
that would demonstrate my discipline’s limited engagement with archival studies and also to find
a way to have those questions answered without seeming condescending or disingenuous.
Recruiting participants for this project was difficult because I found that I was double-guessing
myself, constantly over-analyzing all of the emails that I exchanged with archivists, trying to find
a way to articulate myself and my concerns without alienating anyone: this, I think, is one of the
hardest challenges of cross-disciplinary research: How to speak and listen across disciplinary and
cultural divides? How to be a respectful yet informed outsider?
When I started this project, I found an orientation to cross-disciplinary research through the
work of community researchers; I looked to the work of scholars such as Kathleen Stewart,
Jackie Jones Royster (1996), Julie Cruikshank (1990, 2000) and Greg Sarris (1993): I took my
cues from them as to how to approach communities and how to act with deference. These
scholars did not go into various communities hoping to “fix” problems or position themselves as
experts: instead they went in wanting to learn how individuals in these communities told stories
about who they are and how these stories stand in stark contrast to the narratives that are told
about them in popular and scholarly discourse. In other words, these scholars provided me with
an orientation, an attitude, an approach to doing community and cross-disciplinary research. I
cannot say that I have not made mistakes, but I remained steadfast in my initial goal: there are
grand narratives and orientations within our discipline about archives and archivists; I wanted to

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have conversations with archivists to understand how we can counter some of the lore about
archives and the archival profession within our discipline. I wanted to underscore the incredible
physical and intellectual labor of creating and maintaining archives.
I found myself stumbling a great deal. I think, however, this journey has taught me that
what I considered for so long a personal failing is in fact an disciplinary blind spot: one look at
our discipline’s publications and conference presentations on archives makes it clear that our
orientation to archival spaces and archival research comes from disciplines such as history,
anthropology, cultural studies etc. A look at the octalogs (1988, 1997, 2010) - three of the most
important conversations on history in our discipline - will show that we talk about archival
research as rhetorical historians. We have not looked to the contributions of archival profession
for some reason. I became curious to understand why this field has only existed in our peripheral
vision for so long. We like to talk about archives and have even started creating our own archives
and yet we haven’t fully sought out the expertise of archivists.
From “Archive” to “Archives”:
This move from “the archive” to “an archives” was one of my very first lessons during my field
research. Whenever I type the phrase “an archives”, a thin green squiggly line appears
underneath to reprimand me. Indeed, it feels odd, almost unnatural to juxtapose a preposition
used to denote singularity to a concept as heterogeneous as “archives.” And yet, as William
Maher, one of the archivists participating in this project has pointed out, it is common practice
among archivists to use the term “archives” as opposed to “archive” in the singular (1998).
While the term “archive” is quite common in academic circles, most North American archivists
prefer the term “archives” instead. Maher has written eloquently about how the term “archive”
has been co-opted in popular discourse, but there isn’t a clear understanding of what it means.

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“The Archive” has also become a buzz-word in a number of scholarly disciplines to refer to a
range of physical and digital repositories and databases. In these popular and scholarly
conceptions, “the archive” often refers to a singular collection of documents or ideas. It is
thought of as a purposeful collection: that is, documents are created and collected with the
express purpose of placing them in an archive. For instance, if we were to look at the Digital
Archive of Literacy Narratives, it is clear that they collect and create literacy narratives with the
sole intention of preserving them in the DALN.
However, most archivists hold that archives are collections of “accidental” but “unique3”
documents created during the day-to-day activities of an organization or a specific individual
(Maher 1998, Nesmith 2002). That is, archives don’t collect everything: they only collect papers
and artifacts that may have some future relevance to particular communities. And in regular
practice, not all organizations/people create documents daily with the knowledge that those
papers would end up in an archival space some day. Instead, a lot of the knowledge created by
people and organizations every day is in fact incidental to some other purpose. I am not writing
this dissertation in the hope that it will end up in an archives. I am writing it so that I can
graduate with my PhD. But there is a chance that in the future, an archivist may deem this
dissertation to have some value. It would be “unique” in the sense that it might offer evidence of
the way dissertations were written during this time period at Michigan State University. Or it
might offer evidence of some other activity to future generations of students and scholars. In
other words, most documents don’t always start out being “archival.”
Archives collect a variety of documents from various organizations and people: there is a
vast heterogeneity in terms of what ends up in an archival space. Even though the location of an
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3
Of course who decides what is “unique” is completely subjective.
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archives may be singular, their holdings certainly are not. So, in a sense the use of the phrase “an
archives” instead of “the archive” makes perfect sense to me. As I worked on this project, I had
to continually remind myself of this and train myself to say “an archives” over the more
homogenizing “the archive.” In truth, archives do closely cohere to the Foucauldian notion of
“heterotopia.” In a recent essay (2010), Knut Ove Eliassen points out that heterotopia is
a place that, as it differs from the spaces that surround it, suspends the established
schemata ordering the space-time order, and thus is experienced aesthetically
(Foucault 1994 4,752). Furthermore, it is the place to encounter the past in its
heterogeneity, an encounter that for Foucault remained aesthetic in the most literal
sense as a bodily experience, as a displacement of the self…4
Archives are experienced as places that are displaced. They are experienced as being somehow
outside of time even though they are in the business of organizing time. As Eivind Røssaak
(2010) explains, archives take materials from different time periods and organize these in space.
So literally, they take “slices of time” and turn them into multiple “spatial regimes.” Archives
“house” temporal regimes that are vastly different from our own. This kind of “disordered” time
is often felt rather than experienced intellectually. Archives create a sense of anxiety because
researchers are displaced both from the “normal” flow of time and also from those regimes of
thought that value intellect over emotion. Archives demand an emotional response from
researchers. They are at once singular and multiple.
I contend that in addition to experiencing archives as “outside” time or as timeless, there is
also a tendency to think of them as “outside culture” or as “acultural.” In a sense, archives are the
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4
Foucault clearly spent some time in archives. He writes about them viscerally, from the within
the archives. His theory of the archive is embedded in his material and emotional experiences
within these places. Eliassen notes the use of phrases such as “I shudder” and “I tremble” in
Foucault’s musings on archives.
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offspring of high modernity. The modern notion of archives, or at least the ones that arose in
Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries (Jenkinson 1922, De Certeau 1992, Stoler 2002, Steedman
2002) embodied a certain anxiety and a need to control memory: such modernist archives not
only turned time into space, they also turned archives into positivistic repositories that
supposedly represented the past as it happened. The authority of the archives could not be
touched. They were “neutral” sites, representing the authority and the power of the nation-state.
These archives supposedly occupied a space beyond the reach of cultural influences; they were
completely objective. This line of thinking is reflected in early texts about archival management
and administration. In this view, archivists were merely caretakers whose objectivity went
unquestioned. They did not influence archival materials in any way.
This view was first put forward by Sir Hilary Jenkinson – author of the monograph A
Manual of Archival Administration5. He maintained that “genuine archives ‘accumulate
naturally’” (Jenkinson as qtd. in Nesmith 2002). For Jenkinson, archives grew naturally, just like
any other organism. As he explained, “(archives) came together and reached their final
arrangement, by a natural process: are a growth you might say, as much an organism as a tree or
an animal.” (Nesmith 28). William Maher has pointed out that Jenkinson was writing at a time
when the allocation of space for archival purposes was not a political issue. He was also writing
a time when burgeoning records were not (yet) a problem. Jenkinson’s treatise and other
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5
Jenkinson’s 1922 text (a revised edition was published in 1937) was considered indispensable
at the time of its publication because it was the first manual on archival administration in the
English language (Maher 3). In this manual, Jenkinson also provides us with what might be one
of the earliest definition of archives: “A document which may be said to belong to the class of
Archives is one which was drawn up or used in the course of an administrative or executive
transaction (whether public or private) of which itself formed a part ; and subsequently
preserved in their own custody for their own in- formation by the person or persons responsible
for that transaction and their legitimate successors. To this Definition we may add a corollary.
Archives were not drawn up in the interest or for the information of Posterity” (11).
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scholarship that followed him also emphasized the need for the archivist to be impartial in their
appraisal and selection of records; the archivist was exhorted to take care, to not play the
historian, to “make his decisions free of the taint of ideological, political or personal bias”
(Grover as qtd. in Maher, 5). As Maher has pointed out, the pervasiveness of the Jenkinsonian
perspective is still evident: the code of ethics established by the Society of American Archvists
“uses… the words “impartial,” “objective,” “fair” or “balanced” at least ten times, and implies
the concept of neutrality and balance throughout.” (7).
Jenkinson was a firm proponent of archival non-intervention: as Maher has explained,
Jenkinson proposed that the integrity of an archives depended on the establishment “an
unblemished line of responsible custodians [emphasis in original]”. In fact, Jenkinson believed
that archival records possessed an “inherent impartiality” (Maher 2010); if the archivist made
decisions about what to include or exclude, this would immediately make the records suspect. It
would cast doubt on the records’ ability to tell the “truth.” Additionally, Jenkinson also proposed
that it would be best if the archivist “adopted a strategy of self-effacement in their professional
principles and discourse” (Nesmith 2002). While the archivist could be a student of history,
he/she must pursue this kind of study in their “off” hours. The archivist’s main task was to tread
lightly around other scholars and to ensure that he/she did not deliberately tread on anybody’s
toes. In a nutshell, the archivist was to be seen and heard minimally.
Clearly, the Jenkinsonian perspective was entrenched in a positivistic view of history; it
presupposed that with minimal inference or rather, with no interference at all, the past could be
known as it was. While a great deal of concrete archival practice stems from similar positivistic
views, Brothman (1999) has argued archival practices such as appraisal, arrangement and
description are not neutral even though they are presented as such; Heather MacNeil (2005) has

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also pointed out that even common archival texts such as finding aids are socio-historical
constructs and these are built for particular purposes and for very particular audiences; these
concepts and texts are inherently cultural even though they often espouse the stance of
objectivity and neutrality.
While Hilary Jenkinson stoutly believed that it was not the archivist’s job to throw things
away, this view has naturally come under fire given the massive amounts of records that are
produced on a daily basis by individuals, organization and communities. In fact, Theodore
Schellenberg, author of Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques (originally published in
1956) was a major proponent of archival appraisal; Reto Tschan (2002) has argued that in some
ways, Schellenberg’s book was written as a rebuttal to Jenkinson’s work (179). For
Schellenberg, the archivist was primarily an appraiser. He saw the archivist as “an
interventionist, selecting documents for preservation and working closely with records managers
and current records” (Tschan 187). Schellenberg also argued that the archivist selected
administrative documents for future scholarly use (Tschan 186). Both of these views on appraisal
have been reassessed by archivists in recent decades, but the idea of the archivist as selector and
appraiser of records endures. Recent conversations on appraisal seem to indicate that records are
“accessioned6” not based on some inherent value, but in their ability to tell us more about other

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6
Accessioning is the formal process by which an archives takes “legal and physical custody of a
group of records” (Pearce-Moses 2005). Accessioning does not just mean “acquisition.” Instead
it is the process by which records are formally documented and codified as part of an archival
collection. This might include “entering brief information about those materials in a register,
database, or other log of the repository's holdings” (n.p.) On the other hand, “deaccessioning” is
the process by which records are permanently removed from a repository’s holding. This
happens because a record has been reappraised and deemed unsuitable for preservation or it has
decomposed and is beyond repair. Alternately records may be moved to other repositories and
thus may be subject to deaccessioning. Records may also be deaccessioned if an archival space
changes its collection policies and finds that “the material is no longer within its scope.” (n.p.)
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records and about the organization or individual that created them. As Gerald Ham (1993) has
explained:
“There are five analyses that make up the basic tools archivists need in their appraisal kits
to identify and select records of enduring value. These are an analysis: of a record's
functional characteristics – who made the record and for what purpose; of the information
in the record to determine its significance and quality; of the record in the context of
parallel or related documentary sources; of the potential uses that are likely to be made of
the record and the physical, legal, and intellectual limitations on access; of the cost of
preserving the record weighed against the benefit of retaining the information” (51).
Conversations on appraisal are ongoing and still remain a point of conflict, but it is important to
remember that archives exclude or destroy as many records as they choose to keep or preserve.
This process of inclusion/exclusion is often motivated by the particular goals and mandates of
the archives itself: in composing an archival space through records, archivist often have to keep
the archives’ purpose, context and audience in mind. Additionally, if an archival record is
deemed to have outlasted its value, it may be “deaccessioned.” So records do not necessarily
remain “archival” for the rest of their days.
As I worked on this project, one of my other lessons was becoming familiar with the
archives as memory versus archives as evidence debate (Greene 2002, Maher 1998). In fact,
archivists understand themselves as “evidence professionals” whose area of expertise is the
preservation of materials of the past. As I have already pointed out, archives collect materials
that were produced as a result of various day-to-day activities. These archival materials then
work as evidence of particular actions that were carried out by human beings in the past. Indeed,
one of the earliest function of archives was to help with issues of governance: the Greek

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arkehion (from which the word archive is derived) was a civil servant, a bureaucrat, whose task
was to maintain important state documents at his residence. It was his duty to pull out these
documents in case there was a dispute of some kind and the documents could serve as evidence
for the state at that time. So, even the earliest archives were not so much invested in preserving
all cultural memories, but only those memories that might be of some use to the state at a later
time. If archives work as evidence of particular activities, what counts as “important” or
“unique” is entirely subjective and depends on the attitudes and values of the cultures that
created them. Additionally, regardless of whether they are thought of as memory or evidence, the
point I want to underscore here is that archives are constituted through an extremely selective
process of appraisal.
Oral History as a Site of Shared Authority:
As I have already mentioned, I was trying to understand archivists’ lived experiences in
relation to the archives wherein they do their work on a daily basis. I understand “lived
experience” as understandings garnered from a subject’s long-term interactions within a
particular culture. Lived experiences are often delivered in a narrativized form; the narrator acts
as the protagonist and sets the tone and purpose for the narrative. Lived experiences are
necessarily complex and contradictory but focusing on these narratives allows us to understand
how subjects articulate agency and negotiate differentials of power and privilege in their every
day lives. Such research also prompts the researcher to reflect on her own location and
positionality, especially as she tries to interview, interpret and write about the experiences of her
research participants.
Dana Collins (2102) has recently pointed out that turning towards lived experiences might help
counter imperialistic research practices that “deny subjectivity and render invisible the agency of

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those constituted through exoticism” (52). She theorizes the notion of “limited location” to argue
that all research is “conducted from a standpoint of social positioning” (50). The researcher’s
perspective is always limited, never comprehensive. Given these limitations, it is often only too
easy for researchers to objectify, exoticize and distance ourselves from our research participants.
Such research practices multiply the distance between the researcher and the researched, creating
suspicion and distrust. Collins argues researcher should “(keep) epistemology open” to “the
contribution of lived experiences.” (52) This might create “a shift in representation” for those
who are spoken for and silenced, especially within research epistemologies that do not look to
lived experiences as valuable (52).
I believe our research sites are infused with unequal relations of power. I am specifically
referring to the unequal distributions of power between researchers and their participants. As
Collins points out, research is an invasive process. In most research situations, the researcher has
more power because she is the one “in charge.” As a researcher, I am well aware of my
participation in the problematic and colonizing discourses engendered by academic research.
Additionally, lived experience research is as much about the researcher as it is about her
participants. The researcher brings her own desires and differences to the research situation
which may overwhelm the narratives of her participants. As such, I believe that when it comes to
lived experience research, the researcher and her particpants must assume a stance of “shared
authority” (Yow 2005) wherein both their desires and differences are accounted for and
addressed. I borrow the concept of “shared authority” from the work of feminist and indigenous
historiographers (Cruikshank 1990, Sarris 1993, Monberg 2008) who have argued that lived
experience research needs to be a reciprocal process wherein both the researcher and her
participants contribute to the meaning- making process.

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As I was looking for an “in-depth” view of archivists’ experiences, oral history
methodologies offered a sound framework for collecting data about their lived experiences (Yow
2005, Ritchie 2003). Oral historians consider narrativized lived experiences to be rich resources
that can tell us a great deal about how people construct meaning and make sense of their lives.
Such narratives also allow us to understand “how culture influences individuals’ interpretations
of experience” (Yow 17). When I use the term narrative here, I am referring to strategies that
people use in order to organize their experience. Such strategies involve positing beginnings,
middles and endings for particular lived experiences, even if these categories are created and
abitrary. A narrative strategy, for me, is any attempt made by a subject to make sense of his or
her experiences through stories. An oral history approach presupposes that an individual is
always embedded in a particular set of political and socio-economic structures: it looks to
narratives of lived experiences in order to determine how individuals interacted with these
structures and articulated a sense of identity for themselves. Most importantly, oral historians
consider narrative itself to be a meaningful form of data. They looks to narratives as rich
evidence of a person’s life; such narratives are just as important as archival records since they
can teach us a great deal about particular historical periods.
In oral history research, the concept of shared authority is not without precedent. Whilst
describing her oral history research amongst native women in Northern Canada, Julie
Cruikshank (1990) writes: “Instead of working from the conventional formula in which an
outside investigator initiates and controls the research, [Cruikshank’s work] depends on ongoing
collaboration between interviewer and interviewee. Such a model begins by taking seriously
what people say about their lives rather than treating their words simply as an illustration of
some other process” (1). Cruikshank also points out that narrators of oral histories usually have

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agendas that are just as important as those of the researcher’s. In fact, people often agree to
participate in interview project because they have something important to say or teach about their
lives. Therefore, such interviews need to find a balance to address the needs of both parties.
Instead of taking charge of the interview, the researcher should remain open to her participants’
world-view and should be willing to share her authority. A too rigid line of questioning may in
fact shut conversation down instead of creating more openings for the emergence of different
kinds of knowledge.
For instance, in advance of my interview with Joan Nestle and Willam Maher, I sent both
participants a preliminary interview guide over email containing questions that I wished to
discuss with them. My questions mostly pertained to their work within their respective archives.
Maher wrote back to me almost immediately and shared a paper that he had presented some time
ago on the notion of archives and objectivity (which was one of the topics I had included in my
interview guide). Reading his views on this topic helped me narrow and reframe my questions
considerably. During our interview I was able to discuss the topic with him with a level of
specificity that might not have been possible if he had not guided me earlier. Once Joan had had
the opportunity to peruse the questions in my interview guide, she wrote me back to let me know
that she was a bit tired of answering questions about the LHA, especially since she had already
extensively written about it in her published works. Instead, she said she would like to discuss
her ideas about archives in general, especially since these ideas had changed with the passage of
time. I saw this, as a moment, in which Joan had created her own agenda for our conversation.
While this was not a problem for me, it taught me about the need to keep my research design
open. It also became clear to me that seeing the interview as more of a shared process would be
more productive for me and the archivists.

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The concept of shared authority also asks researchers to adopt a more vulnerable stance, to
acknowledge their own limited locations. As Greg Sarris puts it: “How do scholars see beyond
the norms they use to frame the experiences of others unless those norms are interrupted and
exposed so that scholars are vulnerable, seeing what they believe as possibly wrong, or at least
limited?” In Sarris’ case, he discovers the limits of his own knowledge, as he works to record the
lived experiences of his aunt, Mabel McKay. As an academic, Sarris chronicles his effort to
“explain” Mabel’s life experiences through a masculine, academic lens. However, Mabel
constantly resists his efforts at such classification, forever complicating his pre-determined
categories. She disrupts his efforts to provide easy explanations for her lived experiences and
instead helps him see that things are not always what they seem. Sarris finds that once he let go
of his need to impose preconceived explanations on Mabel’s stories, he became much more open
to the lessons she tried to convey. And he also finds that once he gives Mabel the space to tell
her stories in the way that she wants, their interaction became less of a struggle. For Sarris,
giving up his academic authority in favor of a more shared dynamic allows him to better
understand Mabel’s lived experiences. Sarris advocates a more dialogic mode of interviewing
wherein the voices of interviewer and participant do not work in opposition to each other, but
more as “different voices capable of communicating and informing one another” (7).
In my case, given my own “limited location,” the temptation to “categorize” my
participants and their experiences was overwhelming: for instance, during my interview
with Joan Nestle, I was constantly tempted to classify her as an “archivist” because I was
specifically interested in her work within the Lesbian Herstory Archives. However, as Joan
emphasized at one point during our interview, her “writing and (her) archival work are one and
the same” (2011). She constantly resisted my pre-conceived categories about her life and her

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work. Given the way Joan talked about her life experiences, I found it hard to classify her
experiences: I found that I could not separate the archivist from the activist, the teacher from the
historian, the theorist from the human being. Listening to lived experiences is a messy process
that necessitates an openness in our research design and epistemology. Lived experiences often
resist easy categorizations since our participants’ lives are messy and their various roles and
histories often inform one another. In Joan’s case, it soon became apparent to me that her
personal life constantly rubbed against her professional life as an archivist, writer, theorist and
activist. These various roles did not work in opposition to one another, but informed each other
and Joan continually drew upon all of them to inform our conversation during the interview.
During my interview with both Joan Nestle and William Maher, I was comfortable asking
them questions about things that I was unsure of or that I was not familiar with. Instead of
presenting myself as a researcher who had all the answers, I let the archivists set the tone and
pace for the interview. I asked them questions based on the responses they gave me instead of
having a rigid set of questions prepared beforehand. I listened closely to their voices and let them
teach me about their experiences as archivists.
Locating an Interpretive Methodology for Lived Experiences:
Oral history methodologies presuppose the existence of a narrator who speaks and a
researcher who listens (Monberg 2008). Given the constraints of time and finances, I was unable
to speak with Joan Nestle in person. I currently live in East Lansing, Michigan, while she resides
in Melbourne, Australia with her partner, Diane Otto. Instead, we set up our interview over
Skype. Since Joan’s webcam did not work at that time, our conversation was entirely audiobased (Joan gave me permission to record our interview). While this is clearly not an ideal
situation, our conversation was not too constrained. We spoke for close to two hours about

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Joan’s life with the Lesbian Herstory Archives. With William Maher, while I was able to
interview him in person, I could only audio-record our conversation. Given that I could not
depend on visual cues to interpret our conversation, I had to entirely rely on a methodology of
listening (Powell 2002, Royster 1996, Ratcliffe 2006, Monberg 2008) in order to make sense of
my conversations with the archivists. In practice, I understand listening as a recursive process
that requires complete immersion in one’s data: for me, listening is not just about reading and
analyzing transcripts from an interview, but listening to participants’ voices over and over again.
Such a form of listening involves being familiar with the nuances of participants’ voices; it
involves paying close attention to the ways in which they frame their ideas. Listening as a
methodology also complimented my focus on lived experiences because it acknowledges that
participants’ voices are authoritative and as important as that of any other writer or theorist.
Additionally, listening as a methodology is particular useful because it requires that researchers
look beyond published texts. Often when a research participant is a prolific writer like my both
of my participants, it is very easy to make assumptions about their lives based on their published
writing. However, during interviews, participants can often offer perspectives that are quite
different from the researchers’ initial assumptions.
For instance, before I interviewed Joan Nestle, I knew of her as a famous activist- feminist
who had contributed a great deal to conversations on gender and sexuality. I had always assumed
that her activism was rooted in her feminism. However, when I asked Joan to speak at length
about the emotional and physical labor of being a grassroots archivist and activist, she explained
that one of her main reasons for starting the LHA was to commemorate the women she had come
out to in the 1950s. As she put it:
“it was my body’s way of saying thank you and something I haven’t – and you haven’t

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asked me this, but you say the kinds of labor – I am a lesbian, not as Lillian Faderman said,
because of my feminist principles. I am lesbian because I wanted – and I am going to say
this – I wanted to be fucked by a woman. And that sexual desire is behind everything that I
did. It was what led me to go into those dark streets, to places where women were not
supposed to be, to wake up in bedrooms not remembering how I got there, but enjoying
what had happened and all the other things. So the first labor is one of a passion, a passion
to hold the doors of history open for a loved community to slip in, who had given me, to
this young woman, my first taste, who had touched me, they touched me, they touched my
body, they spread my legs, also touched my imagination and I have written about them, so
this is where my writing and my archival work are one and the same.”
Joan has written extensively about her encounters in working class bars as a young woman.
Particularly, in her essay, “The Bathroom Line” (1987) she details her experiences at The Sea
Colony: a working-class lesbian bar in New York City. She explains how the women in the bars
were monitored and kept under close watch by the police. They were forbidden from dancing
together, “a crime for which [they] could be arrested” (38). So, when Joan “passed the border
into the safe lands of lesbian feminism and gay liberation,” she was intent upon recovering the
stories of the women she had met in those bars, who had created a safe space for her as a young
lesbian (2011). For Joan, her desire was a central motivator that led to the creation of the Lesbian
Herstory Archives. The archives would be a place where one’s sexual desires would not be a
matter of shame. Instead, the archives would grant women a place to openly explore those
desires and share them with women both in the present and in the past. So much of Joan’s life as
an activist and archivist was invested in her identity as a woman who desired and loved other
women. These physical and emotional longings dictated her sense of identity and responsibility

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towards the lesbian community. Joan’s feminism therefore is rooted in her desires and not viceversa. With such a brief explanation, Joan powerfully re-framed my understanding of who she
was and how her desires became the impetus for the inception of the LHA. Such a nuanced
understanding of Joan’s identity and experience would have been lost to me if I had not listened
to her voice over and over again.
As an academic, I am conscious of my imbrication in colonizing discourses: academic
research, after all, can turn research participants into passive “others” who are talked about, but
are not allowed to talk back (Tuhiwai-Smith 2006). Researchers who write about their
experiences in the field often allow their own interpretive frames to occlude participants’ ways of
making meaning; by virtue of the researcher’s privilege, her interpretation is held up as more
valid than that of her participant’s. However, listening as an interpretive methodology
presupposes a research participant who has something to teach the researcher: it demands that the
researcher adopt stance of humility and shared authority. Even when my interview with Joan and
Maher had “ended,” I still listened to the recordings as a space of shared knowledge. I
approached the interview not as an authoritative researcher, but more as a learner whose
knowledge about archives was not comprehensive. Listening asks researchers to give up the
myth of comprehensive knowledge and instead become aware of the various limitations that
might mediate their understanding of their participants’ lives.
Finally, as a straight woman, I am profoundly aware of the way in which my own
histories (both personal and academic) could impact the way in which I heard and interpreted
Joan Nestle’s lived experiences. My experiences as a straight woman grant me a great deal of
institutional and cultural privilege: during the interview itself, I did not tell Joan about my sexual
orientation. Nor did she ask me for this information. I felt uncomfortable not revealing this

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information during the interview: given that Joan was so open with me about her life, I felt that I
was withholding vital information about myself from her and that this was somehow dishonest.
Yet there was never a moment for me to come out as a straight woman during our conversation.
(A few months after our interview, I did send Joan a preliminary version of an article about the
LHA that I intended to publish wherein I was open about my sexual orientation. While
retroactive, I felt that this move still created a much more honest space for our interactions.)
Later, as I listened to our interview transcript, I was aware that I might distort the information
Joan had shared with me. While I transcribed the interview, I had to find a way to look beyond
my privilege (as a straight woman and as an academic) and still account for it. In other words, I
had to account for the differences in interpretation that my own differences created (Reay qtd. in
Archer 2002). For me, being straight meant that I had to be very careful while I wrote about Joan
Nestle. While paraphrasing her words and ideas, I had to be very conscious of my language
because I was afraid I would be extracting power and meaning from the stories Joan shared with
me. So I made the commitment to not “clean up” the interview transcript or remove the pauses
and repetitions in Joan’s responses as I wrote. I made a similar decision regarding the transcripts
that emerged out of my interview with William Maher.
Defining Rhetorics, Culture and Archives:
In his introduction to A Glossary of Archival Records and Terminology (2005), Richard
Pearce-Moses states:
“Archivists have often been seen as custodians of the past. We are seen as the keepers of
old things. While we will remain the custodians of old records, we must change our
emphasis from the preservation of culture as a thing of the past. We must become
advocates for future users of current information by ensuring the transmission of culture.

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What of the present needs to be remembered for future users? I believe that our
knowledge of what has enduring value and of how researchers use materials is our
distinguishing expertise. It is that knowledge that can enable us to help records creators
know when to commit intentional acts of memory, to know what to save. To do that, we
must be able to speak clearly” (n.p).
This introduction manifests a tension that has been brewing in archival circles for the past three
decades: the role of language in the creation of the past and the realization that the past can only
be known through language. In some ways, this is an anxiety that archivists must constantly
negotiate as they put together and describe archival records. It also highlights the fact that the
archivist cannot remain “neutral” since he/she creates archival spaces through language.
Given that this project is located at the intersection of Archive Studies and Rhetoric and
Composition, my task was to articulate an understanding of archives that made sense to both
fields of study. Given the various understandings of archives, I didn’t want to articulate an
understanding that was one-dimensional. Archives are simultaneously a place for research, a
collection of documents, keepers of cultural memory and repositories of socio-political power.
They are extremely complex sites that simply cannot be reduced to a single “definition”. So my
working definition of archives is derived from the ideas articulated by Tom Nesmith (1999). He
writes:
An archives is an ongoing mediation of understanding of records (and thus phenomena),
or that aspect of record making which shapes this understanding through such functions
as records appraisal, processing, and description, and the implementation of processes for
making records accessible” (145).
For Nesmith, archives are “created” entirely through communication processes, which include

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writing. While archival records are material objects, they are re-presented through material
practices such as appraisal, description, processing etc. So Nesmith’s definition presents archives
as a process - created through language. Archives are always being mediated through language
(and writing) to become meaningful to others. Such a definition of archives also highlights the
political aspect of their existence: given that they are created through various communicative
processes, it is clear that there is always a sense of deliberation in the making of archives. This
deliberative process is always rhetorical and always embedded in a particular cultural context.
This brings me to my working definitions of culture and rhetoric: I understand rhetoric as
always already cultural and vice versa. (Haas 2008). In the context of this project, I think of
rhetoric as a culturally-mediated process of deliberation. That is, rhetoric is the deliberate
process of making choices in order to make meaning and to represent oneself or one’s culture. I
understand culture as a complex discursive system of attitudes, practices and beliefs. These
attitudes, practices and beliefs organize people’s actions. Culture is constituted of people; it is
always messy and contradictory. Culture cannot necessarily be “pinned down” or understood as
singular thing (Cruikshank 1990, Stewart 1996, Lowe 1996). Instead, culture is a process: people
deploy cultural attitudes, practices and beliefs to make sense of the world. This sense/meaningmaking process in turn constitutes rhetoric. Additionally, cultural attitudes and practices are not
immutable: given that people can deploy these practices and attitudes in any number of
combinations means that these are always subject to change, depending on people’s needs.
Hence culture is rhetorical.
I understand that I am articulating a version of the chicken and egg theory here: I cannot
tell you if culture or rhetoric came first. I can only assert that they work together. We cannot
make sense of cultural attitudes and practices without some kind of rhetorical framework already

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in place. And all rhetorical frameworks are always already cultural. We do not exist outside
culture or rhetoric. In the context of this project, I understand archives as rhetorical because they
are constituted through language (which is one of the discursive practices that helps organize
cultures). Given that archives depend on language, they enact, reproduce and authorize the
rhetorics of the cultures that created them. As such, archives are always cultural. They cannot
exist outside cultural formations.
A Map to this Dissertation:
There are five chapters in this dissertation. At the end, readers will find a short “postscript”
that sums up the important implications and contributions of this work. In the next few chapters,
I consistently turn towards archives as material spaces and take a close look at the material
practices (such as description, digitization etc) that constitute archives. I argue that all these
material practices are cultural. As such, they reflect the attitudes and values of the cultures that
created them. However, before I turn to the material practices, I also look at the materiality of
archives themselves. I describe particular archival spaces in detail including their plan and
design. I argue that the design of archival spaces is rhetorical and each of these spaces is
different, intended for a diverse range of scholars and designers.
In Chapter 1, “Precursor: How I got to the Archives” I have developed a theoretical and
methodological framework for studying archives as institutions that enact the 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 the materials in their
care; 4) Archives are material spaces that bear very little resemblance to the metaphorical notions

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of “The Archive” developed by theorists such as Thomas Richards, Diana Taylor, Michel
Foucault etc. In this chapter, I have also described the methods I used to understand how
archivists make choices about what to include in their collections. These methods include oral
history interviews with archivists and rhetorical analyses of archival catalogs and finding aids.
In Chapter 2, “We Are What We (Don’t) Keep: Archives, Rhetoric and Identity,” I
demonstrate how the creation of archives is intimately tied to cultural or communal identities.
The choice to keep or exclude particular materials of memory is mediated by identity politics. I
also point out that the constitution of identities in the context of archives is a tautological
process: communities preserve materials that are intimately linked to their identities; these
materials in turn continue to sustain the identities that communities wish to preserve. In this way,
archives sustain communal identities and vice-versa. In this chapter, I also include excerpts from
my oral history interviews with two archivists in order to theorize how archives emerge out of
specific cultural and rhetorical exigencies: archives gather contextual evidence that may be used
to create arguments about the histories of specific communities. Archives are maintained through
a series of culturally-situated practices; these practices emerge out of a given community’s
experiences in the world.
In Chapter 3, “From Metaphor to Materiality: The Rhetoricity of Archival spaces,” I move
away from the notion of archive as metaphor; instead, I point out how archives are materials
spaces deliberately designed to draw in particular audiences and encourage community
engagement. I argue that thinking about archives as a singular, undifferentiated mass of
documents and/or “knowledge” obscures the complex set of arrangement and descriptive
practices that help create archives. It also effaces the careful planning and arrangement that goes
into the creation of archival spaces. In this chapter, I move consistently from metaphor to

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materiality, to reinstate the material processes that allow archivists to make meaning. I take a
closer look at archival spaces – specifically, the space of the university archives in UrbanaChampaign and the space of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York. I argue that
these spaces are not accidental; instead, they are material and have a rhetoricity that allows them
to reach out to particular audiences. In general, I pay attention to the questions of architecture
and design that allow spaces to function as archives. Additionally, I take a closer look at how
being within the above archival spaces affected my body and moderated how I acted in these
spaces. I will argue that such bodily effects/affects are the product of the design and architecture
of archives.
In Chapter 4, “Writing the Archives: Context, Materiality, Culture,” I pay attention to the
way in which finding aids create identities and narratives about archival collections. 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 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.
Researchers often consult finding aids before delving into archival collections. Finding aids
frame researchers’ knowledge of archival collections since they provide contextual information
about how and where records were produced. As such, the composition of archival finding aids
has a material effect on researchers’ work within archives. 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. As such, these communities are re-defining western

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notions of context.
In Chapter 5, “Moving beyond the Illuminated Screen: Asserting the Materiality of
Digitized Records,” 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 a 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.
In “Afterword and Implications,” 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). This chapter
also synthesizes findings from my dissertation and sketches out future publications and projects
that will emerge from this work.

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CHAPTER 2
WE ARE WHAT WE (DON’T) KEEP
ARCHIVES, RHETORIC AND IDENTITY
It’s early on a Sunday Morning in April. I am reading an email from my friend, J: she has
invited me to brunch at her house the following week. I quickly type an email in response,
expressing my regrets for being unable to attend. I hit “send.” Once the email has gone out, I
select the original message again and hit the “archive” function. Immediately, I receive a
notification informing that my email conversation with J has been “archived.”
The above scenario is probably familiar to a lot of people. Each day, we receive emails that are
consigned to the “archives” with a simple click of a button. This allows us to maintain some
modicum of control over the flood of information that confronts us every day. In a sense,
archives are about asserting order and control (or rather the desire to assert control and order):
they allow us to shore up certain versions of the past without letting that past overwhelm the
present or the future. They also allow us to create narratives about who we are, where we have
been and where we plan to go. Archives, in other words, are useful. And yet, when I reflect on
the experience of “archiving” my emails on a daily basis, I wonder what it means to reduce the
term “archive” to a mere function, or rather to the mere click of a button: how does this produce
a one-dimensional picture of what it means to “do” archives? What does it mean to reduce an
entire professional apparatus of appraisal, arrangement and preservation to a simple function? In
other words, how do such daily acts of “casual archiving” de-value the work that archivists
perform in material archives on a daily basis?
As I drafted this chapter, I came across a recent two-part piece (in Enculturation and
Technoculture) by Jonathan Alexander and Jackie Rhodes (2012). In this piece titled “Queer
Rhetoric and the Pleasure of the Archive,” the authors “attempt both to perform a queer

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rhetorical archive and to theorize such archives’ rhetorical and pedagogical possibilities. At a
time when “information” and “data” about the “queer” are readily accessible, [the authors]
wonder about the challenges of making such information and data meaningful” (n.p.). Drawing
on Ann Cvetkovich’s ideas about queer archives and trauma, the authors argue that
“that the concomitant significance of ethos and pathos to the rhetorical performance on
queer rhetorical practices may have much to do with the fact that such practices often
present us with actual individuals or groups, not just with minds articulating a sense of
the queer but also with bodies performing queerness. As such, the online queer archive
offers us a nearly unprecedented opportunity to think the body in rhetorical practice—and
in this case, the queer body in queer rhetorical practice” (n.p.)
They go on to present us with a “a mini-archive that queers dominant rhetorical practice in public
spaces” (n.p.). The authors trace the presence of queer voices in places where such voices are
ostensibly deemed to be “silent” or “absent,” and assert that a rich archive of queer rhetorical
voices does exist in public discourse.
Alexander and Rhodes seem to be looking at a discursive queer archive. Such discursive
archives can also be found in the work of theorists such as Derrida (1996), Richards (1996),
Foucault (1978) etc. I agree with these authors that such discursive archives have a profound
effect on bodies and on practices. They dictate what can be said and they have a profound effect
on what counts as knowledge and who can create knowledge. Indeed, such discursive archives
are everywhere. If Foucault, Freud and Derrida have taught us anything, it is that such archives
cannot be escaped, but they often leave openings wherein silent or absented voices may be able
to insinuate themselves and assert their physical presence.

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Indeed, I don’t want to claim that such discursive or theoretical archives have nothing to
do with the way concrete, physical archives are assembled. After all, physical archives are
particular articulations of knowledge that arise at particular moments in time. They are products
of time and space: depending on when and where they were created, they reflect the regional and
temporal biases, but this does not mean that most archives do not constantly revise their
collection practices in order to reflect a more rounded representation of our times. What I have
gathered is that a good archives never stops collecting; or as an archivist once put it, a good
archives never has enough space. To stop collecting, to deem an end point to a collection is
antithetical to the way archives operate. To create an ending would mean to ignore knowledge
that is being generated all the time. If as Burton maintains, physical archives produce speech and
speech effects, then both of those elements would have to be constantly revised for archival
spaces to survive. Without such revision, archival spaces would remain arhetorical constructions,
reflecting the knowledge and the biases of a former period in time and space.
The point I am trying to underscore here is that the discursive archive that the above
authors speak of and the concrete, physical archives that I am tracing in this dissertation are not
the same. They are different orientations to building knowledge. Indeed, I will hold that while
discursive archives seem to want to assimilate and homgenize all knowledge, concrete archives
are about accumulation: the slow building up of certain culturally-relevant knowledges in the
form of physical documents and artifacts over a long period of time. As I have already stated, I
am not naïve about the fact that discursive archives have an effect on what we can say and do
and physical archives are put together by people who are co-opted by discursive archives: they
bring particular biases and knowledge regimes to their work within archival spaces. But there is a
theory and a science to putting together physical archives that is grounded in particular

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institutional, professional and communal experiences that cannot be simply equated to the
makings of discursive archives. Such equation leeches physical archives of their specificity and
rhetoricity since these are culturally-situated constructions. It also has the effect of ignoring the
materiality of such spaces, the bodies that put them together and the documents/artifacts that
literally hold such physical archives together.
The phrases that I want to underscore here are culturally-relevant, rhetoricity, specificity
and materiality. These elements are lost when we talk about the queer archive or simply the
archive. The above elements are also lost when we turn to theorists such as Derrida, or Richards
to validate our ideas about what archives; these theorists are not looking at physical archives in
all their cultural and rhetorical specificity. They cannot tell us how archival spaces work on an
every day basis. The greater purpose of this project is to reorient us towards physical archives as
material constructs and at the archivist as a real material presence who works everyday within
archival spaces to reassert its cultural specificity and rhetoricity. As rhetoricians, we study how
documents and artifacts are composed to communicate culturally-relevant knowledges across
time and space. Archivists can teach us a great deal about such composition since their work is
inherently rhetorical.
The Archives Versus Archives debate:
If we were to listen to Derrida, he would have us believe that archives are always about
grand constructs such as the law, narrative, access, authority, privilege, power and singularity. In
the introduction to his Archive Fever, Derrida takes us back (and away from the physical
archives themselves) to the root of the word “archive”: he evokes images of the Greek arkhe
(power of commencement and commandment) and the arkheion (keeper of the archive). In the
story he crafts for us, Derrida shows us how the archive has historically been a project of the

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state, curated by a state-appointed official whose task it was to create a singular narrative about
the state. Only select people are given access to the archive. Knowledge is always a by-product
of the power of the state and the state employs the archive repeatedly to constitute individuals as
subjects of power.
I am not trying to dispute the validity of these ideas; indeed I am not trying to say that
archives have not been employed as repressive mechanisms of discipline and power by various
institutions. Over the past couple of decades, narratives about the alienating and disciplining
aspects of archives have proliferated. Within of the fields of English Studies, History, Rhetoric
and Composition, scholars have tried to reimagine how they think and talk about archives. If we
were to read edited collections such as Antoinette Burton’s Archive Stories (2005) or Kirsch and
Rohan’s (2008) Beyond the Archives, we would encounter plenty of narratives about the
importance of looking for sources outside archives and looking for alternate ways to do archival
research in order to encounter narratives that might remain occluded otherwise. A common point
underscored by most of these writers is well-encapsulated by Burton when she writes: “Archives
are already stories: they produce speech and especially speech effects, of which history is but
one” (20). And yet, I would argue that authors such as Burton and Derrida are talking about very
different kinds of archives: their ideas are embedded in theoretical notions of “the archive.” It is
ironic that while so many of these authors are doing their work within material archives, their
writing is informed by a consistent tendency to make these material archives abstract and
metaphorical. The metaphor of the archive holds the promise of a kind of power that is missing
from the mundane reality of more concrete archives. But I wonder what may be achieved by
consistently turning to the material reality of archives? What knowledge might we gain by
paying attention to the concrete practices (such as appraisal, arrangement, description) that

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allows a place to turn into an archival space? And how do such practices allow archives to make
arguments about the historical presence and visibility of particular communities?
I argue that archives are not just stories. Instead, archives are culturally-situated
arguments. In other words, they are rhetorical. Archives emerge out of specific cultural and
rhetorical exigencies: they gather contextual evidence that may be used to create arguments
about specific communities. How archives are put together and sustained over time depends on a
series of a culturally-situated practices; these practices emerge out of a given community’s
experiences in the world. Additionally, all archives are different: they enact, reproduce and
authorize rhetorics that are always cultural.
In the next few pages, I analyze data from my interviews with two archivists; I will use
this data to critically interrogate some of the “universalizing” language that is commonly used to
represent archives in contemporary scholarship (especially scholarship out of English,
Performance Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, History etc). I will try to understand how this
universalizing language tends to extract archives from their cultural-rhetorical context and situate
them in a realm that is somehow outside of culture. Next, I will argue that all archives emerge
out of specific cultural and rhetorical exigencies and these exigencies dictate how archives will
be managed, and how access to these spaces will be mediated. For instance, a university archives
is very different from a community-based archives because both these spaces emerge out of the
needs of very different groups. Decisions about the management of archival spaces depends on
the common experiences and practices of the groups who helped create these spaces. So in a
sense, the theory and management of archival spaces are intrinsically linked to group identities
and experiences.

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Lastly, I use the space of this chapter to contest some of the claims of homogeneity that
are often deployed against archives. Instead, I claim that these spaces are heterogeneous and full
of narratives that contest and contradict each other. I recount some stories that my participants
shared with me in order to demonstrate how archivists often have to “step out” and present
alternative narratives that contest the homogeneous narratives about their
institution/communities. I argue that archivists sometimes function as activists whose task it is to
set the record straight even in the face of pressures from their institutions and communities.
On Archives, Rhetoric and Identity:
The notion that archives are rhetorical is not new within rhetoric studies. In 2006, the
journal, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, invited its writers to reflect on “The Archival Turn in
Rhetorical Studies; Or, the Archive’s Rhetorical (Re)Turn.” Charles Morris, the editor of the
issue, points out that “the archive itself, chief among the inventional sites of rhetorical pasts, has
yet to be subjected to sustained critical-rhetorical reflection by scholars in this discipline” (113).
Morris asserts that that
“the archive significantly influences what we are able to study, to say, and to teach about
rhetorical history, and what we do, as rhetors, with its holdings in our scholarship, in our
classrooms, and in the streets. The archive, therefore, should rightly be understood not as
a passive receptacle for historical documents and their ‘truths,’ or benign research space,
but rather as a dynamic site of rhetorical power”(115).
Morris rightly points to idea that “the archive” is a space where power, authority and truth are
not stable constructs, but are constantly re-negotiated. He also points out that the archive
occludes as much knowledge as it reveals.

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In the same issue, Cara Finnegan argues that we need to embrace “archival research as a
process of rhetorical negotiation that parallels the demands of our other critical practices.
Recognizing that the space of the archive both prompts discovery and requires interpretation and
evaluation has the potential to make our experiences in the archive more fruitful and our
resulting scholarship richer” (121). Fignnegan points out that archives are products of deliberate
classification; these classification systems can work as “terministic screens” that may limit the
researcher’s interpretation of the archival object. Thus the researcher has to actively work against
such screens as s/he works within the archive. In her essay titled “Of Historicity, Rhetoric: The
Archive As Scene of invention” Barbara Biesecker writes that “out of the deconstruction of the
material presence of the past and thus, in relation to what the archive cannot authenticate
absolute but can (be made to) authorize nonetheless, issues an invitation to write rhetorical
histories of archives, which is to say, critical histories of the situated and strategic uses to which
archives have been put” (130). Biesecker calls for increased attention to the “historicity of the
archive” and asks scholars to write rhetorical histories of the archive. Writing rhetorical histories
will allow us to understand archives as sites of complex negotiations of the past.
Similarly, in his piece, “Archival Queer,” Charles Morris insists that “straight archives”
silence or ignore queer histories. He writes that “a significant portion of (LGBTQ) history is
housed in straight archives and circulate in straight collections.” This creates a need to “queer
the archive” (147). In order to recover these histories, Morris writes that “we must all become
archival queers. Queer historical voices, and their interrogations, must echo throught our
epideictic occasion… must inform our own deliberative discourse… and must provide
alternative precedents for judicial renderings” (149). He also argues that rhetorical scholars
should “take seriously sexuality as a chief influence of rhetorical culture, past and present…

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Queer movement… will be measured by the common usage of the texts archival queers have
assembled and articulated” (149) Morris asks rhetorical scholars to become activists, to go
beyond their disciplinary boundaries and insist upon the presence of queer voices within straight
history. However, it is worth nothing that Morris does not necessarily call for the construction of
more queer archives. Instead, he wants to focus his attention on extant archives that mask queer
histories. This view has been contested by Joan Nestle in her conversation with Jim Monahan in
1978.
As all the above writers point out, archives are rhetorical constructions: rhetorics reveal
as much as they conceal. When one rhetoric is made visible, it simultaneously conceals other
rhetorics and forms of knowledge. Our task as rhetoricians is to uncover what things mean within
a given context, fully aware that meanings change as contexts change. Archives are a form of
cultural rhetoric: they are created by communities in order to make visible particular aspects of
their pasts. Such forms of archival construction allow communities to articulate their presence
and their identities to the world. Additionally, if we agree with the idea that archives are
constructed rhetorically, then this implies that archives always make choices about what to keep.
. For instance, while conducting research in the archives of a Chicana organization in California,
Kendall Leon (2010) discovered that the members of that organization were making deliberate
choices about what to keep and what to exclude from their archives. This process allowed them
to articulate a particular identity. Rhetoric is a deliberate process: it implies that choices are
being made about how to represent someone or something to the world. Leon’s work allows us
to see that the inclusion of particular materials within archives allows for the construction of
deliberate identities.
This link between archives, culture and identity has been an ongoing conversation in the

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field of Archival Studies as well. In her article “We Are What We Collect: We Collect What We
are,” Elizabeth Kaplan (2000) points to the rhetorical nature of archival and identity
construction. She makes the case for this argument by the tracing the way in which American
Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) was created in 1892. A fundamental exigency that led to
creation of this historical society and its archives was to establish the American Jew not as a
sectarian identity, but as an American identity (127). Kaplan takes a close look at the minutes
from the meetings of the AJHS in order to trace how archives are employed to create certain
identities and reject or sublimate others (127). As Kaplan explains:
“Archives would serve as the props with which an American Jewish identity would be
built. The initial activity of establishing a historical society would begin a tautological
process; each step of which would legitimize the next. The historical society would serve
as a sanctioned, authoritative base which would enable the collection of archives, carefully
selected for their content. With a critical mass of documents, histories could be written.
The publication of documents and histories by a historical society would grant legitimacy
and authenticity to an American Jewish identity. Once this identity was forged, further
collection of archives and writing of histories would confirm and sustain it, continually
‘proving’ its existence.” (149).
She concludes by cautioning archivists that they should be aware of their own role in the
construction of identities since they “appraise, collect, and preserve the props with which notions
of identity are built” (126). Kaplan reminds archivists that they need to pay careful attention to
the cultural and historical contexts out of which archives emerge and that they must resist
essentialized notions of identity while creating and administering archival records.
Along similar lines in his article, “The Archival Sliver” (2002), Verne Harris points out the

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national archives of South Africa were constructed during the heyday of apartheid by
suppressing and destroying documents and memories of anti-apartheid institutions. This process
of destruction literally involved burning thousands of documents that posed a challenge to the
reigning powers. Harris then also describes the manner in which South African archives are
being transformed to become more democratic now that apartheid has seemingly come to an end.
He looks at the ways in which access to the archives is becoming easier for the black population
of South Africa. However, Harris explains that the construction of archives in South Africa is
still rooted in a “positivist paradigm” which believes that the past can be known as it was. This,
he points out, is a fallacy as theorists like Derrida, White (1987) and Foucault have also pointed
out. Instead, he calls for archival construction processes that are rooted in South African realities
and conceptual frameworks. To me, this call exemplifies a need to examine the particular
cultural and rhetorical exigencies that make archives necessary. Paying attention to such aspects
of archival construction may also help archivists cater to particular audiences in a better way
A chief problem with recent work on “the archive” - in fields such as Rhetoric and
Composition -is the conspicuous absence of archivists or theorists working within archival
studies7: indeed, as Joan Schwartz (2006) has pointed out, many academic conversations on “the
archive” seem to be lacking contributions from archivists themselves. If academics acknowledge
the presence of archivists at all, they are either cast as evil figures lurking in the shadows just
waiting to restrict the researcher’s access to materials or they are cast as invisible figures who try
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
7
The recent collection Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and
Composition (edited by Ramsey, Sharer, L’Eplattenier, Mastrangelo 2010) intervenes in this
discourse in a significant way. This collection contains chapters by noted archivists and
librarians such as Sammie Morris, Helena Zinkham and Elizabeth Yakel who write about issues
such as researching photographs, searching for sources on the web and processing records and
creating finding aids for archival collections. This collection constitutes a significant step
towards including archivists in our disciplinary conversations about archives.
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to stay out of the researcher’s way: both of these characterizations, however, are grounded in
truth to some extent. Archivists work in accordance with particular institutional mandates: they
can make some things available for the researcher and restrict access to other things. On the
other hand, archives are also lacking in resources to appraise and describe all of the materials in
their holdings. So sometimes, archivists are not sure if they have all the materials that researchers
are looking for. Historically, archivists have also been trained to step out of the researcher’s way
and to merely act as invisible custodians of archival spaces. They are to be seen and heard
minimally and not intefere with the reseacher’s discovery of the past. Of course, these
particularly characterizations of the archivist have been debunked recently (Nesmith 1999, 2002;
Brothman 1991,1999; Cook & Schwartz 2002; Harris 2002).
Archival studies, as a discipline has been growing over the past seven decades: and yet,
our academic conversations about “the archive” usually absent the voices of those who’ve the
most to say about these spaces. For instance, in January 2002, Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz
guest edited a special issue of Archival Science devoted to the theme of “Archives, Records and
Power.” As practicing archivists, they claim that far from being benign repositories, archives are
active sites where power and privilege are negotiated. They argue that archives are social
constructions that reflect the conflicts and contradictions of their time and place. They admit that
archives and archivists are complicit in perpetuating certain power dynamics. The others authors
in this issue of the journal also make recommendations about how archivists can renegotiate
some of the problematic discourses that archives are often embedded in. They also try to imagine
different ways of constructing archives that are not embedded in (mostly Western) positivistic
notions of the past. This particular issue of Archival Science however is not the first instance of
such conversations: similar issues have been debated in other journals such as American

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Archivist and Archivaria (two pre-eminent journals authored and edited by North American
archivists).
Similar concerns have also been reflected in various book projects developed and
published by archivists. For instance, in a recent collection titled Refiguring the Archive, Graeme
Reid, a former coordinator of the South African Gay and Lesbian Archives (GALA) argues that
“archivists are susceptible to the social mores and moral codes of the time” (194). He further
explains that “… in deciding what is included and what left out of the public record, archivists
wield considerable power. It is a power that impacts considerably on groups that are
marginalized or oppressed by the dominant social order” (200). There is a sense in all these
conversation that archivists enact the cultural rhetorics of their time and place: archival records
are reflections of choices made during a particular time and within a particular place. In
Foucault’s theoretical conception, the archive sets limits on what can be considered
“knowledge”: while Foucault is referring to a more discursive notion of the archive, it still acts
upon everyone, including archivists who come into material archives everyday with very
particular notions of what counts as knowledge. However, the important fact is that archivists are
aware of these issues and are actively working towards creating archival systems that are more
inclusive. Outside the world of professional archives, many grassroots archives have been in
existence: these grassroots archives- such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) – enact their
commitment to preserving the voices of marginalized communities by enacting a form of radical
archiving: they work against common notion of what counts as “archival” and instead place
power entirely in the hands of the community. As Maxine Wolfe of the LHA has explained: “…
the community defines what is important about their lives.” (Refiguring, 202). The LHA is not
just another “queer” archive; instead, it is a community-based archives that is working to create

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and preserve particular lesbian identities that are deemed important by the community: while this
process of picking particular lesbian experiences for preservation is fraught with political debates
about identity, it still works against dominant archives that have ignored or absented lesbian
voices from their records.
To me, the above examples underscore the idea that the archives of an American Jewish
Historical Society are not exactly like the archives of South African communities. There may be
similarities in terms of archival practices (such as appraisal, authentication, preservation, etc),
but both these archives are rooted in different realities. They are built for completely different
audiences and their purpose is to enact and authorize rhetorics that emerge out of very different
cultural contexts. Archives are rhetorical constructions. So what exactly is lost when archives are
extracted from their particular cultural and rhetorical locations? What happens when archives are
leeched of their particularities and operationalized as a universal regardless of their culturalrhetorical contexts?
Theorists - such as Derrida, Foucault, Carolyn Steedman, Thomas Richards, Linda Tuhiwai
Smith, Lisa Lowe, Diana Taylor etc - have written persuasively about the Imperial Archive (or at
least about a version of the Imperial Archive) whose agenda is homogeneity, the pursuit of
sameness. The point of this pursuit, this need to make archives seem “unmarked” by culture goes
hand-in-hand with the pursuit of progress (mostly western notions of progress that legitimated
and supported so many colonization efforts); there is a desperate need to flatten out those
differences that will not allow us to look forward, that will not legitimate narratives of progress.
If archives legitimate and authorize rhetorics, then many theorists would have us believe that it is
the problematic rhetorics of progress that most archives believe and enact. In a sense, I fully
agree with these critiques of “the archive”: texts such as The Imperial Archive present a

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compelling case about how nation-states try to control and homogenize cultures through the
assimilation of knowledge. In scenarios such as these, there is no regard for the cultural context
out of which knowledges emerge. Instead all knowledge is used to perpetuate the power of the
nation-state regardless of cultural context, regardless of the cultural rhetorics that created those
knowledges in the first place. And yet, I would like to claim that there is a difference, a gap
between the theoretical archives that the above writers describe so convincingly and the concrete,
physical archives that hold and store documents for users. So for the purposes of this project,
instead of assuming that concrete archival spaces are all the same, I assumed the opposite: that
all archival spaces are different and they enact rhetorics that emerge out of different cultural
contexts. Therefore, the analytic that I used to interview archivists for this project is: archives are
spaces of difference.
In the next section of this chapter, I will outline archivists’ ideas about difference, identity,
archival spaces, context and activism. As I have already mentioned in Chapter 1, the two
archivists that I interviewed for this project were: William Maher, a University Archivist and
Joan Nestle, founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York. I will present both their
views on some of the abovementioned issues; I do not plan to “compare” their ideas or to claim
the validity of one set of views over another. Instead, I am presenting their views here as
different orientations to the creation and management of archival spaces. I will argue that both of
these orientations are equally useful because they can teach us about how different communities
create, mobilize and use archival spaces for purposes of creating and preserving memory.
What The Archivists Taught Me:
Before I present the data that emerged from my interviews with my research participants, I
would like to make two claims as a way of framing this section. The first claim pertains to why it

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is necessary to understand how archives are created and managed; while this may be selfevident, I do think it is important to mention that archives are often touted as one of the keepers
of cultural and public memory. As rhetoric and composition scholars, we have a special stake in
understand how memory works. A great deal of recent scholarship has demonstrated the
importance of memory as a form of composition (Lowe; Villaneuva 2004; Hoang 2008;
Carruthers 1990); many scholars have convincingly eschewed the idea that memory can ever be
objective; they argue that all memory is partial and in fact all memory is deliberately crafted and
put together for different audiences and for different purposes. Hoang, Lowe and Villaneuva
especially have shown us how marginalized communities deliberately compose memories as a
way of inciting social action. Such alternate sites of memory not only provide a different
orientation to the past, they also help undo the primacy of dominant narratives about the past by
showing us the composed nature of all memory. What we remember and how we remember
depends on context and on the rhetorical situation that creates an exigency for memorializing
events from the past. Thus, if archives are one of the keepers of memory, then it is important for
us to understand how archives themselves are composed and arranged. It is important for us to
consider the cultural-rhetorical contexts that create an exigency for memorializing the past
through archives. Both of archives/archivists’ stories that I present here are located in very
different contexts with concerns that are varied and dissimilar, yet both of their views can teach
us a great deal about how communal and institutional memories are preserved in archival spaces.
My second claim also serves as another analytic I employed as I collected and analyzed
interview data from my participants: archives are a form of cultural rhetoric. To be more
specific, archives enact and authorize cultural rhetorics. My reason for making this claim springs
from the idea that all rhetorics are cultural and these rhetorics emerge from specific cultural

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practices and beliefs. Archives are a form of cultural rhetoric because they help create and
preserve memories that serve specific rhetorical purposes for a particular culture. In other words,
archives emerge from the practices and beliefs of specific cultures. Therefore, when I started
analyzing the patterns that emerged from my data, it was important for me to not impose a preconceived definition of rhetoric that emerged from say, a Greco-Roman cultural context. Instead,
I looked for particular tropes or ideas that recurred in my interview data that seemed to help my
participants convey how archives worked. To me, these tropes/ideas seemed like culturallysituated analytics around which my participants organized meaning. Cultural rhetorics is study of
how meaning is made within discursive systems created by various cultures. I argue that archives
are a kind of cultural discursive system.
Both the archivists that participated in this project have practiced their craft for several
decades. While Joan Nestle is now retired, William Maher still holds an appointment as a
University Archivist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Maher began working at
his institution in 1977 as an assistant archivist and was eventually promoted to the position of
University Archivist in the late 90s. Given that Maher8 works at UIUC (a state-funded university
in the mid-west), clearly there are particular limitations set upon the University Archives. Within
this context, the archives collects materials pertaining to student life and the administrative life
of the university. Since its funding comes from the University and from the State, the archives’
mission is tied to both these entities. The archives helps construct a particular kind of identity for
this state school: an identity that is very much grounded in its location.
In 1997, Maher also served as the president of the Society of American Archivists (SAA).
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8
In this project, I refer to William Maher by his last name and to Joan Nestle by her first name. I
was invited by Joan Nestle to use her first name given that our relationship evolved a great deal
since the beginning of this project.
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As the former president of the SAA, Maher is very clear about the fact that his concerns and
identity as a professional archivist are grounded in the goals of this organization and also in his
duties as the archivist of his institution. As he explained to me “… the archivist is part of the
lifeblood of the institution and I think really needs to have a certain amount of loyalty to the
institution and I take that loyalty to be… to me much more important than loyalty is trying to
keep the institution honest which means sometimes raising your hand to say ‘Sorry teacher, I
don’t think that’s right’” (2012).
This impulse to keep the institution honest springs out of a series of experiences wherein Maher
and his staff were called upon to verify his institution’s version of certain historical events. As
the University Archivist, Maher felt compelled to present archival evidence that directly
contradicted the University’s narratives about its past. For instance, when his university made the
claim that its students had invented the tradition of “homecoming” back in 1910, for various
reasons, the archives were called upon to validate this story. Maher and his staff decided that
“instead of waiting for someone to ask for the archival evidence of the claims–something
that too often happens only after thousands of dollars have already been spent on the
project. Utilizing credibility previously developed with the Alumni Association, we
approached them for financial support for a summer project to try to assess the strength of
the claim of “first,” and we embarked on the project with the hopes that we could settle the
claim once and for all to the benefit of the institution…What we found, however, was that
the story as it has been promoted is not entirely true. Those two students back in 1910
probably were not aware that a university over 900 miles away in the deep south, Baylor
University, held an event called Homecoming a year earlier, in 1909. The event, like the
idea that later developed at Illinois, was an organized alumni affair including a varsity

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sports match as well as a concert, pep rally, parade, and bonfire. The only difference–that
Baylor’s was not planned as an annual event until 1915–offered little support for Illinois
continuing to claim it had ‘invented’ Homecoming in 1910” (“Stepping Out,” 14).
In this manner, Maher has consistently argued that the archivist often needs to “step out of the
shadows” (in the face of dissent and disagreement) and balance the historical record when the
institution is at the risk of making claims that may be construed as dishonest or damaging.
Repeatedly, during the course of our interview, Maher underscored the link between
practice and identity. This was especially apparent when I asked him about the “risk of naming
things that may not be archives as archives.” In a sense, I was trying to understand what happens
when there is no explanation for how an archival space functions as an archives. In response,
Maher explained:
“Well, I think the risk, I would argue…. is that good archival work, proper archival work
which has been developed over the archival profession in Europe and in the United States,
Europe in the 19th Century, United States in the 20th Century, involves a systematic
application of a series of principles to accomplish certain things, to ensure that the record is
an authentic record. To ensure that the record reflects that same kind of evidence that it had
when it originally came in or when it was originally created, so that has to do with
authenticity. That the right stuff is selected, that it is made accessible in a way, etc, etc. All
these standards… that is different than somebody going out and just gathering materials
and saying it’s an archives. It’s not just a pile… it has structure, it has order, it has
principles that it is following, that the record of the past will be messed up… so that’s the
risk that somebody is putting something forward as an archives and it hasn’t really been
followed in a way that ensures that it communicates to the future what it has the potential

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to communicate to the future. Now you could also say, just to step away from our field… I
have read enough and done enough in the whole professional status issue that it’s just a
matter of being in a guild and trying to protect ourselves, that we are archivists and we are
the only ones who can do archives and you can’t do it, you can’t call it archives and so
on.… and there’s certainly that and when you are president of a professional organization,
you are going to speak on behalf of your guild… of any organization. And it could be landsurveyors, it could be anything else, you know, we don’t want any amateurs coming in here
and doing dental work on people, you know? Normally, people don’t get harmed if bad
archiving is done, but they can...” (2012)
In this response, Maher consciously emphasizes the link between archival practices, identity and
professional cultures. In this view, archival practices are not “unmarked,” but reflect the
professional culture out of which they arose. The standards and principles that Maher describes
are determined by that professional culture and are not “universal.” Indeed, as it was repeatedly
pointed out to me, the archival profession in North America is quite different from the archival
profession in Europe. Different standards and principles determine how materials will be
selected, authenticated, narrated and preserved across these cultural contexts. Admittedly, there
is also a certain conflict here relating to who can “do” archives or who can claim to be an
archivist. This is a tension that is related to question of professional identity and community;
there is no clear or easy way to respond to this tension since members of professional
communities are responsible for protecting the interests of their community. And yet, as Maher
himself has pointed out in his SAA chair’s address, archivists have a responsibility to work with
others outside their profession and educate them about archives while still adhering to the
principles established by their profession (SAA address). The problems of professional status

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and identity, the questions of inclusion and exclusion that they bring up are not ones that I can
answer in this dissertation. Indeed that is not the aim of the project. Instead I will point out once
again that the archival practices emerging out of professional cultures are different from the
practices that motivate community-based organizations. Both of these practices are meant to
invite very different audiences so we should expect variations across archival spaces.
In above response, Mr. Maher also brings up the idea that an archives is “not just a pile.”
He asserts that “it has structure and order” and “involves a systematic application of a series of
principles.” To me, this indicates that there needs to be a theory motivating the management of
archives. An archives is not merely a place for things to settle or pile up without purpose; instead
it is the systematic accumulation of a series of documents/artifacts that may explain how a
culture understands itself and the world. While there may be differences in the science
motivating archival management across different cultural contexts, it is still important to note
that this science is not arhetorical. These practices and principles spring out of a cultural
exigency to communicate a version of the past to the future. If rhetoric is the study of how
communication occurs within a given cultural context and if archives are a product of culture,
then I argue that archival science is culturally situated and rhetorical: its task is to narrate,
arrange and preserve certain documents of the past in a way that it communicates that past to the
future. Indeed, as Tom Nesmith has argued, the archivists’ work of narrating records is almost
akin to authoring” (32). The archivist creates a certain version of the past through language. If
rhetoric is the study of authoring, of narrating and arranging a world through writing, then our
field may have more in common with archivists than we realize. It could also be said that if
archives are not arranged carefully, if there is no thought behind their composition, it leads to a
failure in communication. Such failure might have consequences for the way documents of the

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past are read, understood and narrated by researchers in the present.
The notion of archival spaces being rhetorical is reflected in the way Joan Nestle speaks
about the Lesbian Herstory Archives. The LHA started out in Joan’s Upper West Side Manhattan
Apartment, a home that she shared with her then partner Deborah Edel (also one of the founders
of the LHA). In her article “A Will to Remember” (1990) she explains that one of the main
reasons for the inception of the LHA was that “we remembered a world of lesbian culture that
had nourished us but that was rapidly disappearing. We also knew, in this early heyday of lesbian
publishing, that our presses and publishers were fragile undertakings and we were concerned
about preserving all their precious productions. But the strongest reason for creating the archives
was to end the silence of patriarchal history about us - women who loved women” (87). The
LHA was founded in 1973 and it “became a reality in 1974.” To this day, the LHA honors the
idea that present everyday struggles of lesbian women are historical. The mantra “the past is
now” has motivated the LHA’s collection practices since its founding by a consciousness-raising
group made up of approximately 20 women.
Joan Nestle’s contributions to queer studies/theory are well-known. As a writer and a
theorist, she has persistently argued that “there are pluralistic gender histories, pluralistic
challenges to the male/female, woman/man, lesbian, butch/fem constructions and identities…”
(GenderQueer 9) For years, she has been an outspoken advocate for women’s sexual autonomy;
in particular, through her vivid explorations of lesbian sexuality and her erotic portraits of butchfem relationships (see her edited collections: GenderQueer [2002] and The Persisitent Desire
[1992]), she is one of those thinkers who made it possible for us to think of the body as a site of

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pleasure and meaning. For Joan, lesbian9 sexuality and desire need not be a source of shame10;
instead lesbian sexuality and desire seem to be at the source of her activist consciousness. It is
through the acknowledgment of the body’s most intimate and demanding desires, that histories
can be re-written. Lesbian desire interrupts heteronormative histories by making the body visible
and particularly by making the shamed, subdued and often, displaced body visible. If mainstream
heteronormative histories try to “normalize” desires, then lesbian histories deconstruct such
normalizing tendencies and point to bodies, memories and desires that exist outside the
heteronormative matrix.
For Joan, the Lesbian Herstory Archives was a labor of remembrance and love as much
as it was a professional labor. When I asked her to speak at length about the emotional and
physical labor of being a grassroots archivist and activist, she explained:
“the reason I did it, I did it – and this is heartfelt- was to commemorate and in a way
thank the women I had come out with or come out to in a way, in those butch-fem
working class bars because these were the women, passing women, working women,
butch-fem women, who even while I was in those bars, I had a sense something amazing
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
Please note that here I am not talking about a singular expression of lesbian desire or a singular
idea of the lesbian body. Indeed, I am not trying to propose a singular definition of what it means
to be a lesbian. As a “straight” woman, I am aware of how definitions can make things invisible,
even as they try to create a fixed view of things. My purpose in this essay is not to provide
definitions of identity categories and expressions that are very fluid and subject to change.
10
Eve Sedgwick has suggested that “for certain (“queer”) people, shame is simply the first and
remains a permanent structuring of identity. One, that… has its own powerfully productive and
powerfully social metamorphic possibilities” (64). Sedgwick resists binarizing shame as entirely
“good” or “bad” or “healthy” or “unhealthy.” Instead, Sedgwick asserts that the “toxic” parts of
shame cannot be “excised” permanently from a group or an individual: it remains tied to their
identities. Shame is part of the process of “metamorphosis, reframing, refiguration,
transformation, transfiguration.... (and) deformation.” (63). This view of shame as a process, as
part of the apparatus of one’s identity is reflected in Joan Nestle’s writing about the LHA. At one
point in our interview, she asserted “to me all the richness of life is embedded in these so-called
shameful moments, and they have to be part of our history.”!
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was happening, you know? Something… women without power, women often without
family, women who were working – and I am using the word women again – let’s say,
lesbians, gay women, fem women, butch women, we would have used those words, kiki
women, sort of who went both ways, bi women, bisexual, were taking on the forces of the
state, of criminality, of organized criminality, to pursue a sexual longing. Now in the
1950s – and now remember it started way back, but I entered it in the 1950s- that’s one
hell of a moment, you know. So that’s why – when I passed the border into the safe lands
of lesbian feminism and gay liberation and all of that, what was in my mind, and it was
my body’s way of saying thank you and something I haven’t – and you haven’t asked me
this, but you say the kinds of labor – I am a lesbian, not as Lillian Faderman said, because
of my feminist principles. I am lesbian because I wanted – and I am going to say this – I
wanted to be fucked by a woman. And that sexual desire is behind everything that I did.
It was what led me to go into those dark streets, to places where women were not
supposed to be, to wake up in bedrooms not remembering how I got there, but enjoying
what had happened and all the other things. So the first labor is one of a passion, a
passion to hold the doors of history open for a loved community to slip in, who had given
me, to this young woman, my first taste, who had touched me, they touched me, they
touched my body, they spread my legs, also touched my imagination and I have written
about them, so this is where my writing and my archival work are one and the same”
(2011).
Clearly, Joan’s activism, writing and archival work are intimately tied to the fact that she came
out in the 1950s. She found a welcoming community of lesbians in the working class bars of
Greenwich Village. The need to remember and memorialize these women became one of the

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foremost reasons for the establishment of the LHA: to not let a past lesbian culture dwindle away
and to establish a solid foundation for the remembrance of present cultures.
In her life, Joan has worn, and continues to wear many hats. Before I embarked on this
project, I was familiar with Joan, the outspoken writer and the theorist. As a writing teacher
myself, I felt a kinship with Joan who had also taught writing for about three decades. However,
when I sought her out for this project, I was also looking for Joan, grassroots archivist and cofounder of The Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). It is always tempting (and always so easy) to
compartmentalize the lives of project participants, to separate the archivist from the activist, the
teacher from the historian, the theorist from the human being; but, as Joan taught me, it is often
not as easy to keep these things separate, because when it comes to the work of a lifetime (such
as the LHA), every role, every experience and every history matters. It is this sensibility that
Joan brought to her work in the LHA where her personal life literally rubbed against her
professional life as an archivist, writer, theorist and activist. When it was housed in Joan’s
apartment, the LHA was interesting conglomeration of personal/public and
domestic/professional. Even after the archives moved to a new location in Brooklyn, it continues
to be housed in a home. A member of the LHA’s collective continues to live with the archives
and take care of it, in much the same way that Joan took care of the archives during its first
twenty years. Thus, the LHA continues its dual legacy of being a domestic and a public space.
This need to house the LHA in a home is related to the idea of “persona” that Maher
brought up during our interview. For the founders of the LHA, it was important that the archives
acted as a safe space, not just for documents and artifacts, but for community members, on a
physical level. This notion has been repeated persistently in every newsletter published by the
archives since 1975. The LHA depends on the community to stay alive: its primary audience is

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lesbian community members who support the archives both monetarily and by donating
materials to it on a regular basis. Therefore, it was important that the archives felt like home to
community members.
Another reason the LHA used the word “home” in conjunction with archives was to enact
its commitment to co-creating culture and history was through the establishment of the “Athome-with the Archives” series. A goal of this weekly community event was to throw open the
doors of the archives to community members and have them engage in conversation with each
other in a physical and emotional safe space. This series - which is still in existence - “allows
lesbian cultural workers to try out first-time creations, gives space for open debates and
discussions where women know that all are welcomed, and encourages political organizing”
(92). Another goal of this series was to help community members feel a sense of ownership
towards the Archives. It allowed community members experience the space of archives not as
foreboding or ominous, but instead as welcoming and safe. As Joan pointed out:
“…so we always did “At homes” which is… we always believed we were creating
culture at the same time we were preserving it. So we have new writers and new
filmmakers and political debates and things, always at, at the archives where people felt
safe, women felt safe to disagree with each other. So we have the sex worker
representative and we have the women against pornography…no other place in the
community could this happen. Now here is where you can use the so-called neutrality of
the archives as a positive space… because the archives is… has to be, in my head, a safe
space for difference. So that means conversations can go on and there is disagreement,
but there is no, you know, close the door on that woman who practices S & M, or close
the door on that commie… it’s a community archives because it’s a place of community

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conversation about culture of the past and culture being created in the very conversation
itself becomes culture, you know, within the archives. It’s a place where contact with
one’s past can be made safely, particularly, if it is a criminalized archives…. So it has to
be a place where the encounter with memory, with cultural collective memory, is a
physically safe encounter, even that bare minimum…but any way, it’s a place where the
culture is created at the same time it is preserved through sharing of cultural… it’s a place
where identities can be revalued… and identities can be questioned in safety. So a
community archives… doesn’t mean a fixed narrative about any specific community, but
it does mean a place where there can be a safe conversation using all the materials of
memory that are available in that space by community members” (2011).
The use of the phrase “at home” in conjunction with the word “archives” once again overturns
the alienating connotations attached to some archival spaces. In this context, it gives community
members the sense that the archives could - in addition to being a safe space – be a space of
comfort and belonging. Thus, it turns the archives into an invitational space where the
professional work of archiving could comingle comfortably with the domestic connotations of a
home-space. However, the trope of “At-Home” further works to overturn the connotation of
domesticity because it is intended to help community members uncover and work through
memories and stories that are subversive to the traditional idea of home and family. So in a
sense, this is a very different home within a very different kind of archival space, all nested
together in a supposedly harmless series of weekly meetings. The LHA thus persistently works
to create a unique paradigm of archives in which one’s public, private, domestic and professional
selves can profitably rub shoulders. This is a paradigm in which the archives belong to the

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community and is as much a home as it is a space for histories and memories to repeatedly come
out rather than remain shut in.
As Joan also explained to me, the LHA was started at a time when many GLBTQ
communities felt left out of mainstream historical narratives. Not only did many institutional
archives seem intimidating, there was also a sense among GLBTQ communities that their life
experiences were not considered important. This created an exigency for the creation of archival
spaces that would honor the everyday struggles of GLBTQ communities. Grassroots efforts such
as the LHA were started in order to reimagine archival spaces entirely, and to humanize people’s
experiences within such spaces. More importantly, the LHA also hoped to create a sense of
belonging and safety for lesbian community members. For the LHA, there is also a great deal at
stake in memorializing the lives of contemporary lesbians by collecting and recording their
everyday experiences. In An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich explains that given the
supposedly “short” history of homosexuality in official accounts, it has created the imperative for
recording histories left out of mainstream accounts, but that nevertheless created the foundation
for gay liberation movements that emerged in the 70s. It has also created the historiographical
challenge of rethinking what “counts” as historical; Cvetkovich explains that “the stock-in-trade
for gay and lesbian archives is ephemera, the term used by archivists and librarians to describe
occasional publications and paper documents, material objects and items that fall into the
miscellaneous category when being cataloged” (243). For gay and lesbian archives, the notion of
what counts as historical are not “subject to the same categories of inclusion and exclusion as
those of a public research archive” (243). As Cvetkovich further explains:
“in insisting on the value of marginal and ephemeral materials, the collectors of gay and
lesbian archives propose that affects – associated with nostalgia, personal memory,

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fantasy and trauma – make a document significant. The archive of feelings is both
material and immaterial, at once incorporating objects that might not be considered
archival and at the same time, resisting documentation, because sex and feelings are too
personal or ephemeral to leave records” (243)
This revisionist attitude towards history and archival collection would explain why the LHA
encourages all living lesbians to donate everything that they consider important about their lives.
There is an emerging sense here that the past is happening right now and it has to be carefully
recorded and remembered in the present through the collection of everyday artifacts and stories.
Joan and some of the early coordinators felt that the LHA should be an inclusive space.
This meant that the archives would accept all histories. This commitment to being inclusive
came out a particular orientation to the “sex wars” of the 70s and 80s in which many writers and
activists came under fire for their support of particular sexual practices and histories (like butchfemme relationships, lesbian sadomasochism and women’s pornography). Certain feminist
groups such as Women Against Pornography (WAP) considered such practices and histories to
be anti-women and dangerous. They condemned writers such as Joan for trying to reinforce
“problematic” sexual practices and gender hierarchies. This created an atmosphere where certain
conversations about gender and sexuality were considered taboo. However, when the LHA was
started, the founders and volunteers decided that it would be an inclusive space where all sexual
histories and practices would find a home for preservation and discussion. When I asked Joan to
elaborate on how the LHA created an argument for a space of inclusivity, she explained:
“The challenge to our… inclusivity was the politics of our own communities, so I’ll tell
you some early conversations. When an archives… a lesbian archives was being
considered, was being started based on the model of LHA, which was use your own, use

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any space you have, don’t wait for a grant, don’t wait for funding, just do. Okay? … but
the woman who was… starting it, we were sitting down and talking, and she asked about
what do you collect and I said, we collect anything we can… but she said, well you
wouldn’t – this grew out of the debate over S&M, lesbian S&M- she said, well you
wouldn’t collect the papers of a lesbian Nazi party, would you? And I said, of course we
would. Of course, we would. And then, I got into some discussions with Lillian
Faderman over this and I really have a different view of history than she does, and I own
it… we refused, I refused and the archives, other people in it agree mostly – that we not
be a role-model archives because that’s one of the beginnings of exclusions. In others
words, when you’ve been an oppressed people, and this I see in many other communities,
the battle about how respectable do we have to appear, not only in the present, but in the
past. You know, how much dirty laundry, as it’s called, are we willing to show… and I
coming from a family, whose mother was a whore sometimes… to me all the richness of
life is embedded in these so-called shameful moments, and they have to be part of our
history” (2011).
The refusal to be a “role-model archives” indicated the desire to eschew the narrative that “all
lesbians did good things all the time” (Nestle 2011). The LHA has never belonged to a single
group of lesbians or to a singular narrative about what it means to be a “lesbian.” This decision
also meant that the archives refused a simplified, homogenized and cleaned-up version of the
past or the present. Such a narrative would serve to keep people out instead of creating an
inclusive space. Repeatedly, through its collection and memorializing practices, the LHA has
tried to make the argument that all lesbian stories were important legacies for future generations
of lesbians.

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In the next chapter, “From Metaphor to Materiality: The Rhetoricity of Archival spaces,” I
move away from the notion of archive as metaphor; instead, I point out how archives are
materials spaces deliberately designed to draw in particular audiences and encourage community
engagement. I argue that thinking about archives as a singular, undifferentiated mass of
documents and/or “knowledge” obscures the complex set of arrangement and descriptive
practices that help create archives. It also effaces the careful planning and arrangement that goes
into the creation of archival spaces. In this chapter, I move consistently from metaphor to
materiality, to reinstate the material processes that allow archivists to make meaning. I take a
closer look at archival spaces – specifically, the space of the university archives in UrbanaChampaign and the space of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York. I argue that
these spaces are not accidental; instead, they are material and have a rhetoricity that allows them
to reach out to particular audiences. In general, I pay attention to the questions of architecture
and design that allow spaces to function as archives. Additionally, I take a closer look at how
being within the above archival spaces affected my body and moderated how I acted in these
spaces. I will argue that such bodily effects/affects are the product of the design and architecture
of archives.

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CHAPTER 3
FROM METAPHOR TO MATERIALITY: THE RHETORICITY OF ARCHIVAL SPACES
“the term ‘archive’ is itself polyvalent, referring simultaneously to a place, to the
papers collected there, and to the institutions that manage such collections.” ‘
- Randolph Head, 2008
“… the meaning of archive, its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek
arkeheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior
magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. The citizens who thus held and
signified political power were considered to possess the right to make or to
represent the law. On account of their publicly recognized authority, it is at their
home, in that place which is their house (private house, family house or
employee’s house), that official documents are filed…. It is thus, in this
domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place”
- Jacques Derrida, 1996
I am in the archive.
In rhetoric and composition, our work on archives exists in the gap between the metaphorical and
the material, between the abstract and the specific. Even when we are inside material archives,
we tend to turn them into abstract, theoretical constructs. There is something entirely too
seductive about the metaphor of the archive rather than the dreary materiality of dusty
documents. The metaphor of the archive is about the promise of power and knowledge; the
materiality of the archive promises long, hard days spent hunched over documents that may or
may not reveal something about the past. And yet, what may be gained by taking a long hard
look at these material archives? What may be gained by making a leap from “the archive” to “an
archives”?
I am in an archives.
August 2012: Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, New York
I pause excitedly outside #484 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It is a bright and sunny day in New
York City. The street I am on seems deserted. There are no signs on the large black door to

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indicate that I am standing in front of the famed Lesbian Herstory Archives. A casual passerby
would not be able to tell that this place is home to records about lesbian writers and activists such
as Joan Nestle, Adrienne Rich, Dorothy Allison, Mabel Hampton etc. Indeed a casual passerby
might keep on walking past the house unless she were to be specifically looking for it. At the
door, there seem to be three different buttons for the doorbell: I press the one that looks like the
newest and wait. After a minute or so passes, I become anxious that that the bell hasn’t rung at
all. As I resist the temptation to press the button again, I see the inner foyer door open. Soon I am
met by S11, an archival intern at the LHA. She has helped me arrange this visit and agreed to
meet with me on a day when the archives are closed to the general public.
We walk into the house: it is dark and cool in here. I let my eyes adjust to the dim lighting
as R and I walk down the hallway. Right in front of me is a broad wooden staircase leading
upstairs. To my right is a doorway leading to a series of interconnected rooms. I feel awkward in
here. I feel as though I have stepped into someone’s private home: I take a moment to remind
myself that in fact, this is a private home. The LHA’s caretaker has an apartment on the topmost
floor of the house. Like Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel, the LHA’s caretaker lives with the
archives.
As the second epigraph to this chapter indicates, the connection between archives and
houses/homes is not an unusual one. Derrida points out that originally archives were housed in
the home of a bureaucrat or government official who had the authority to interpret the law. It was
his task to use and interpret archival documents as evidence to protect the nation-state. His home,
therefore, was in itself a place of authority. I find it interesting that homes were vested with so
much authority and power that they were deemed appropriate to house important documents of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
I don’t have S’s permission to use her full name.
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the state. Archives were originally housed in the same spaces where people lived and ate and
slept. I wonder to what extent the “domestication” of homes led to the institutionalization of
archives. To what extent, did the “feminization” of homes make these spaces less authoritative?
Indeed, in a tiny footnote in Archive Fever, Derrida cites a historian named Sonia Combe who
mentions the connections between the archive and the “patriarchive.” They both dangle in front
of the reader the idea that many archives are masculinist in nature, intended for the purpose of
perpetuating the authority of the fathers. Indeed, the word patri-archy (literally: order of the
father) carries the memory of the word “arkhe” from which “archive” is derived. It is not
inconceivable that the more homes came to be associated with women, they could not continue
to sustain the archives/authority of the fathers.
The Lesbian Herstory Archives reinstates the forgotten connections between homes and
archives. This is a place that functions as a home, not just for the materials of the past, but for
people as well. While the archives has an official “reading room” with a long table for
researchers to work at, there is also a “parlor” with a long couch. Additionally, researchers and
volunteers at the LHA are also welcome to use the kitchen. The copier is located in the kitchen.
No matter how much I tell myself to relax and to enjoy myself, I am initially nervous. I am afraid
of touching things because I am afraid of being reprimanded. My experience in other
institutional archives has trained me to be wary and circumspect: I have been trained to ask
archivists for materials instead of look for them myself. Besides, institutional archives are rarely
comfortable: when I think of these spaces, I am reminded of uncomfortable chairs and
windowless reading rooms. In contrast, a sense of comfort pervades the space of the LHA. This
is clearly not something I am used to. S tells me that community members often use the archives
as a space to hang out and read. The LHA often works as a community center rather than an

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archival space.
------------In her introduction to a special issue on archives, space and power (available in
Archivaria 61), Joan Schwartz (2006) writes about the “academic/archival divide.” She argues
that “differering conceptions of the archive/ ‘archives’ are at the heart of the ironies of
postmodern, post-structural, and postcolonial scholarship. The ‘disconnect’ or ‘slippage’
between “the archive” of this recent and burgeoning scholarship and ‘archives’ where archivists
live and work has a great deal to do with misunderstandings about the relationship between
records and power, and the presumed role of archives as spaces of power” (8). She points out
that there is a difference between the “metaphorical archive” (as theorized by scholars such as
Steedman, Richards, Derrida, Foucault and Taylor) and the “material archives” that archivists
deal with on a daily basis.
Schwartz also points out that academic conversations about “the archive” are taking place
without the input of archivists. However, as she puts it “ultimately, what these examinations of
“the archive” have to offer archivists working ‘in the real world of archives’ is an important
critique of the knowledge/power nexus which archivists occupy. Their lessons are not pointed,
specific, tailored to our needs; their caveats are embedded in their observations; their suggestions
are written between the lines. It is our job-nay, our duty – to attend the conferences, read the
journals, learn the vocabulary, cut through the jargon, better to understand the power we wield
and how others in many important sectors of society see us” (9). Schwartz calls upon archivists
to work with scholars in other fields in order to understand more about theoretical/academic
formulation of archives. She explains that such conversations are important because it would
help archivists re-evaluate their own practices in the light of theoretical critiques about archives.

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It would also allow archivists to explain their practices to scholars whose ideas about archives –
in addition to being mediated by theoretical concerns - is solely based on their experiences as
users of archives. William Maher (1998) has also advocated that archivists work closely with
scholars from other disciplines, especially if these scholars are interested in starting and
maintaining their own archives. Maher advocates that archivists help the “nonarchival world” by
emphasizing their expertise in the seven core domains of archival world -“securing clear
authority for the program and collection, authenticating the validity of the evidence held,
appraising, arranging, describing, preserving, and promoting use” (255).
Admittedly, an “archive” can be many things. As Randolph Head points out in the quote
that serves as the epigraph to this chapter, the term “archive” can be a place, a collection of
documents or an institution that collects documents. Additionally, theorists such as Derrida,
Foucault, Richards, Tuhiwai-Smith would maintain that an archive is also a function, and an
orientation/mindset towards collecting and creating knowledge. However, as Schwartz and
Maher have pointed out, a great deal of damage can be done by thinking about archives as a
singular, undifferentiated mass of documents and/or “knowledge.” Such a view obscures not
only the complex set of arrangement and descriptive practices that help create archives, but it
also writes out the careful planning and arrangement that goes into the creation of archival
spaces. In this chapter, I move consistently from metaphor to materiality, to reinstate the material
processes that allow archivists to make meaning. I take a closer look at archival spaces –
specifically, the space of the university archives in Champaign, Urbana and the space of the
Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York. I argue that these spaces are not accidental;
instead they are material and have a rhetoricity that allows them to reach out to particular
audiences. In general, I pay attention to the questions of architecture and design that allow spaces

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to function as archives. Additionally, I take a closer look at how being within the above archival
spaces affected my body and moderated how I acted in these spaces. I will argue that such bodily
effects/affects are the product of the design and architecture of archives.
---------January 2012: University of Illinois Archives, Urbana-Champaign
I am in Urbana-Champaign for the day to interview William Maher, the University
Archivist at UIUC. My back is sore from the long train-ride to Champaign, the day before. I am
staying on campus at the Illini Union. The campus is deserted: students are not yet back from
winter break. This makes for a particularly eerie experience: what is a place when there are
almost no people in it? What is a university campus without people? From the window of my
hotel room, I also have a clear view of the library where the university archives are located, but I
am not yet aware of this just yet. Having only been on this campus once before, I am disoriented:
I leave my hotel early to ask for directions. I discover that my destination is only about three
minutes away. This is good news: it will allow me to arrive early and orient myself to the space
of the archives. I imagine that the interview will take place within the archives. However, despite
asking for directions, I still get lost on the way to the archives. I keep second-guessing myself
and my directions. Even though I am secure in the knowledge that I set up this interview well in
advance and have followed all of the protocols that I laid out in my IRB application, I am
anxious. My anxiety has at least two causes: first, I am not “at home” here. I am an outsider
temporarily taking up space in this other place. Second, I have traveled to this place, not to use
the archives (at least not in the conventional sense of the term), but to meet the archivist.
In her essay “Orientations,” Sara Ahmed explains:

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“Bodies hence acquire orientation by repeating some actions over others, as actions that
have certain objects in view, whether they are the physical objects required to do the
work (the writing table, the pen, the keyboard) or the ideal objects that one identifies
with. The nearness of such objects, their availability within my bodily horizon, is not
casual: it is not just that I find them there, like that. Bodies tend toward some objects
more than others, given their tendencies. These tendencies are not originary; they are
effects of the repetition of ‘tending toward.’” (553).
When I read over my reflections about my trip to the UIUC archives, I am struck by the repeated
use of the words dis/orientation: I wonder what it is about visiting the archivist that made me so
nervous. I wonder why it was important for me to arrive early, to “orient” myself to the new
surroundings I found myself in. There are a few ways of reading into my sense of dis/orientation:
first, as Ahmed points out, our tendencies – the way in which tend, or lean – are the effects of
particular histories. When I think about it, I realize that my entire disciplinary training, my entire
disciplinary “orientation” has required me to not seek out the archivist, but to look towards the
archives, nay, the objects within the archives as the goal of my inquiry. Indeed, my training has
taught me to not look at archival records as material objects, but as texts to be read and
transcribed. In other words, my disciplinary orientation makes me tend towards dismissing the
thingness of archival records and asks me to textualize records instead.
My sense of dis/orientation is compounded further by the fact that archivists are trained
to remain in the background. While they do “step out” sometimes to set the record straight or
assist the researcher in accessing records, they remain liminal figures on the peripheries of our
scholarly frames of reference. In other words, the archivist is deferred, never quite “within our
reach.” And as Ahmed would point out, this sense of distance between the researcher and the

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archivist is a product of particular cultural histories of interactions between academics and
archivists. So what does it mean to “tend” towards the archivists? What does it mean to assert not
just the materiality of the archives, but also the materiality of the archivist? This, perhaps, was
one of the reasons for my discomfort (in addition to the “newness” of the location I found myself
in. I was not familiar with Urbana-Champaign. I had not become familiar with it in the way
bodies become familiar with places through repeated visits and by demarcating clear boundaries
and landmarks): I was both deliberately disorienting and re-orienting myself away from the
archives and towards the archivist. I want to point out that by moving towards the archivist, I
wasn’t dismissing the archives themselves. Instead, I wanted to understand the rhetoricity of the
archives through the archivist.
---------In her lecture titled “Rhetorical Powwows: What American Indian Making Can Teach Us
About Histories of Rhetorics” (2010), Malea Powell introduces the term “rhetoricity” in order to
show how things have meaning. She argues that things (such as baskets or wampum strands) are
not the same as text: when we turn things into text, their meaning is lost. Things, by themselves,
have a presence and a meaning; this meaning depends on how a particular cultural uses things;
cultures build stories around things and therefore when something like a basket is used, it carries
with it the weight and meaning of that cultural usage. As Powell explains: “There is a space
between textualization and discernability/signification, a place where story and thingness meet.
We don’t have to turn [a] wampum strand into a text in order for it to have meaning – its
presence invokes meaning, it’s part of an entire structure of meaning that isn’t necessarily textual
but that is nonetheless a discourse available for us to learn from” (6).
An archival space is material (indeed all spaces are material): it has what Powell would

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call a thingness, a tangible reality that can be touched and felt by one’s body. Indeed if we were
to look at recent scholarly collections on archival research (such as Antoinette Burton’s Archive
Stories or Kirsch and Rohan’s Beyond the Archives), we would find many writers trying to
articulate how archival spaces feel and how being in such a space affects how they do research.
An archives is a space built for users (among others): it has a presence and a meaning that acts
upon users. This presence and meaning cannot necessarily be textualized: they exist in the stories
that are built around archival spaces. This presence and meaning are felt in the intersections of
story and space. What Powell calls rhetoricity - the transmission of meanings through a thing - is
located at this intersection. Rhetoricity, then, is the meaning located within an archival space; it
can be seen, felt and heard when someone uses the space. Rhetoricity is kinetic, not passive. It is
dependent on use and on action. It is not a stable set of meanings; instead the rhetoricity of a
thing changes depending on the user. An archival space feels different to different people. We all
bring particular histories and interpretive frames to our experiences within archives. Please note
that I am not saying that archival spaces have a rhetoric or that they are rhetorical: instead what I
am arguing is that archival spaces are not inert, passive things. They are living things, just like
the baskets and the wampum strands that Powell has theorized about. Therefore, archival spaces
have a rhetoricity.
Elsewhere in this dissertation, I have argued that archival records capture both meaning
and materiality. And, in some ways, the meaning and materiality of archival records are deferred
because language and time act upon the archival record. Archival records like archival spaces
also have a thingness and an accompanying rhetoricity. The archival document is more than just
words on a page: it has both an intellectual and a physical structure, an order. When we read
something in an archives, we read not just the words on the page, but we also notice the physical

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state of the document itself: the faded words, the worn out edges of the pages, the weight of the
paper; all of these things tell us something about the record and about the meaning held in the
record. This meaning can be only be seen and felt when we are in the presence of the thing itself,
when we let the thingness of the record act upon us. However, the archival space also acts upon
the user’s experience of the record: reading a record in an archives is a very different experience
than when one reads it in a non-archival space. The archival space itself imbues the record with
an additional layer of meaning: in an archives, in this place where the past, present and future
collide, this space of both secrets and discovery, the record becomes a thing that is both
recovered and discovered. In an archival space, the researcher has the satisfaction of knowing
that she has toiled in some way in order to unearth the information held in the record. There is a
kind of pleasure in this experience that is deferred when the record is discovered elsewhere, in a
space that is not archival.
Despite all the deferrals and delays coded into his work and despite the fact that he is
talking about a very different kind of “archive,” Derrida’s “archive fever” is a very pertinent
concept especially when we talk about rhetoricity. Archive Fever is about the researcher’s
feverish truth for the past; it is about the feverish race to invent the past for the present and the
future. However, this feverish drive takes place within an archives: this fever, this archival illness
would not be the same if it were happening elsewhere. There is joy in this archive fever, there is
a kind of pleasure in being ill for “truth.” Archive Fever, then, is not just a sickness of the mind
or the body; in fact, this fever is more of a fervour. There are emotions and feeling attached to
this fever/fervour (despite Derrida’s best attempts to defer these things). When I talk about the
rhetoricity of the archives, when I talk meaning being coded into an archival space, I am also
talking about the intense emotions – those feelings of joy, anxiety, sorrow etc – that accompany

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all kinds of archival work, that make archival work meaningful and memorable. When I talk
about rhetoricity as a set of meanings that are kinetic and not stable, I am also referring to the
different emotional experiences that people have within archives. An archival space has, both,
intellectual and emotional value (as does an archival record). And despite Derrida’s attempts to
defer the archive’s materiality, he cannot ever get away from the concept of place in his work: he
constantly refers to the archive as an event that takes place or the archive as a thing that “takes
place at the place of originary and structural breakdown…” (11; emphases mine). Whether this
place is material or metaphorical, it is coded with intellectual and emotional value: a place has
value only when it means something to someone. A place is an accumulation of stories. A place
has a rhetoricity that is dependent on use. Therefore, no matter how much Derrida defers the
archive in his work, an archive (be it an institution, a building or a set of documents) is always
built upon another place. An archive means something more when we experience it within a
place.
---------August 2012: Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, New York
As S gives me a tour of the LHA, I am reminded of something Joan Nestle told me during
our interview:
“… the archives has never been a static place. It has never been a quiet place. It doesn’t
mean you know that it can’t work in the quiet, but it has never been a place without
conversation between all its parts. Its private self, its public self, its workers and its users
and sometimes, they are the same. You know women who sit around that table… we are
an artifact. I always said, if we didn’t collect another thing, the archives itself is an
artifact. Just the way it is and the way it functions” (2011).

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For Joan, the LHA is a place of kinetic energy. There is something extraordinary at work when a
researcher or a community member finds herself in the archives of a collective lesbian past. This
“extraordinary something” relates back to the concept of place and rhetoricity that I discussed
earlier: rhetoricity is a set of kinetic meanings that depends on use and interaction. The LHA has
a rhetoricity because it is a place where community members can jointly recover and discover
their past, present and future. This discovery/recovery would not be the same if it were to happen
in a different place or in a different archives. Place means something when it used or practiced.
The meaning and the materiality of the Lesbian Herstory Archives is amplified through the
repeated use of its place. If the archives were to be devoid of people, if it were to be devoid of
use, it would mean something entirely different. Additionally, as Joan points out, the LHA is an
artifact – it has a thingness, a materiality that may not be reproduced in another place. Inside the
Lesbian Herstory Archives, community members come together to make their pasts both
meaningful and material. This materiality, this rhetoricity is lost when we talk or theorize about
the LHA as just another “queer archive” or equate it to other GLBTQ archives: each archives has
a unique constellation of meanings that can only be discovered when we visit it in its place.
In the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the past comingles with the present. It is a place where
feelings and emotions are central to the work of memorializing lesbians who may have remained
nameless. Indeed as Ann Cvetkovich has pointed out, the LHA is “organized as a domestic space
in which all lesbians will feel welcome to see and touch a lesbian legacy… (the LHA) aims to
provide an emotional rather than a narrowly intellectual experience.” She adds that “archives of
emotion” such as the LHA assert the centrality of emotional and affective experience to the
process of remembering the past. Often in the absence of context surrounding many LGBTQ
document and artifacts, emotions often add a much-needed contextual dimension. Cvetkovich

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asserts that “subject to the idiosyncracies of the psyche and the logic of the unconscious,
emotional experience and the memory of it demand and produce an unusual archive, one that
frequently resists the coherence of narrative or that is fragmented and ostensibly arbitrary.
Memories can cohere around objects in unpredictable and the task of the archivist of emotion is
thus an unusual one” (242). While Cvetkovich maintains an arbitrary division between emotion
and intellect, in the context of the LHA, the emotional work of producing and maintaining the
archives has always been an intellectual process and vice-versa. Joan Nestle has pointed out that
the LHA was created to nurture both emotional and intellectual inquiry about a collective lesbian
past. In this view, an emotional lens towards intellectual inquiry would work to dissolve feelings
of cultural deprivation and shame; it would also allow members of lesbian communities to reimagine their alliances based on intellectual and emotional ties.
The LHA was created in 1973 in the home Joan Nestle shared with her then partner,
Deborah Edel. It is a home for the artifacts of lesbian memory; the earliest organizers of the LHA
were afraid that if something wasn’t done to preserve material objects from lesbian lives, these
objects would be lost forever. The mantra “the past is now” has motivated the LHA’s collection
practices for the past 40 years. Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel “agreed that the first ten years of
the Archives would be to build the trust of the communities it was serving. They were
determined to keep all of the services of the Archives free, to not seek government funding, and
to build grassroots support for the project” (“A Brief History of the Lesbian Herstory Archives”).
With the help of thousands of volunteers, the earliest coordinators of the LHA created
presentations that would help them reach out to lesbian community members. However, in the
mid-80s, it soon became apparent that the LHA would need a much bigger space to house its

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expanding collection. With the aid of a bank loan12 and further financial help from the
community, the LHA was able to purchase a home for the archives in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
S’s tour of the LHA’s space includes the first and second floors. The second floor houses
the LHA’s “special collections” (specifically materials donated by lesbian community members
about their lives. The LHA now currently has 400 special collections in their Brooklyn location.
Other more fragile collections are housed off-site in a special storage facility). S also walks me
through the LHA’s collections of periodicals and newspapers. Everything smells dusty here.
There are boxes upon boxes of materials piled everywhere: all of these are materials that are
waiting to be processed by volunteers. A sense of happy disorder pervades this space. When we
walk back to the reading room, I look up at the ceiling and notice a large sign that reads
“Adrienne Rich Road.” This makes me happy. I have always felt a special connection to Rich:
her book Of Woman Born was my first theoretical text; it helped me make sense of and locate
invisible, yet powerful institutions. It was a text that made me feel empowered. I am humbled by
the reminder that Rich had visited the LHA as a researcher. I feel as though I am participating in
something wonderful that I cannot name. This realization makes me feel increasingly silly and
giddy. There is no surface in this archives that does not contain a piece of lesbian history.
Everywhere, I look there are posters, books, buttons and boxes. Even the bathroom is decorated
with various plaques celebrating LHA’s coordinators such as Joan Nestle and Mabel Hampton.
Once we are done with the tour, I ask to look at some of photographs. I am specifically
interested in looking at pictures of the archives when they were housed in Joan Nestle’s
apartment. When I ask S about the photographs, she points me to a large filing cabinet in a
corner of the reading room and tells me to help myself. When I hesitate, she explains that most
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12
While the bank had some reservations about lending money for the archives, the LHA was
able to repay the loan completely.
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researchers who visit the LHA become nervous when they are asked to seek out materials on
their own. She also adds that the LHA does not believe archivists are “servants” to researchers.
There is a definite “do-it-yourself” attitude here. However, there are many signs around the place
asking researchers and community members to be careful with materials. I feel strange walking
into the archives’ special collections and hauling acid-free boxes out by myself. I am sure a stern
voice is going to reprimand me, but it never happens. I feel emboldened by this lack of
discipline.
---------January 2012: University of Illinois Archives, Urbana-Champaign
Inside the library, I still have a few minutes left before my interview. I take the elevator
to the basement. I stride confidently through the corridors, certain that once I turn the next
corner, I will see the long narrow corridor that leads to the archives. However, I slowly realize
that I am lost, again: perhaps I took the wrong elevator. Perhaps I took the wrong turn. I am not
sure. I run into a library staff member who leads me through an intricate maze of rooms and
corridors and finally to the long passageway that leads to the University Archives themselves.
At the end of this long passageway, there are a couple of bulletin boards and a small exhibit case.
On one of the bulletin boards is the picture of a large canyon with the question “How much space
does the University Archives Really Need?” written above it. Space is clearly a point of
contention here. This is something Maher will discuss at length during our interview, but
archival space and the lack of it is a point of debate for many archives.
When I step into the archives, it is almost empty. A few members of the archives’ staff
are working. I see Maher in his office (a cubicle-like structure) on the phone. He waves me in.
The reading room is poorly lit. There are no windows down here. One side of the room is lined

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with metal shelves. I am too nervous (and absent-minded) to take pictures. I walk into the room
and sit down on the chair nearest the door. I feel like the proverbial bull in the china shop as I try
to take off my bulky winter coat without knocking anything off the table next to me. I notice that
the table is littered with documents and boxes. As I wait for Maher to finish his phone call, a
member of the staff approaches me: in a slightly condescending manner, she asks me about the
purpose of my visit. I explain to her that I am there to interview Maher. She instructs me to go sit
in a chair across the room since the chair I am currently occupying is reserved for other
researchers. I do as she requests, but I feel a mixture of anger and embarrassment: I feel
disciplined and humiliated by her condescension. I make note of it in my journal. I try to
rationalize it by telling myself that she is probably wary of students who come into the archives
without any sense of the place’s value. And yet, I remain angry. I wonder if she made wrongful
assumptions about me based on my accent or the color of my skin. I wonder if she was just as
condescending towards other researchers. For a moment, I wonder what I am doing here and
whether my dissertation project had any merit at all. In the space of a single interaction with a
member of the staff, I am beginning to question everything about myself and my work. I wonder
how much the atmosphere of the archives have to do with this feeling. I wonder how the archives
are acting upon my thoughts. When Maher finishes his phone call, he lets me know that he has
reserved a conference room for our interview up in the library. He informs his staff that he’ll be
away for a couple of hours and that they should call him if there is an emergency. As I briefly
wonder what kind of emergencies occur in archival spaces, we leave the archives and head
upstairs.
---------August 2012: Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, New York

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I ask S about how well the temperature and climate in the LHA are moderated to help
preserve the archive’s records. She responds that the building doesn’t have very good safeguards
which is why more fragile materials are stored off-site in a storage facility with better controls.
In general it appears that the LHA has to constantly balance the need for preservation versus the
need for access: the LHA’s mission is to make archival materials immediately available to
community members and to place almost no restrictions on access. Therefore, the onus of
making sure archival materials remain intact falls on researchers. As I looked through some
materials, I felt a great sense of responsibility knowing that these materials were one of a kind. I
had to exercise a great deal of caution and care as I handled documents. But there was also a
great deal of relief in the knowledge that I wasn’t being monitored, that I was trusted by the LHA
to treat the materials carefully.
Indeed, this balance between preservation and access seems to have motivated the
architecture and design of the archives. A floor plan of the archives 13reveals that during the
process of constructing the archives, the coordinators of the LHA wanted to preserve the
“homeness” of the original building. Hence, they left the parlor and the kitchen on the first floor
almost intact. The kitchen and the backyard were envisioned as “center(s) for socializing.” (LHA
Newsletter, 1992) The need to create and maintain a community space alongside an archival
space motivated the re-design of the house. The LHA seems to have been constructed as a place
for people as well as archival objects. It is not just a place for research, but a place for
community. A heavy emphasis on socializing and bringing people together indicates the LHA’s
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
!Available here: http://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/tourfloor.html. The first floor houses
the LHA’s book collection. It also has a dining/reading room area, a kitchen and a bathroom. The
second floor houses the periodicals, newsletters, objects such as clothing and also the LHA’s
special collections. The LHA’s website also offers a “virtual tour” of the building.
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commitment to creating joint communal memories. The objects in the LHA have greater value
because they are actively used to remember and invent the past. The design of the LHA’s space
enacts Joan Nestle’s idea that the archives cannot be an isolated building, separate from the
community that created it. Instead, the archives should enact the cultural values of the people
who use it the most.
On a second level, the LHA’s design also affirms its commitment to being a place where
one’s bodily desires co-mingle with one’s intellectual longings. As a queer archives, the LHA
welcomes all forms of lesbian sexual expression: sexuality is not something one needs to check
at the door. Indeed, for many people who visit the LHA, it is a place where they re-discover their
desire through archival objects. As Joan Nestle explained to me, the process of archival research
is an “erotic exchange.” As she put it during our interview:
“There’s a moment of welcome to the archival experience, put it that way. And for me, I
always saw it as a moment of seduction. And people say “ Oh Joan, you see everything
sexually!” But it was sexual and it was wonderful and I used, you know, one of my lovers
grew out of this experience but you know trying to seduce her with watermelon which
you should never have in an archives anyway. But it was safe, it was in the kitchen. But I
always saw the act of welcoming people into the archives as another form of my
sexuality. For better or for worse and people loved it, people stayed – I didn’t mean that I
jumped on people, that’s not what I mean, but I loved serving food. That makes us
different also because it was an apartment you know. We always served food in the
kitchen, I mean. But there is a … to me there is an erotic encounter that happens, for me,
when someone comes and says “do you have?” and I say “yes” and “you are welcome to

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it.” That is an incredible moment, of an erotic exchange that is the desire to know and the
desire to give” (2011).
The fact that the LHA exists in a home, the fact that an archivist/coordinator comes out to greet
and welcome visitors continues this tradition of “seduction.” Indeed, all archival research is
borne out of some desire that is felt in the body: there is a sense of immense bodily gratification
and elation in being allowed to access that which we desire. At the LHA, such desires are not
condemned as deviant or wrong: instead, the LHA collects particular archival
materials because they are representative of lesbian sexual desire across many generations. By
preserving these materials, the LHA preserves and affirms the pervasiveness of lesbian sexuality
and desire even during times when they were deemed “absent.” When researchers and
community members look for materials at the LHA, they are accessing and exploring not just
memories, but also the desires of lesbians who came before them. As such, in the context of the
LHA, archival research is an erotic encounter because there is always an exchange of desires
amongst researchers/community members and the archival materials they handle.
The LHA is designed to not frustrate, but seduce and gratify. Archive fever, in the
context of the LHA, is a very different experience: it is not a feverish search that requires
researchers to punish their bodies in order to fulfill an intellectual longing. Instead, the LHA is a
place where the body is acknowledged as the space where desires expresses themselves.
Allowing researchers access to materials is a way of letting the body’s desires be acknowledged
and fulfilled.
January 2012: University of Illinois Archives, Urbana-Champaign
Space has a rhetoricity. It acts upon us. As I reflect on my experiences in the archives at
UIUC, I can distinctly recall a flood of emotions ranging from nervousness to anger to elation.

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Archival spaces are built in particular ways in order to both preserve documents and encourage
researchers to visit. Certain areas within archives are meant for researchers whereas other areas
are out of our reach. Our bodies are made to tend towards certain archival objects and away from
others. When I reflect on how I was told to move away from one table and towards another, I
saw that as a moment of the archives exerting its discipline on me. And yet, despite their status
as places that exert discipline, archives are also welcoming places, the point of contact between
the past, the present and the future. They are constructed in a way to facilitate this contact. When
I asked Maher to reflect on the construction of archival spaces, He spoke about what it means to
deliberately create an archives instead of merely finding “leftover” room for it:
“In an archives, you have a function, you have to store the stuff for permanent retention
and protect it. You have to be able to receive new material that comes in, you have to
then prepare it so that it can later be used and you have to then serve it up for users. I also
think you have to have an ability to do public engagement and you have to administer all
those things… those are probably some other functions. But so that when you are
thinking about planning a space all those factors need to be brought into play; Archives in
American universities really took off as a field developed in the 1960s and so various
archives were kind of put in, a lot of universities, especially public universities faced their
centennials in the 1960s and that was a impetus for a lot of them, there was something
existing before. But they were kind of given leftover space, basements and attics - not
sorry attics – but basements and top floors of buildings because they were not going to be
high use, not perceived to be going to be high use. We don’t want, we can’t take people
out of the reference room and put archives in there. And they were sometimes given
space that were released from other purposes. University of Missouri had a lot of its

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storage space and its archive space in an old dormitory. Dormitories are fine if you are
housing students and you need a bunch of old rooms. They don’t work very well when
you are trying to deal with several people at the same time and you know, organizing
stuff like that. That’s where that comes into play, but to realize that there are these
different if you will personas of what an archives does of keeping –that’s not necessarily
analogical - getting, preparing, keeping, making available and promoting” (2012).
In this response, I hear Maher articulating the idea that archival spaces need to reach out to
audiences and they do this by constructing deliberate “personas.” To me, this is a rhetorical
impulse: the need to relate to the community through spatial organization and configuration. An
archives is, therefore, not an “accidental” space. It is always meant for an audience and it is
always meant to help store documents and artifacts over the long term. An archives is not just an
inert space where things end up by accident; there always need to be a careful process of design
and planning before an archival spaces becomes an archival space.
Later in the interview, I asked Maher to talk out loud about the idea of constructing an
ideal archival space. In response, he reflected about the process of creating an archival space
within the Horticultural Field Lab building on the UIUC campus. This building serves as an
extension of the University Archives and also houses the archives of several organizations
including the American Library Association (ALA) and the National Council of Teachers of
English (NCTE). Maher drew a map of this building in order to explain its various
characteristics. I asked him to reflect on the design of the building:
“One of the good things about the Horticultural Field Lab building Archives Research
Center, is that it has a loading dock at the back, you gotta have a loading dock, but the
loading dock is covered on the outside and then on the inside of the building is a huge,

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kinda like, if you will, at the back a lobby just inside the loading dock so that there is
adequate space to unload a big truck with lots of boxes before you can get them on to
shelves and do triage right there, covered, out of the way…. This is actually ALA
archives here… which is ours. The center of the building, the part that you see most from
the street, is three stories high and it’s a book stacks area, it’s a stack area with a
refrigerated vault. So this therefore when you want to keep the temperature and humidity
very controlled is surrounded not by an outdoor wall, but by indoor walls so that means
that it doesn’t have as much problems with condensation on the outside in the summer
time and on the inside etc, all sorts of environmental things become easier to control
because it’s got the whole envelope of the building even though it’s an older building. A
new building you can build much tighter than you can with this… The public comes into
reference room, this lobby… one of the things I like about it is that it can be used for
exhibits and public events and its big, high ceilinged and so on, just has a concrete floor,
they never finished it off with terrazzo or tile or anything like that. In terms of layout,
there’s a lot of assets here. It’s probably got too many little cubicles broken off into
offices on the side, it does allow us to find people who are focusing on student records or
focusing on in this case, American Library Association’s archives or Law School
association’s archives in their little separate work spaces there. There’s a conference
room down in here and so forth. It’s this general layout where you get… you know you
wanna have a lobby where you can do exhibitions and public events because archives
need to connect with the public and public engagement is really important. You do need
to have a reference room. Then the stack area is then in the middle which means it is
accessible to all these other sources. There’s lots of other designs I could come up with

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that might have this, and of course one of the problems here is, one stack area, this is not
enough space to take all the collections we need, so we need all three floors, so you have
have to the elevator here etc etc…” (2012).
Listening to this explanation of the construction of this space, I am reminded again of Powell’s
notion of rhetoricity. Much like baskets or wampum strands, archival spaces are made for use,
for archival staff and researchers. These spaces have a function and deliberate design that
promotes community engagement. Each archival space is different because the needs of its
community of users are different. Further, the UIUC archives is a space built over another space:
the horticultural field lab building was not originally intended to be an archival space. Instead it
had to be deliberately converted into an archives. This is not a metaphor. A place does not turn
into an archival space by merely depositing a bunch of old artifacts and documents inside it. An
archives, as Mr. Maher pointed out during our interview, is not a pile. Instead an archives has an
order and a structure. This structure has to be practiced: it involves a complex set of appraisal,
arrangment, description and preservation tactics. It is also true that an archives can be many
things: it can be a collection of documents, a building, a function, an institution or even a
metaphor. I am arguing that these descriptions are not mutually exclusive: an archives is at once
all of these things. It is both materiality and metaphor, it works at an intersection of these things.
An archives can be a material collection of documents within a building housed in an institution
and a set of immaterial stories surrounding those documents, buildings and stories. This is where
meaning resides: between the material and immaterial, between the story and the spaces.
-------August 2012: Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, New York
There is so much I want to do, see and accomplish at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. I only

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have about three hours to spend here. Given that I do not want to overwhelm myself with
information, I draw strict boundaries: I tell myself that I can only look at specific materials that
would help me write this chapter. In addition to the pictures, I am also interested in looking at
materials from the controversial 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality14. I tell S about this and
she informs me that the archives has the original program from the conference. I grin broadly
and tell her that I would like to see it. She takes me upstairs and into the Special Collections
room. I tell S that I am excited. My heart is beating loudly in my chest. I can sense all the blood
in my body rushing to my face, my neck, my head. I feel a sense of … intense pleasure. I can’t
stop grinning. She hands me the materials, including a copy of Joan Nestle’s original typewritten
remarks at the conference15. My hands shake as I take the documents from hers; I make copies of
everything. I am not sure if I’ll ever use any of these materials in my dissertation. I just know I
need to have them.
I am content here, I think to myself. I am content to just be in this place, even if I have
nothing to look at or to do. There is a sense of safety here. I know my presence here would not
be questioned even if I didn’t have any research to do. I could just be here. For once, as a
researcher, I am free to let my body dictate how I go about my work. I am free to let my body
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
14
In 1982, as part of the “The Scholar and Feminist” series, Barnard College organized a
conference entitled “Towards a Politics of Sexuality.” This conference exemplified the moment
in which the debate over women’s sexuality became more prominent and pronounced. This
debate is commonly referred to as the “sex wars” since it polarized people who felt that
particular representation of women’s sexuality reproduced patriarchal forms of oppression. Joan
Nestle had been invited to speak at this conference, along with others such Carole Vance, Amber
Hollibaugh, Gayle Rubin etc. The group “Women Against Pornography” (WAP) had not been
invited to participate in the conference because the organizers of the conference felt that the antipornography moment was already very visible and dominant. They wanted to make space for
other people who were not as visible. On the day of the conference, WAP organized a protest in
order to explain their point of view to conference attendees (Hamilton 1993).
15
Titled “The Fem Question,” this talk was later published in Carol Vance’s edited collection
“Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality”!
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feel a sense of pleasure that has almost always been suppressed or absent in other instances of
archival research. It is okay for me to let my emotions dictate what kinds of materials I choose to
take away from this place. But soon my time is up and I must leave the archives. Before I go, I
invest in a Lesbian Herstory Archives tote bag. And then, seized by another impulse, I leave the
rest of my cash as a donation to the archives and walk out the door.
In the next chapter, “Writing the Archives: Context, Culture, Composition” I pay
attention to the way in which finding aids create identities and narratives about archival
collections. 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 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. Researchers often consult finding aids before delving into archival collections.
Finding aids frame researchers’ knowledge of archival collections since they provide contextual
information about how and where records were produced. As such, the composition of archival
finding aids has a material effect on researchers’ work within archives. 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. As such, these communities are redefining western notions of context.

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CHAPTER 4
WRITING THE ARCHIVES: CONTEXT, CULTURE, COMPOSITION
I am at Special Collections located in the basement of Michigan State University’s
library. I am here to look through the newsletters of the Lesbian Herstory Archives for an article
I am writing16: it feels strange to be doing archival research about another archives. I am
physically removed from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and yet here I am, trying to create a
sense of its place in this other archival space. As I peruse the newsletters, I try to take copious
notes on my computer. I also try to photograph some issues of the newsletter: particularly, I am
interested in capturing Joan Nestle’s words about the early days of the LHA, since her life with
the archives was going to be a major focus of my article. But soon, I am distracted from my notetaking endeavors: the physicality of the newsletters itself is enticing. When I had looked at the
brief description of the newsletters offered online on the library’s website, I wasn’t made aware
that the earliest newsletters of the LHA were held together by a single stapler pin. I did not know
that for a long time, the LHA’s newlsetters were composed on a typewriter (conceivably in Joan
Nestle’s home) and corrections were letter appended to the text often by hand. How do I capture
all of these physical details in my notes, I wonder? How do I capture a sense of the early days of
the archives by merely recording the text in my journal? Eventually, I give up on taking notes
and just ask for photocopies of the newsletters. While the photocopies are not quite the same as
the originals themselves, they help me read the words on the page in their context rather than as
abstracted thoughts.
Recently, archivist Mark Matienzo tweeted that “library authority control is almost
exclusively about control of names of bibliographic entities; archival [authority] focuses on
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16
The Special Collections at MSU has copies of the LHA’s newsletters. These newsletters were
widely circulated by the LHA in order to reach a larger audience.
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context” (2012). My experience with the LHA newsletters within MSU’s Special Collections
was indicative of this dichotomy: in the MSU library’s catalog, the entry about the LHA’s
newsletters17 was restricted to cursory descriptions. It included elements such as the name of the
author, title, frequency of publication, number of volumes etc. This description seeks to
faithfully record details about the newsletters themselves, but doesn’t necessarily give us a sense
of the context surrounding the production of these letters. For instance, what exactly did the
LHA’s newsletters seek to record? What purpose did they serve? As I look at the library’s
description, I wonder if I might have approached the newsletters differently if I had had a better
sense of their context. I begin to wonder how archival description - with its focus on context –
produces a different orientation towards research. To what extent does archival description – as
exemplified in archival finding aids and related catalogs – refocus our attention from the words
on the page towards the context of the document’s production? That is, how does it allow us to
see a document, not as a solitary artifact, but as being located in a network of related
information?
In this chapter, I trace the following claim: archival description seeks to preserve the
rhetorical context around material artifacts: that is, archival compositions - such as finding aids seek to describe and preserve both the intellectual content and context of archival records.
Fundamentally, one of the purposes of archives is the long-term preservation of records.
Archivists are experts in the preservation of records that are no longer used on a day-to-day basis
but may still hold some enduring historical value. So, as researchers, when we read a finding aid
we are in fact looking at contextual descriptions of concrete material artifacts. Archival
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17
The MSU catalog entry about the LHA’s newsletters is available here:
http://magic.msu.edu/search~S39?/tlesbian+herstory+archives/tlesbian+herstory+archives/1,5,7,
B/frameset&FF=tlesbian+herstory+archives+newsletter&1,1,/indexsort=!

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description tries to not simply privilege the content or the intellectual matter contained in a
document. Instead, this is a kind of writing that seeks to capture a record’s context and
materiality as well.
Archival description also tries to represent the physical location of a single record in
relation to other records that are housed within archives. So a finding aid does the work of
reasserting the context of archival records alongside other records. Additionally, in an archival
space, meaning may not reside in a single record, but can be inferred by locating that document
in relation to other records. That is, in archives, information literally resides in a network of
material records. Finding aids are rhetorical artifacts that allow us to see information in their
entire context even if they don’t give us specific item-level details about particular records. A
better understanding of archival writing and description would serve to enhance our knowledge
of archives in general and would aid researchers greatly when they work in archival spaces. As
Wendy Duff and Catherine Johnson (2002) have argued, researchers often turn to finding aids
first when they visit archives. Such aids give researchers a good idea of what is available in a
particular collection, even if item-level descriptions are not present. In this chapter, I will also
argue that archival writing is culturally-situated. Particularly, in the last section, I will trace how
Western archival practices have been complicated and re-imagined by LGBTQ and indigenous
communities.
Creating a Record through Archival Description
The most basic “unit” of an archival space is a record. Pearce-Moses (2005) notes that a
“record” usually means documents although “collections of records may contain artifacts and
books.” Records are stored within acid-free boxes, usually in the order in which they were
created. While records may be housed within archives, they are not necessarily synonymous with

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archives. Additionally, a record also has “fixed content, structure, and context.” The idea of
“fixed content” implies that the record has some data (in the form of text, images, graphics,
sounds etc) that can be repeated, recalled or used as evidence at some later date. “Fixed” means
that this data is not changeable or unstable. The record must have integrity and it needs to serve
as consistent proof of past activities and events. In our age of electronic data, even if a record is
created on a “mutable form” (such as a computer program), it is considered “fixed” if it yields
the same result or data over and over again. The “structure of a record” refers to its physical and
internal organization: regardless of whether it contains words on a plain piece of paper or
complex charts and graphs, the structure allows the content of the record to become intelligible.
Additionally, a record does not indicate a single sheet of paper: if a record’s structure and
content exceed its boundaries, it must all be held together. Lastly, the “context” of the record
refers to “organizational, functional, and operational circumstances surrounding a record’s
creation, receipt, storage, or use. Context includes a record’s date and place of creation,
compilation, or issue, and its relationship to other records.” While records may be transferred to
different media or stored in a different format (e.g. paper records are often turned into
microfilm), the record must be stable enough to endure such changes and still convey its original
content, structure and context. Typically, archives that are well-funded and staffed are able to
both describe and digitize their records for users.
Rhetorically speaking, the idea of preserving the content, structure and context also
preserves the intention behind the creation of the record. A record is generally a text that
originally had a purpose that might have resulted in an action or an event of some kind.
Preserving that original purpose and intention might also help other scholars piece together a
narrative about how events of the past might have taken place. So, essentially, in preserving the

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content, structure and context, archivists are allowing us to see that records don’t exist in
isolation or in a vacuum: records are always in conversation with each other and with other
collections of records. They must be read as part of a larger narrative about a particular
organization or event.
Archives depend on writing in order to organize the records in their holdings. In the
Standards for Archival Description (1994) developed by the Society of American Archivists,
“description” is defined as “the process of capturing, collating, analyzing, and organizing any
information that serves to identify, manage, locate, and interpret the holdings of archival
institutions and explain the contexts and records systems from which those holdings were
selected.” Such archival writing and description is useful not only for users, but for archivists
themselves as they manage the holdings in their care. While this form of description is similar to
bibliographic description, it is different in the sense that it relies heavily on the context of the
record rather than the content. While describing books, we often rely on the cover page for
publication information, but archival records lack such information: hence the record is always
described in relation to what it is next to, or what it is part of. Further as Daniel Pitti (1999) has
explained: “In contrast to the published items collected by libraries, the identifiable object of
interest in the archive is a complex body of interrelated, unique materials. The fond18s coheres
and is identifiable because all of its records or papers share a common provenance, derived from
one source and context” (n.p.). While a library may have several copies of the same book, often
these books are not unique (since any one copy may serve the interest of researchers); however
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Terry Cook describes the concept of fonds as: “The fonds is thus the conceptual 'whole' that
reflects an organic process in which a records creator produces or accumulates series of records
which themselves exhibit a natural unity based on shared function, activity, form or use. It is at
the heart of this process or relationship linking the creator to the records that the essence
of respect des fonds can be found and must be protected” (33).
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the materials in an archives are unique because they often don’t have multiple copies and were
created in a particular context that may not be reproducible.
Lucia Duranti (1993) has argued that description “has been one of the means to
accomplish the only two permanent archival functions: (1) preservation (physical, moral and
intellectual) and (2) communication of archival documents, that is, of the residue and evidence of
societal actions and transactions” (52). She also argues that “there is no universally recognized
conceptualization of archival description, no steady progress in its use, and not even linear
development in its application. Description has been carried out or not carried out depending on
the specific needs and conditions, attitudes and requirements, and its products have consistently
reflected the conceptions about archives held by the society of the time” (53). Description, then,
is a culturally-situated process that reflects the needs and resources of particular communities.
The manner in which records are described are dependent on what particular communities view
as important and useful. In the Western archival tradition, elements such as the name of the
creator, the title of the record and a brief contextual history are usually provided, but these
standards are not universal and may differ across various communities.
Archival finding aids are one of the most visible products of the archival writing process.
Heather MacNeil (2012) has defined the term “finding aid” as “any tool that aims to provide
users with intellectual and/or physical access to holding of archival institutions.” She
characterizes finding aids as a rhetorical genre system that commonly contains elements that
allow users to access and understand archival holdings. She argues that finding aids are largely
meant for users and most archives operate under the assumptions that users understand the genre
of the finding aid. In other words, it is commonly assumed that users know that finding aids are

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meant to provide contextual information about a set of records rather than direct information at
the item-level. Pitti adds:
“Archival description represents … a complex body of materials, frequently in more than
one form or medium, sharing a common provenance. The description involves a complex
hierarchical and progressive analysis. It begins by describing the whole, then proceeds to
identify and describe sub-components of the whole, and sub-components of subcomponents, and so on. Frequently, but by no means always, the description terminates
with a description of individual items. The description emphasizes the intellectual
structure and content of the material, rather than their physical characteristics” (n.p.).
Finding aids, then, move from the general to the specific. Often finding aids may also just
provide information about the structure of the records, or merely the content or simply the
physical location of the records. In such instances, the user who is looking for very particular
information has to know that archival records exist in relation to other records and therefore must
use finding aids as the initial point of contact that could lead to other connected resources. As
such, reading finding aids can be a befuddling experience for new users; in such instances,
MacNeil (2012) adds that the archivist “has to play a mediating role between the user and the
descriptive system” (12).
For instance, consider the finding aid linked here:
http://archives.library.illinois.edu/archon/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=1815&q=ncte
The above link is that of a finding aid that describes the collected publications of the Conference
on College Communication and Composition (CCCC) since 1957. These records are currently
housed at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign. As finding aids go, this is a fine

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example since it provides enough metadata19 about the creator of the record, the date of
acquisition and also links the user to related records. On the same webpage, the user can also
find a detailed contextual description of the records themselves. In the description, the user is
given general information about CCCC’s various publications. This finding aid is structured in a
way that allows us to approach CCCC publication records in a particular context. For instance,
the above description clarifies what the CCCC does and provides pertinent information regarding
the publications produced by this organization. The records are described in a way that reflects
their arrangement within the archives themselves20. Thus this finding aid preserves the original
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19
In the archival context, the idea of metadata is a standard that has emerged in response to
emerging digital technologies and encoded archival description. Increasing levels of information
require more context; so in a sense, metadata constitutes information about information or data
about data. The Minnesota State Archives offers the following explanation about metadata on its
website: “(Metadata) is used to describe an object (digital or otherwise), its relationships with
other objects, and how the object has been and should be treated over time. Metadata allows
users to locate and evaluate data without each person having to discover it anew with every use.
A structured format and a controlled vocabulary, which together allow for a precise and
comprehensible description of content, location, and value, are its basic elements.” The concept
of metadata allows us to understand a record’s “internal” information such as date of publication
or authorship or even accompanying data such as the publisher’s name, place of publication etc.
On a deeper level, metadata allows us to see how the record exists in relation to other records; it
might also enable an understanding of how the record has changed or been altered since its
creation: if the context around archival records are subject to change because of the way they are
described by the archivist, then this new context needs to become a part of the record’s narrative.
So in a sense, metadata allows for an increased level of awareness about the context in which a
record was produced and the context in which it was changed or altered. The standards for
metadata may vary from one context to the next. However, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
has provided a scheme for the stabilization of metadata standards across different contexts. In
this scheme, the following information elements must be included: title, creator, subject,
description, publisher, contributor, date, type, format, identifier, source, language, relation,
coverage, and rights. Other elements of information may be included by different agencies in
order to provide more specific context.
20

This online finding aid is a good example of how Encoded Archival Description (EAD) works:
With the emergence of digital technologies, Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is a second
standard has emerged in order to broaden the scope of archival description online. The SAA’s
application guidelines for EAD (1999) defines it as “a data structure standard for preserving the
hierarchy and designating the content of descriptive guides to archival holding worldwide. It
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order and arrangement of the physical records. So even if researchers are unable to find a box of
records physically, the same order of records is represented online. By providing this context and
by replicating the original order and arrangement of the records in the finding aid, it becomes
clear that CCCC publications do not exist in a vacuum. Instead, they are a part of a unique
constellation of publications produced by a single organization which caters to teachers of
college English. Anyone who wishes to research a specific publication or journal would have all
this information and context before she even gets to the physical collections themselves. Contrast
this finding aid with an entry from a library catalog: instead of providing descriptions about a
specific item or a journal (as libraries often do), this finding aid provides overarching
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
enable Internet delivery of these guides and also ensures their permanence by providing a stable,
non-proprietary data storage environment from which data can be transferred to other software
environments as necessary. In technical terms, EAD comprises a Document Type Definiton
(DTD) that is written following the syntactic rules of Standard Generalized Markup Language
(SGML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML)” (2). Given that most researchers depend on
the internet to deliver finding aids electronically, EAD provides archival repositories “with a
means of establishing an effective, accessible, and stable presence for their holdings information.
EAD accommodates variations in the length and content of finding aids within and among
repositories, and preserves in electronic form the complex, hierarchically structured descriptive
information found in archival repositories and registers, while also enabling the documents to be
navigated and searched in ways that their printed counterparts cannot.” (Feeney 99). The EAD
project was initiated in 1993 in Berkeley, California20: Daniel Pitti headed the project and
developed requirements that would allow electronic finding aids to represent information in a
way that physical finding aids could not. In particular, encoded archival description allows users
to move through finding aids in a way that maintains the document’s hierarchical nature (since
finding aids are written in order to reflect original arrangement or the fonds); however users are
allowed access to information at all levels and may be able to trace how different elements in a
finding aid are connected to one another because of their hierarchical arrangement. Thus, it
allows users to read information about records in their own context rather than in isolation. EAD
also, however, allows user to find specific records and retrieve them electronically. In sum, the
EAD project allowed for the stabilization of archival description in online spaces by preserving
the original order and arrangement of records. Thus even if researchers are unable to find a box
of records physically, the same order of records is represented online. While some records may
be digitized and found online in their entirety, this may not be the case for all archival records.
Even so, encoded archival description allows finding aids to convey a specific record’s
information in relation to other records. As I have already mentioned, archival arrangement is
mean to reflect information in context rather than information in isolation.
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information about CCCC as an organization and the related publications it produced. As such,
this finding aid represents a very different genre of writing that is intended for the purpose of
reading information within a given context.
The archives at the University of Illinois also provide box-level and folder-level
descriptions of many of their archival holdings. While these descriptions don’t necessarily
narrate detailed bibliographic information about every single item, they still give researchers a
pretty good idea of what they can expect to find in the physical boxes themselves. Such detailed
box/folder-level descriptions may not be provided by all archives: it depends on the resources
available at the archives’ disposal. What we get here is a chronological list of all the CCCC
publications starting from 1957. This chronological list of publications serves to create a
narrative about CCCC as an organization: it creates a sense of the kinds of issues valued by the
organization. While this list highlights certain details – such as conference proceedings and
issues of style and linguistics – it perhaps does not include other issues that the organization was
dealing with between 1957 and 1974. A researcher must therefore think of this list and indeed
the entire finding aid as a rhetorical artifact that makes visible certain aspects about CCCC and
obscures others. The physical boxes themselves might contain more information that is not
represented in the finding aid. Documents such as archival finding aids are rhetorical because
they create particular personas for people and organizations by highlighting certain events: we
cannot think of such documents as accurate or holistic representations. Instead, when we look at
descriptions such as the ones in the above image, we should remember that it represents only one
outlook about CCCC as an organization. Indeed, Heather MacNeil (2005) has also argued that
archival finding aids are socio-cultural constructs that reflect the prejudices and biases of the
archivists who compiled them. She critiques the positivistic assumption that archivists offer

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impartial representations of records; she points out that finding aids are “shaped by particular
ideologies and intentionalities, which in turn shape what they include and exclude, what they
emphasize and what they ignore” (274). She lays bare the idea that archivists often function as
“editors” who make culturally-situated decisions about what goes into finding aids. Therefore,
such finding aids are not “neutral” and researchers have to read them rhetorically in order to
discover records that may be occluded by such documents.
Tom Nesmith (2002) further echoes MacNeil’s ideas about writing and archival work. As
he puts it, “Seeing archives… means seeing archivists anew- as visible, active, agents in the
construction of this history and the societal knowledge it shapes” (41) He even suggests linkages
between archiving and authoring:
“…any work of archives-making is a type of authoring or creating of the archival records.
What does it mean to author? Authoring means much more than inscribing with pen,
keyboard, or camera. There are many acts of records creation that are not solely literal acts
of inscription by an initial inscriber. The idea that archives play an authoring role is based
on the view that a record is a meaningful communication, which means it is a physical
object, plus an understanding or representation of that object. Some of what makes a record
meaningful is inscribed in it by those who literally made it, but most of what makes a
record intelligible lies outside its physical borders in its context of interpretation.
Archivists, who do much to shape this context, therefore share in authoring the record”
(32)
Nesmith works to dispel the myth of objectivity that is often tied to the work of the archivist. For
him, archivists are creators and authors of records; the archivist’s work of description and
narration is a form of recontextualization: this work creates a new narrative around the record.

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MacNeil has also argued that archivists are producers of contexts: context is always invented.
Archivists make conscious decisions about how much context they include; and no matter how
much context “archivists try to include… something will always remain outside of it; and… the
decision they make about what to include and exclude are, inevitably, ideological” (MacNeil
2011, 190). Context, therefore, is not a neutral construct: so when we read finding aids, we
should be aware that there may be other ways of contextualizing the information provided by
such descriptions. Indeed, many theorists have also suggested that by merely turning a document
into a archival record, the archivist is in fact “elevating” the status of that document: when
something become “archival,” it becomes a valued commodity and this in effect changes the way
the context of the document and the way it is read. Therefore, archival processes are not
innocent: even activities such as appraisal and arrangement are value-laden and they work to
both de-contextualize and re-contextualize records. As Nesmith argues, far from being “neutral,”
the archivist’s practices become part of the history of archival records. Margaret Hedstrom
(2002) has advocated for a great sense of transparency when it comes to archival work. She
suggests that “rather than obscuring the interpretive aspects [of their work], archivists should
expose and articulate these interpretive acts, capture and structure information about them, and
leave as many traces as possible about interpretive frames” (43). She also asked archivists to be
aware of the power structures within which they operate and share their power with users. For
Hedstrom, such transparency would allow users to understand why certain kinds of contextual
information were privileged. It would give users greater agency to interpret both the evidence
and context left behind by archivists.
Brien Brothman (1991) has argued that archival writing is about creating “order” out of
the seeming “disorder” of information that floods archival spaces. Drawing upon anthropologist

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Mary Douglas’ ideas about “order,” “disorder,” “cleanliness” and “dirt,” Brothman asserts that
the archivist’s task is to create some kind of neat meaning out of the flood of documents and
artifacts that are often deposited into archival repositories. Writing is a large part of this
meaning-making process (81). For instance, the finding aids pictured above represents a very
“neat” version of CCCC’s organizational concerns. Archival description is often the process of
taking messiness out and imposing an artificial sense of order. Indeed, archives are messy places,
but when we look at neat descriptions offered in finding aids, we don’t see the mess. It is often
the archivists’ job to create boundaries between the messiness of the past and the seemingly
ordered present of the researcher. Brothman (1999) has turned to the Derridean project of
deconstruction in order to show the constructedness of archival projects; through deconstructive
readings of archives, he tries to dispel the illusion of objectivity that are often associated with
archives. He has written persuasively about the connections between writing and archival
practices:
“…it is necessary to understand that Derrida simultaneously construes writing as one of
several important metaphors for archiving, and archiving as one of numerous metaphors
for writing. It will also help to keep in mind that the notions of both writing and archiving
are metaphorically associated with concepts of memory and preservation, and vice versa,
and even with the formation and operation of consciousness. This should not come as a
surprise, as Derrida seems to believe that language unavoidably carries metaphorical
resonance – and thereby never quite yields the literal meanings its users intend to express.
Thus, when Derrida writes about archives, the discussion stretches beyond and beneath
our profession’s conception of archives. By the same token, when he dwells on the
thematics of “writing,” when he introduces seemingly recondite notions of ‘difference,’

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‘trace,’ and ‘origins,’ and when he deals with the issues of ‘presence’ and ‘absence,’
being and meaning… he is addressing concerns that ultimately carry consequences for
the archival community’s conception of what the preservation of records actually
accomplishes, and what significance lies within and beyond the language archivists use to
enunciate their purposes.” (66)
Here, Brothman is pointing to an important link between archives and writing: both these
technologies emerged coterminously (at least in Europe). Writing and archives share the same
concerns: the preservation of memory through the meticulous invention, arrangement and
description of the materials of memory. For those of us in Rhetoric and Composition, this is an
important set of linkages: our canons of writing are similar to the canons of “archiving.”
Archivists are also concerned with the processes of arrangement, invention and description: they
are trying to understand how writing may be used to describe and re-inscribe the materiality of
archival records. Archival records are material. They possess a “thingness” and a concreteness
that archival writing attempts to capture. This materiality is lost when we speak of archives in
metaphorical terms or when we conflate them with discursive or theoretical notions of archives.
As a profession and as a discipline, archival science attempts to preserve and reinstate the
materiality of records.
If writing and archiving share the concern of preserving memory, they both depend on
language; as Brothman points out in the above quote, language works through deferrals, through
the postponement of meaning: in Rhetoric and Composition, as teachers and researchers of
writing, we constantly grapple with such deferrals and postponements. We are forever caught up
in this constant interplay of figuring out what things mean in a given time and place before there
is a change of context. Our work, in so many ways, is the preservation of meaning within a given

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context. However, for archivists, this play with language and meaning takes on another level of
significance: archival writing is not just about the deferral of meaning, it is also about the
deferral of materiality. Archival writing depends on language to not just capture the context of a
record, but also its material presence. However, by merely making a record “archival,” the
archivist changes not just the context of the record, but also makes its materiality all the more
significant. And in making the archival record significant, the archivist must impose restrictions
on who can access the record and under what conditions. Thus, the meaning and the materiality
of the archival record are constantly deferred.
For Brothman, “archiving” as a practice – because it is emerges out of writing–
necessarily “depends on tracing”: as he explains, the idea of a trace suggests both the presence
and the absence of something from a record. Archival records are necessarily “incomplete”
traces because they are created through language and always signify the absence of something
else. So if archiving is a form of tracing, then as Brothman puts it, tracing also “induces
archiving.” If archives try to make visible certain aspects of the past, then something about this
past is always lost or missing from archival records which further induces the need to find and
archive more materials that may account for this “gap.” Additionally, archives and archival
records are often considered to be objects outside of time; in a sense, they are considered
“timeless,” or not subject to the ravages of time. However, time works on archival records in two
ways: first, as Brothman, suggests “writing… is the most obvious form of temporal delay, for
signs in all their forms engender delay. No word, no sign, ever “takes time off” to remain fully
present and self-identical. Signs unavoidably become swept up in the movement of delay and
difference, of traces leaving traces” (72). Time, therefore, works on the archival record through
language: it works on a metaphorical level to delay meaning, to never allow the past to be known

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as it was because the past itself is a linguistic construction that is further constructed through
linguistic delays (Notice how I use the word “construct” only to deconstruct it? Notice how I use
a temporarily stable sign in order to show its permanent instability? For a moment, allow me to
insert my own material presence here: allow me to point out that, at this moment, my very
material head hurts).
On a second level, time works on the archival record in a very material way. The archival
record is “preserved” for the future; the general fallacy holds that this preservation is supposed to
make the record timeless (notice the linguistic tautology here: pre-serve. Something that is
served before; and yet the archival record is generally served after, right?). I am not arguing that
archival preservation strategies are not useful, but I am arguing that time still affects the record:
the record grows old, it wears at the edges, the words on its surface eventually fade. The
researcher steps into the archives in order to discover the record as it was, as it used to be and yet
this discovery is always mediated through the passage of time. The materiality of the record has
changed: time has worked upon it in such a way that it cannot convey its origins any more. It can
only convey what has happened to it over time.
As Brothman points out, even though the stability of language, meaning and materiality
are not guaranteed, archives and archival records are still necessary and useful. He writes: “The
survival of communities depends on our capacity to stick labels on things. It is how we control –
and make – our environments” (73). This ability to control and make depends on the context: in
other words, the emergence of archival spaces depends on exigent circumstances. Archival
spaces are not acontextual or timeless: archives emerge in order to make claims about the
presence and visibility of particular communities. They are made in order to argue for the

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historical existence of these communities. In other words, archives are rhetorical. They enact the
cultural logics of particular communities and cultures for very specific purposes and audiences.
Complicating Archival Description and Decolonizing Archives:
Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz (2002) have pointed out that archives are social constructs
that serve particular political stakeholders. As Cook and Schwartz put it, “Their origins lie in the
information needs and social values of the rulers, governments, businesses, associations, and
individuals who establish and maintain them… archives (are) about maintaining power, about
the power of the present to control what is, and will be, known about the past, about the power of
remembering over forgetting” (3). Like many disciplines –such as English, History,
Anthropology, etc - archival studies has been undergoing a “postmodern turn” (Cook &
Schwartz; Fredriksson 2003; Holmes 2006; Nesmith); this has led to an increased awareness of
the constructed nature of archival projects. Since then, there have been many debates about what
archives exclude from their collections and why. However, many marginalized and colonized
communities have been aware of this idea for a long time. Indeed, as Joan Nestle has pointed out,
before the emergence of grassroots archives such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives, many
GLBTQ communities felt as if they had been written out of history and out of archival spaces.
This writing out was a literal process. As she explains:
“… when we were, at the beginning, thinking about this[the LHA], and we talked to
people in the American Library Association who were gay like Barbara Giddings who
since has died, and she suggested we give it to the New York Public Library instead of
doing it ourselves. You know… when we approached [the New York Public Library] in
the beginning, the said no no no, they’ve changed now many many years later, we all
knew [they] wanted collections of famous people… so, you know, we said, no, we’ll do

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it, that’s not how we want to do it. So, inclusiveness and exclusiveness – and you are
right- are central pivots – both practical moments of archives… and I’ll just come out and
say this, these major women’s collections and wealthy academic institutions like Sarah
Lawrence never had the word lesbian in their catalog. Never considered it as a collection
heading, but later, later, after we’d been in existence for many years, now it’s a very hot
topic. So many academic institutions and I can’t speak for them, I don’t know what the
Smithsonian is doing, but I imagine if it’s a white man and he is a famous gay writer, you
know, they want his collections. So…. it’s the fashion of memory, it’s…. who is… who
represents the image of your archives and your institution, and who is funding it” (2011)
As Joan points out in the above quote, entire populations can be written in and out of archives.
Through finding aids and catalogs, mainstream archives often manufacture narratives and
arguments about what is important to a given culture in a particular time and places. For a long
time, the absence of word “lesbian” in various archival lists and catalogs served to signify the
absence of lesbian lives and histories entirely. Given the political climate of the early 70s,
GLBTQ communities were highly policed. Indeed in many states in the US, homosexuality was
criminalized: given this kind of charged political atmosphere, the presence of GLBTQ lives
could not be written into mainstream archives.
The inception of archives such as the LHA became necessary especially since many
mainstream archives privilege the lives of the famous or the published. Indeed, as Joan points
out, many mainstream archives continue to collect materials of predominantly white, male
individuals who have made some visible contributions to society. Such a collection mandate
writes out the lives of other individuals who may be less visible, but whose contributions are
nonetheless important. Archives such as the LHA work to decolonize the practices of

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mainstream archives by collecting materials from lesbians everywhere, regardless of whether
they are famous or not. Such a collection mandate builds the sense that all lesbians are
responsible for collectively shaping lesbian past(s), present(s) and future(s) by sharing their
histories and stories: in this view, no community member stands outside lesbian history as a mere
onlooker. Instead everyone shares in the task of creating legacies from which future generations
of lesbians will benefit.
Every newsletter published since 1975 contains explicit requests to community members
to become historians and interviewers21. The newsletters ask their readers to seek out other
lesbian community members and interview them about their lives. These requests gave
community members an opportunity to consider themselves historians and historical subjects:
they were participants in the culture and history that they were responsible for creating. Most
notably, the January 1995 issue of the LHA newsletter carries an extended article that provides
step-by-step instructions about donating materials to the archives. Given the widespread nature
of their audience and the constraints of time and distance, in this article the LHA asks its readers
to “be archivists of (their) own collection” (Thistlethwaite 4). The article contains deliberate
instructions for readers about preparing their collections for donation, such as including an
outline of major life events; identifying people who appear in letters, pictures, etc; using archival
folders with clear detailed folder headings; The instructions ask readers to “use a soft #1 pencil;
pen seeps through eventually. Include notes explaining how memorabilia, flyers and clippings
relate to your life.” The article also includes notes about storing collections “in a cool, dry, dark
place. Dampness, heat and overexposure to dust and sun encourage paper and electronic records
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21
While the co-founders of the archives - including Deborah Edel and Joan Nestle – were not
trained archivists, later generations of coordinators have gone on to receive degrees in archival
studies and have returned to work at the LHA. The earliest coordinators and volunteers were
self-taught archivists.
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to decay. Keep moldy books and documents away from everything else” (4). Additionally, this
article also addresses concerns about property rights and copyright, privacy restrictions,
appraisals and tax deductions amongst other things. In other words, it provides a holistic sense of
what it means to donate to the LHA and how such donations will be processed.
Additionally, the LHA’s current website also contains explicit instructions to community
members for creating special collections: these collections contain the personal papers, letters,
emails, photographs etc of lesbian community members who may have been relatively
anonymous, but nevertheless made an impact within their communities. The LHA urges
community members to immediately start creating special collection by compiling their own
papers with the intention of donating it to the archives. The website provides clear instructions
for describing materials in a special collections. Such descriptions are mean to make the
materials more accessible and understandable to users of the archives:
“If possible, include an outline or timeline of the major events in your life in either
written or recorded form. Be as lengthy or brief as you like, then organize the
collection using your outline.
Identify the people whose letters appear in your collection, making clear who wrote
what, and arrange the letters in order by time and/or correspondent. You might want
to add a description of your relationship to them and other information about them.
Arrange other writing, photographs, clippings and keepsakes similarly.
Use folders (acid-free folders are best) for your materials and give them headings, for
e.g., ‘LETTERS, GLORIOUS R. DYKES, 1981-1989” or “PHOTOS, SOFTBALL
TEAM, 1985.’

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Clearly label your photographs, clippings and other items with names, dates and
locations. Include notes explaining how the memorabilia, flyers and clippings relate
to your life” (“Donating Materials: Special Collections,” LHA Website).
By asking potential donors to provide these descriptions, the LHA gives donors the agency to
narrate the context around their own materials. This allows donors to be the authors of their own
collections; donors have the power to give as much context as they like and in a way that makes
sense to them. Instead of leaving the narration of context to an archivist who may not know them
very well, donors make choices about what to include and exclude from their descriptions. For
me, this demonstrates the LHA’s commitment to demystifying the process of archiving itself.
Community members are educated in the process of creating and maintaining archives over a
long period of time. So in a sense, archival science is not seen as an arcane process; instead it is
as a deliberate skill that needs to be practiced by every community member to keep the Archives
alive. Additionally, such moves to reach out to community members turns them into active and
careful documenters of their own life histories; it also gives them a sense of why their lives
might be historical and useful to future generations of lesbian women. Additionally, in this view,
all community members can become archivists and historiographers. They are responsible for
shaping the histories in which they participate regularly. Community members are left with sense
that they do not have to be carried by the overwhelming tides of mainstream history, but they can
narrate and preserve their own histories in a way that is meaningful to them and others who will
follow them.
The notion of decolonizing archives has for long been a part of many indigenous
communities. In a recent issue of Archival Science (2011) devoted to indigenous perspectives on
archives, Sue McKemmish, Shannon Faulkhead and Lynette Russell describe the Trust and

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Technology Project whose goal is to build “indigenous frameworks of knowledge, memory and
evidence” (212) into archives that were constructed as part of Australia’s colonial apparatus. The
authors argue that Indigenous people “view archival records containing information about
themselves…. as indigenous records.” (219). As such, many Indigenous Australian communities
feel that control and access of these records should be handled by them and they should be
considered owners of such records. However, archival institutions in Australia are working
within legal frameworks that make the archives owners of indigenous records. The authors argue
that archival initiatives work within a paradigm that positions indigenous people as “subjects of
records and clients of archival services, rather than as co-creators of records and partners in
developing archival systems and services” (220). Additionally, the article points out “in Australia
and other post-colonial societies, western representations of the orality vs literacy dichotomy
have been associated with views relating to the inferiority of oral traditions that have been an
obstacle to mutual. [The article] posits instead a continuum of orality and written text, with both
oral tradition and written records being accessed and understood in the context of their own
knowledge systems and related transmission processes.”(212). The Trust and Technology project
represents an “archival reconciliation project” that puts Indigenous Communities in dialog with
archival communities.
The authors of the article found that current archival classification and descriptive
systems that are based in Western epistemologies do not favor “participatory model[s] of
recordkeeping” (229). Instead in the Western archival tradition, “metadata elements and archival
descriptors designed to manage ownership, custody, privacy and access as defined in western
legal system can deal with individual but not collective rights in records. They cannot support
decision-making shared between co-creators…” (229). Working against such ideas, the Trust and

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Technology project created specifications for a Koorie archiving system. In this system,
indigenous community members would have access to their own records and would be able to
create their own annotations for the records. Such a system would support multiple descriptions
and annotations about a single records and allows multiple stakeholders to access, create and add
new content to the archival system. The Trust and Technology project is a good example of how
indigenous communities are reimagining and decolonizing archival description. Such methods of
describing archives put records back in the control of indigenous stakeholders and allow for
multiple perspectives and contexts.
For those of us in rhetoric and composition, many implications arise from the views of
archival description presented in this chapter: our field has been increasingly turning to archives
in past few decades to make sense of our disciplinary past(s). As researchers in the archives, we
should learn more about archival description so that we are able to pay greater attention to the
created contexts of our research materials. We should read materials both in and out of context in
order to create new frames of references for our research. Additionally, when we educate our
students –both graduate and undergraduate - about archival research, we should advice them
about how finding aids work to create context about particular individuals and communities.
Finding aids should be read both along and against the grain in order to lay bare who/what such
documents include and exclude.
In the next chapter, “Moving beyond the Illuminated Screen: Asserting the
Materiality of Digitized Records,” 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

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biases, and it is never an “objective” process. As such, I argue that digitization is a rhetorical
process because it creates a 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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CHAPTER 5
MOVING BEYOND THE ILLUMINATED SCREEN
ASSERTING THE MATERIALITY OF DIGITIZED ARCHIVAL RECORDS
“…one of the things that I’ve always said is one of the most useless things
in an archives is an unidentified photograph of a person.”
-William Maher, 2012
I am idly browsing through the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN): 22the
DALN is “publicly available archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text,
video, audio) that together provide a historical record of the literacy practices and values of
contributors, as those practices and values change. The DALN invites people of all ages, races,
communities, backgrounds, and interests to contribute stories about how — and in what
circumstances — they read, write, and compose meaning, and how they learned to do so (or
helped others learn)” (DALN Home). Indeed, the DALN has accumulated several hundred such
literacy narratives in a variety of formats ranging from audio files to personal letters to freshman
composition papers. The website also has an extensive FAQ page about what a literacy narrative
is, why the DALN is interested in collecting such narratives, who can submit etc. I decide to look
through the archives via the “date submitted” link on the lower right hand corner of the DALN’s
homepage. There are over 3000 items available, ordered from the earliest date of submission
through the latest. A navigation bar at the top of each page allows me to sort through the
submission index by issue date or ascending/descending order etc. Overwhelmed by my choices,
I click on the second link of the first page: “Kristine Blair’s Literacy Narrative.” The screen
changes to reveal a “simple item record” for this submission. Visitors to the DALN also have the
option to access the “full item record” which provides more detailed metadata about particular
submissions. As I look through all this information, I am struck by the fact that neither the
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22
Link to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives is available here: http://daln.osu.edu/
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“simple item record” nor the “full item record” provides a fuller description of the images
accompanying Blair’s literacy narrative. There is no contextual information about the images:
how are the images supposed to explain Blair’s literacy history? What was the context for the
creation of these images? What were the original dimensions of these images? Where and how
were these images stored before they were digitized? Were they part of a scrapbook perhaps?
The full item record merely notes in the description field that the record “contains a video
and related images (pictures, report cards, diplomas, handmade cards) related to Kristine Blair’s
literacy history.” Yet, there is almost nothing in these images that suggests anything about
literacy to me. It might be argued that the report card could stand as an example of Kristine
Blair’s literacy, but outside of the context of the DALN, the report card could have many other
histories and meanings. As a collection of visual artifacts chosen and assembled ostensibly by
Kristin Blair herself, the above images represent a created narrative. But have these images
always stood next each other? Spatially, have they always been arranged in this way?
Additionally, there is no documentation that might help other users trace the original context of
these images.
The insinuation of literacy with regard to the above images is a product of “archival
intervention” (Opp 2008). It suggests an archival narrative about these visual images that they
don’t contain in and of themselves. Making literacy central to these photographs creates new
meanings for these images and leaves out the original contexts of their production and
circulation. To me, these images appear as records that were abstracted from their original
material context and then repurposed to make an argument about Blair’s literacy history; these
abstracted and repurposed images illustrate one of the dangers of archival digitization: namely,
its ability to simultaneously decontextualize and recontextualize information.

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As Joanna Sasoon and Joan Schwartz have argued, archives have a responsibility to
document not just the content of digitized images, but the original material contexts in which
such images were created. Surely, the pictures, diplomas, handmade cards pictured above had a
rich history before they were repurposed for the purpose of this literacy narrative? Surely, the
picture of the smiling child in these digitized images was taken for a purpose other than
illustrating the development of literacy? Who is this smiling child? Is the user supposed to
assume that she is the subject of the literacy narrative (i.e Kristine Blair)? Why was her picture
taken? What was that purpose for it? Why has the history of all these digitized images gone
unacknowledged in the full item record? Why is there no metadata surrounding these images
themselves? It may be argued that I could learn more about these images by listening to the
literacy narrative itself, but that still creates the same problem23: i.e. the images would only be
explained in the context of the literacy narrative and not perhaps in the original context of their
production. Additionally, if I were a visitor to the archive who may not know much about the
concept of literacy or why literacy narratives need to be archived, I am not sure a cursory
investigation of these images would yield too much knowledge.
These images, along with others available on the DALN, create another
complication: it appears as if the DALN seems to be conflating digitization with preservation. It
is assumed that just because an artifact is digitized, it is preserved and available for long term!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23
!I listened to Kristine Blair’s narrative on the DALN website as I looked at her images. The
images, including the photographs are mentioned a few times as part of Blair’s efforts to
excavate how literacy articulated itself during her childhood. She mentions being surprised at
finding things in the photographs like “technologies of gender, so understanding what it means to
be a girl and how that involves toys, like [she] had a stove… a hair dryer, and [she remembers]
getting those little kits and things” (Blair, 2008). It appears then that the images posted with the
narrative itself act as supplements to the larger narrative of literacy being crafted by Blair. They
are not being regarded as documents that are capable of communicating information on their
own.

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use. However, archival preservation of digitized artifacts is a complex process of appraisal,
arrangement and description: providing contextual information about digitized artifacts helps
make them useful to users on a long-term basis. It is also helpful to users when archives provide
information about why particular images were chosen for digitization over others. With regard to
archival digitization of photographs, Joanna Sasoon has argued than “an archival approach to
documenting photograph collections requires transfomation in the understanding of the nature of
a photograph. Rather than seeing the photograph as an image and as a passive object, it can be
seen as a material document that has played an active role in history.” (199). She also points out
that while it may be an expensive process to document the context of a photograph’s production,
such an approach helps maintain the material histories of the photographic document. Sasoon’s
argument could be extended to a range of digitized images, including photographs. She argues
that the process of digitization – when it is performed without regard to context – is not
preservation. Instead, such a process only creates a “digital shadow” that is much more
“ephemeral” than the original object itself. Mere digitization does not create an enduring digital
object: instead it creates a dematerialized and discrete object that is divorced from other material
objects. It makes it impossible for researchers to study “materiality and the entangled histories
and relationships between artefacts” (201). As Sasoon points out, instead of providing enhanced
access, such a one-dimensional approach to digitization only creates an impoverished view of the
visual image.
Through the selection of particular images for digitization, archives frame
researchers’ understanding of the past. Therefore, a more reflexive and transparent approach to
digital preservation and description helps build trust between users and archives. James Opp

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(2008) has also argued, archivists should try to connect digitized artifacts24 with their material
histories. He explains that while digitized artifacts might offer great access to users, digitization
often has “serious consequences to the loss of materiality” (4). He also writes that digitized
artifacts often carry hidden histories that may become invisible when we simply look at them on
the flat screen of a computer: since digitization –to some extend - depends on standardization
(especially in terms of image formats) archival description needs to make visible all the histories
and narratives surrounding digitized artifacts instead of presenting them as abstracted pieces of
history. When we look at a digitized object that is not framed by contextual information, we are
merely looking at a flattened text. It lacks the nuance and the subtlety of its original because
digitization often leaves out blemishes in favor of providing a more enhanced view of the object.
Such a view of the object limits the kinds of research questions that can be asked: it frames how
we will interrogate the past and interact with it. For instance, when I look at the above images
that are part of Blair’s literacy narrative, I wonder what questions I can ask of the smiling child
in those pictures. Without any context around those images, I am not sure how to interact with
them as a researcher. Am I only supposed to understand those images through the concept of
literacy? Are there no other possibilities for research embedded in the above images? As archival
documents, the above images from the DALN seem to preclude research questions rather than
encourage them.
Asserting the Materiality of Digitized Texts:

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24
Archivists also make a distinction between images that are digitized versus images that are
“born-digital”: digitized and born-digital artifacts are encoded with different kinds of metadata
which needs to be captured so that we may understand such artifacts in the context of their
production.
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In his book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, Matthew
Kirschenbaum argues that electronic texts25 are material artifacts. He persistently works against
the notion that electronic texts are ephemeral or unstable and open to modification or that they
are easily replicable. Instead, he argues that each electronic text is unique; his book is “given
over to the project of discovering the heterogeneity of digital data and its embodied inscriptions”
(6). He uses the term “screen essentialism” to critique the culture of “critical and theoretical
writing about electronic textuality to date” (19). This is a kind of essentialism that privileges the
“illuminated screen rather than the inscrutable disk” (30). Kirschenbaum borrows insights from
the field of computer forensics in order to argue that digital data can be individuated; in other
words, even though digital texts can be copied, such text still have an individual identity and
material presence that can be detected and preserved. In terms of archival practice,
Kirschenbaum argues that as more and more digital objects take on “archival identities,” it will
become necessary “to understand the nature of what is being collected and preserved, and where
the most significant challenges of digital preservation finally lie” (21). He also points out that for
archivists “it will be important to insist that digital objects are no more homogeneous or selfidentical than other artifacts, and that the relationships between individual digital objects (and
versions of those objects) should be preserved along with the actual works themselves” (22).
Kirschenbaum’s critiques are relevant to digitized texts as well as born-digital texts26. Often, in
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25
In this chapter, I use the terms electronic texts and digital texts interchangeably.
26
In terms of born-digital texts, Kirschenbaum articulates several ideas that hold relevance to our
work in rhetoric and composition: using insights from the field of computer foresnics,
Kirschenbaum argues that electronic or digital objects “can be algorithmically individualized”
(56). That is, no two digital objects are ever the same and they can be differentiated from one
another. Secondly, he also argues electronic data is “explicitly built and engineered to model
ideal conditions of immateriality.” (71). He points out that digital inscription is a “written trace”
that may be “invisible to the naked eye, but it is not instrumentally undetectable or physically
immaterial.” And lastly, he argues that digital inscription is a form of writing that always leaves
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our study of born-digital and digitized archival images, we restrict ourselves to what we see on
the screen, instead of connecting digitized and digital images to more material histories beyond
the screen.
For instance, a cursory examination of the digitized images from the DALN may be read
as an example of “screen essentialism.” This is an approach to image digitization that focuses on
the preservation of content, or more narrowly on what is readily available to us on the surface.
And yet, I wonder if the backs of the digitized photographs contains some information (such as
date and place) that could be use of to researchers? Did these photographs have negatives that
might need to be preserved as well? As Sassoon has pointed out, often archivists consider the
negatives as “originals” as opposed to photographic prints themselves. The prints are infinitely
reproducible, but the negatives are not. Archivists who preserve photographs try to keep the
negative intact as well. Additionally, even if there are multiple prints of the same photograph,
each print may exist in a unique material context that may not be similar to other prints. By
focusing purely on its contents, it appears that the image is only useful because of what it
captured on the surface instead of the complex material relations that were engendered by it. This
urge to preserve and reproduce the surface of the image through digitization creates the sense
that archives only value the aesthetic qualities of the image rather than its messy and complex
materiality. The postmodern sense that we live in an age of infinitely reproducible copies is
supported by irresponsible acts of archival digitization that make it seem as if the study of
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a trace upon physical materials that exist beyond our computer screens. Kirschenbaum’s
arguments reinscribe (pun intended) digital writing as a material act that leaves real traces upon
physical objects such as computer disks and hard drives. This form of writing happens at such a
microscopic level that seems negligible, but it always leaves a physical trace that can be detected
and resurrected. Essentially, Kirschenbaum builds a material framework for studying digital
writing: this framework is built out of the interaction between the user, the computer’s software
and its very material hardware.
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materiality is irrelevant in digital contexts. It creates a stark schism between the material and the
digital even though these categories are always entangled with each other27.
In the context of the DALN, clearly, the contents of the photographs, the newspapers
clippings, the report cards etc are supposed say or add something to the concept of literacy.
These images are not meant to be viewed by themselves, but in the context of a greater narrative
about somebody’s literacy development. However, this view denigrates the status of visual
images as documents that have the ability to communicate multiple aspects of the past to us.
Even different views of the images could convey different sets of meanings to the researchers.
There doesn’t seem to be an identity or a history for the images in Kristine Blair’s literacy
narrative outside of the context of the archive itself. What we know of the images is entirely
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27
More and more, archivists are also asserting the materiality of born-digital records. They are
also arguing that that the original environment and context of the digital record is as important as
the record’s content itself. Such an approach allows users to think of digital records not as easily
replicable objects, but as unique artifacts that were created on real physical media. Ciaran Trace
(2009) has argued that archivists should learn more about “the inner workings of the computer
and the computer system” (8). This he argues will allow archivists to “more fully embrace
sophisticated models of how digital records exist within computer systems.” Like Kirschenbaum,
Trace argues that digital records are more than just “conceptual objects”: instead they exist as
physical and as logical objects. By looking at the inner working of computers, archivists will be
able to “more fully comprehend the relationship between computer hardware, operating system,
and application software” (8). He also argues that such knowledge would let archivists “access
and evaluate the different layers of abstraction that constitute the computer system… in order to
preserve the records stored within it. Such work involves understanding what is contained on a
computer’s hard drive so that the archivist knows what is captured through a disk image (an
exact copy) of the device” (8). This process would also allow archivists understand the function
of “a computer’s registry so that archivists do not unknowingly make changes to important
recordkeeping metadata” (8). The idea of not making changes to metadata is significant: a record
that is “born digital” has “metadata stored in a variety of place within a computer system. The
file system contains metadata about the file, including location, size, date last modified, creation
data, and owner of the file…. The document itself can store additional internal metadata which
can be added whether by device, application or user. This metadata includes information on who
created or saved a document and when it was created or printed.” Such an understanding of how
metadata works within computers systems would allow archivists to preserve this data as it was,
instead of making modifications that would change the entire context of the record.

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restricted to what we see on the screen. But what kinds of relationship do the digitized images
hold to other images that are not represented in the DALN? If some of Kristine Blair’s
photographs were part of a material album, then what other images were they situated next to?
Such context matters because it probably helps us understand the image’s material relationship to
other photographs. It may also give us an idea of the events that led to the production of the
photograph. We may also need information about the photographer and the type of camera that
was used to take the picture. However, because this information has been co-opted in the service
of literacy narratives, it appears as if the photograph has no connection to other events or
activities. Additionally, the photograph’s materiality is also erased: we don’t really know if the
pictures were taken using a modern digital camera or a more-old fashioned camera. Even
information about the camera would help us situate these pictures within a particular time-period.
As such, since the photographs are represented as discrete objects rather than part of larger turn
of events, they have a disturbing appearance of timelessness and placelessness.
Archivist Joan Schwartz has argued in her oft-quoted essay on photographic archives
that “…without adequate contextual information about [the] functional origins and provenance
[of photographs], or clear links to such contextual information… photographic archives are
transformed into stock photo libraries, reducing photographs to their visible elements, and
conflating photographic content and photographic meaning. The social and geographical
implications of this transformation are exacerbated by digitization projects which aim to provide
access to images on the internet” (157). Schwartz’s critique is relevant to many visual artifacts:
in the case of the DALN’s digitized visual artifacts, it is apparent that these images only have
value within the context of particular literacy narratives. As Schwartz points out when visual
images are archived with enough metadata to communicate the “original context of [their]

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creation, circulation and viewing,” they could work as records in and of themselves, and not just
as supporting caste for written narratives. Visual images by themselves communicate
information about particular cultures that may be valuable when they are read in context.
Schwartz also makes the case that instead of making visual images “accessible only as discrete,
decontextualized and dematerialized images” (157), we must start cataloging these images as
material records in terms of the context of their production and circulation, instead of their
content. So especially, when it comes to digitized images, we need to move beyond the
illuminated screen and trace the material history of these images and provide as much contextual
information as possible.
James Opp also warns us that by
“the privileging of resources for the technical process of digitization over the
labour-intensive work involved in describing, contextualizing, meta-tagging, and
recording archival intervention (whether as a result of institutional priorities or the
demands of granting agencies), avoids rather than confronts, the wider cultural
issues that face institutions in the digital era. As historians start to approach the
archive as the object of their research, and not simply as a filter for results, we
need to be able to make the connections between material histories of the artifact
and their virtual avatars” (19).
Opp’s warning is especially relevant for digital archives such as the DALN. In this context, by
not giving us enough of the history surrounding the various digitized artifacts available in the
DALN, the archive has in effect literally “flattened” these artifacts. They are available to us
merely as flat texts rather than as three-dimensional object. They are separated from their
originals and from the other material artifacts that presumably surrounded them. As Opp also

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points out, with material artfiacts “the paper, the binding, the style of the font, all serve as
sensory cues that the viewer would recognize (12)” However, in the case of “flattened” digitized
representations, such sensory cues are expelled, not allowing us to experience any of the
subtleties and nuances of the original objects themselves. In the case of the DALN’s digitized
artifacts, these three-dimensional artifacts have been turned into texts and have therefore lost
their material nuance and complexity.
In a sense, the DALN itself acts as a massive text. It collects evidence about the existence
of various literate practices around the world: by privileging narratives or stories about literacy,
it foregoes or ignores other meanings that might be embedded in these narratives. Since it is
more interested in content rather than context, it tends to flatten and decontextualize all artifacts
in the pursuit of narratives about literacy. What appears in front of visitors is simply a textualized
narrative about literacy that has almost nothing to with the material contexts or circumstances
beyond the screen. In a recent webtext published by the DALN collective, Lewis Ulman provides
a lengthy explanation of the “messy metadata” practices encouraged by the DALN. He argues
that such practices allows participants in the archive to build contexts around their own
recordings. They are also asked to determine their own self-identifications (in terms of gender,
race, class etc). From Ulman’s explanation, it appears that the DALN is indexed in terms of
content rather that context: by focusing their meta-data and tagging practices in terms of subject
matter, the DALN encourages visitors to “read” the archival narratives as dematerialzed texts
rather than as material archival records.
I stare again at the images that were part of Kristine Blair’s literacy narrative. However,
this time, I am viewing them as a JPEG file downloaded on my computer. I have named the file

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“KrisBlair-DALNJune16201228.” This file now has an existence outside the context of the
DALN and lives on my computer. If I hadn’t included the tag “DALN” in the file’s name, it
would probably not mean anything to me if I come across it a few months later. Now that the file
is circulating outside the archives, it has a whole new context and even a new name assigned by
me: since the DALN also has not assigned metadata to these images, I have assigned metadata
that has nothing to do with the original context of its production. The file and its associated
images now float freely in the digital wilderness, with an uncertain identity and history. I can
make as many modifications to it as I like and return it to the world wide web from whence it
came. Clearly, these images are someone else’s property, but given how little proprietorial
information I have been provided, it is easy to rename and change aspects of this digital record.
In the context of archives, naming and contextual information are important because they allow
us to cite things in a responsible manner and provide archival records with a history and identity
that can be retained even when records are removed from the physical space of the archives. It’s
true that Kristine Blair’s images on my computer are only copies, but making copies is a regular
part of archival practice: this is why in physical archives, researchers are exhorted to take down
information about the pertinent folders and boxes when they make copies of archival materials.
Information about folders and boxes works as metadata as well and helps keep information in the
context in which they were found. When it comes to the downloaded images on my computer,
other than the “DALN” tag on the saved file, I have almost no other information about the
context surrounding Kristine Blair’s images.

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28
I first downloaded the pictures on June 16, 2012.
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A Brief Look at The Blake Archive:
The Blake Archive is a good example of an online repository that deals mostly with
digitized images and artifacts. This online archive is, first of all, quite conscious about its own
status as an archive. As the editors of the Archive explain:
“The Blake Archive is not a physical repository of Blake's collected works, nor is
it a clearinghouse through which users can obtain reproductions of those works
[…] The William Blake Archive is an online hypermedia environment that allows
its users to access high-quality electronic reproductions of a growing portion of
Blake's work. These reproductions have been prepared according to the highest
technical and scholarly standards, with the cooperation of a number of the major
museum, library, and private collections. By eventually incorporating as much of
Blake's pictorial and literary canon as possible—with both images and texts
organized, interlinked, and searchable in ways that only hypermedia systems will
allow—the Archive will for the first time give scholars and students access to the
major intersections between the illuminated books and Blake's other creative and
commercial works. Though "archive" is the term we have fallen back on, in fact
we envision a unique resource unlike any other currently available for the study of
Blake—a hybrid all-in-one edition, catalogue, database, and set of scholarly tools
capable of taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by new information
technology” (“What do we mean by an ‘Archive’?”).
This explanation provides users with an understanding of the term “archive” in the context of
The Blake Archive. In digital contexts, understandings of the term archive must be necessarily

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reimagined: mimicking the features of a physical repository is not quite possible in digital
spaces. Additionally, digital archives often don’t resemble each other because each archive must
caters to very different sets of interests and materials. What The Blake Archive does offer is a
good understanding of the possibilities and potentials of digitization: as an “online hypermedia
environment” each image and object in the archive is provided with painstaking “copy
information”; this includes information about each item, its provenance29 and its present location.
By providing users with the above information, the digitized object’s materiality is preserved:
whilst users do have access to an enhanced digital version of Blake’s works, we are able to
understand those works in the original context of its production and circulation. Users who may
wish to track down the object itself are also given detailed information about its current location.
Additionally, this information also includes details about blemishes on the object’s surface, its
dimension, the printing style, ink etc. Such information allows users to understand that the object
had a long, material history before it was digitized: the digitized image is not presented as a
discrete object divorced from the material realities of its production and circulation. Instead all of
these details are incorporated into the description. Even though the digital image is extensively
detailed, users understand that it stands in for the original and is not equal to the original. In
some ways, the digitized copies in The Blake Archive are still only traces of the originals, but
given the wealth of details the copy information provides, users will still be able to experience
the complexities of the original images.
In addition to copy information about the image itself, The Blake Archive also provides
extensive metadata about the digitized image. In this instance, information about the copy is not
the same as image metadata. As the editors explain: “Each and every image in the Archive also
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29
Provenance literally means origin or source
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contains textual metadata comprising its Image Information record. The Image Information
record combines the technical data […] with additional bibliographic documentation of the
image, as well as information pertaining to provenance, present location, and the owning
institution” (“The William Blake Archive: Technical Summary”) The editors also note that the
information about the image travels with the images themselves. So even if the images are
downloaded from the Blake Archive, they would carry information about the image no matter
where they go. By coding this information into the images, the editors of The Blake Archive
ensures that the image’s material history and identity remain intact outside of the context of the
archive itself. The images in The Blake Archive therefore do not depend on the archive to give
them a context. These images had a context long before the archive and will continue to do so as
long as they are coded with enough information. Also, by making sure the images’ context is
preserved, the editors of the archive allow us to understand that digital archival preservation is
not simply a matter of capturing content alone; context matters on two levels: first, there’s the
context of the image’s material production and circulation (which is captured by the “copy
information”). And secondly, the digitized image also has a unique context that is captured by its
technical metadata. By asserting the importance of the image’s metadata, we are allowed to see
that each digitized image also has a unique identity. If a copy of the digitized image is made, that
copy will be coded with metadata of its own. So, in other words, each digital object can also be
differentiated (Kirschenbaum).
In reference to his own work on the Blake Archive as a graduate student, Matt
Kirschenbaum (1998) has noted that “Electronic editing is work, and I mention this because a
project like the Blake Archive is, truth be told, a long way from the desktop cottage industries
imagined by early cyber-enthusiasts. Despite its ‘virtual’ home on the World-Wide Web, the

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Archive requires a real institutional infrastructure, as well as real scholarly labor and expertise,
real technical labor and expertise, and, finally, real money…” (n.p.) Kirschenbaum demystifies a
lot of the material effort that went into creating The Blake Archive, even before anyone “went
near a scanner or a keyboard.” He details the extensive discussions among editors about how to
digitize images, what kind of information to include, how to troubleshoot problems that may
arise as users interact with the Archive. Digitzaition is not an easy process of replicating an
image’s content: instead it is a complex process of understanding an image’s multiple contexts of
production, circulation and reception. Additionally, this information also allows us to understand
that the Blake Archive doesn’t merely provide a flattened textual representation of William
Blake’s works. Instead, users who want to interact with the images online have a variety of tools
(such as the virtual “light box”) that allows them to examine the images in detail. Such tools
allow them to experience the complexity of each image, albeit through a digital medium. The
copy and image information that is provided alongside each image doesn’t limit users
interpretation: i.e. it is not limited to a theme or a concept (such as say power or sexuality or
gender): in other words, it doesn’t suggest information about the images that they may not
contain. Instead the copy information provided by The Blake Archive merely provides enough
context about particular images that helps users come to their own conclusions and
interpretations.
Ultimately, as Sassoon reminds us, digitization is a cultural process. Decisions about
what to digitize and how to digitize are culturally-mediated. Curators and archivists of digital
archives and collections have a responsibility to offer more insights about how and why certain
materials were digitized. It is always assumed that digitization offers enhanced access to images
and artifacts that are usually not available to researchers. By digitizing things, researchers are

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able to view images through the screens of their own computers. And yet, as Sassoon has also
pointed out, the process of digitization is never a clean process of translation: something is
always lost in the process of creating a digital image. Digitization has the potential to defer our
understanding of the materiality of artifacts: once an object is digitized, it cannot be touched or
felt in the same way as its material counterpart. It becomes a mere trace of the original object:
the digitized object merely stands in for its material counterpart. As researchers then, we need to
recognize that digital archives could offer us a greater sense of the material object by providing
us a fuller narrative of its material history. And while descriptions of the material object would
depend on language (which by itself defers meaning and understanding), we would still be
empowered with information that cannot be divulged by the digitized object alone. Digital
curators and archivists could also be more transparent about the language they use to describe
objects: they could be more reflexive about the linguistic choices they make to write about the
object in their collections. Such transparency and reflexivity would go a long way in helping
researchers interpret digitized images.
In the next chapter, “Afterword and Implications for Rhetoric and Composition,” 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). This chapter also synthesizes findings from
my dissertation and sketches out future publications and projects that will emerge from this
work.

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CHAPTER 6
AFTERWORD AND IMPLICATIONS FOR RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
“When I first began seriously digging into the archives, a senior scholar
casually told me that I wouldn’t understand what my dissertation was
about until about three years after I had written it. I take the sentiment to
suggest that scholarship is an ongoing process. One is never really
finished. The work always leaves unanswered question, which is actually a
blessing. Unanswered questions are the fuel of the scholarly process.”
-David Gold, 2008
In June 2012, while I was in the midst of writing this dissertation, The Atlantic published
an article by Suzanne Fischer (snarkily) titled “Nota Bene: If you ‘Discover’ Something in an
Archive, It’s not a Discovery.” Fischer wrote the article in the aftermath of the publication of the
Leale Report. Briefly, Charles Leale was the Surgeon-General when President Abraham Lincoln
was shot. He was the first doctor to arrive on the scene after the shooting. His report of the
shooting was found by Helena Iles Papaioannou, a research assistant who has been working on a
project titled “The Papers of Abraham Lincoln.” The Leale Report has the potential to change the
way historians write about the days following Lincoln’s assassination.
Fischer’s contention is a simple one: the Leale report was “discovered” by researchers
within the National archives because “(a) 19th-century professional knew about the Leale report
and decided that, as a part of the Surgeon General's correspondence, it was worth keeping in the
nation's collections.” For Fischer, nothing can be “discovered” in an archives because it has
already been found by an archivist who then makes materials available to researchers. She
further points out that, given the scope and volume of the collections under their care, it would
be difficult for archivists to know every minute item contained within a particular collections.
Archivists, she explains, describe materials not at the item-level, but at the level of the collection.
Such collection-level description gives us an idea of the “shape of the collection, who owned it,

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and what kinds of things it contains.” She also adds that “with the volume of materials, some
collections may be undescribed or even described wrongly.” Fischer ends her piece by adding
that “archival discoveries” quiet often depend on the labor of archivists and that researchers
should be willing to acknowledge this labor rather than “devalue” it for the “sake of an exciting
narrative.”
Two days later, The Atlantic published a rebuttal by Helena Iles Papaioannou with an
even more snarky title: “Actually, Yes, It *Is* a Discovery If You Find Something in an Archive
That No One Knew Was There.” Iles Papaioannou argues that while she is cognizant of the
important work done by archivists, it does not mean researchers cannot make archival
discoveries. As she puts it: “if someone uncovers something unknown in living memory (or in
the historiographical record) this counts as a discovery.” Since archivists do not process
everything at the item-level, they did not know of the existence of the Leale report. Iles
Papaioannou concedes that while it would be inappropriate to call something a discovery if an
archivist knew of its existence, in the instance of the Leale Report, this was not the case. She also
points out that there is no evidence that a 19th century archivist actively made the decision to
preserve the Leale Report since it is likely that the National Archives received the document as
part of the Surgeon-General’s entire correspondence. Instead, what is more likely is that all of
the Surgeon-General’s letters were kept and the Leale Report was simply one among those
letters. Lastly, Iles Papaioannou also points out that since the Leale Report was not cataloged in
any of the National Archives’ finding aids, it was entirely unknown to researchers. Thus, the
finding of the Leale report indeed qualifies as an archival discovery.
I see good arguments being made by both writers: on the one hand, Fischer is calling out
the conceit of discovery. The idea of “discovery” has often been used to justify colonial

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conquests and erase the existence of people and knowledge that existed before those conquests. I
see vestiges of the same attitude towards archival discoveries: it negates the labor of archivists
and glorifies the labor of the historian or researcher. Archives are often seen as “unchartered”
territory for researchers to discover or illuminate through their work. On the other hand, there is
some weight to Iles Papaioannou’s argument as well: something can be discovered if no one
knows of its existence. On a fundamental level, however, I see this as a debate about archival
context versus historical context. As Joan Schwartz has pointed out, what is deemed important
by historians may not be as significant to archivists and vice versa. The Leale Report may have
just been another letter to the archivists who originally filed it30: it may have been preserved
because it supplied information about aspects of Charles Leale’s work as the Surgeon-General.
But for the researchers studying the Leale Report in the context of the life and death of Abraham
Lincoln, its significance is amplified in a very different manner.
This debate between Fischer and Iles Papaioannou opens up significant implications for
those of us in Rhetoric and Composition: first, it asks us to think critically about those “exciting
narratives” that we create about archival research. So many narratives depict archives as inert
spaces simply waiting to be illuminated by the intrepid researcher. And yet, archives are deeply
hegemonic spaces reflecting the power and the politics of the institutions/communities that built
them. While archives depend on users for support, they are largely constructed to mirror the
values of the communities they live in. They are unique socio-political sites that are part of larger
societies that keep them alive. So when we craft our “exciting narratives” about our archival
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
It should be noted that even though the Leale Report may have been deposited in the National
Archives many decades after Charles Leale’s death, it would still not have been possible for the
archivists of that period to predict its historical value: so much of history/historiography is about
having a long view of the past that is often not available to those archivists who are under
immense pressure to appraise and make sense of the large number of documents that flood their
workplaces every day.
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research experiences, we should be talking about these spaces not as isolated pockets of
information, but as rich resources that are embedded in very particular cultural formations. We
should start undertaking critical ethnographies31 of archives themselves because such a lens
might allow us to understand how access to materials is mediated in these sites. Lastly, a critical
view of our narratives of archival research might help us become more aware of how we write
about people who work within archives every day and make these spaces inhabitable for
researchers.
In general, we need to account more account more for the labor carried out by archivists
every day. We need to account for the material presence and practices of archivists32. As I have
illustrated in the previous chapters of this dissertation, archives are not inert sites where
documents are dumped: turning those documents into meaningful collections takes a great deal
of work and time. Phaedra Pezzullo has pointed out that our experiences as tourists or visitors in
different places are dependent on the labor of people who remain largely invisible to us.
Similarly, as researchers, our success within archival spaces depends on the seemingly invisible
labor of archivists. The debate between Fischer and Iles Papaioannou also illustrates that the

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31
This is a call that has already been issued by writers such as Charles Morris, Barbara
Biesecker, Cara Finnegan etc.
32
In Rhetoric and Composition, Shirley Rose and archivist Sammie Morris have already started
this conversation in their recent article “Invisible Hands: Recognizing Archivists’ work to Make
Records Accessible” (2010). In this article, they work with James Berlin’s papers at Purdue and
create a portrait of how archivists process materials and create finding aids for those materials.
They also make an argument for the importance of context in archival work. They point to the
importance of building context for archival collections so that researchers are aware of the
original circumstances under which particular archival materials were created. Awareness of
context would also allow researchers to know more about the original creators/authors of
archival materials.
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work of the archivist and the historian are not the same: these two roles cannot be conflated33.
While an archivist must utilize her power of interpretation as she describes and narrates the
context surrounding the records in her care, she certainly cannot come to conclusions about the
historical value of those records. Such historical value must be decided by individual researchers
in the context of their own projects.
Next, Fisher and Iles Papaioannou help us re-assess how we conceptualize what is
archival and what is historical. In the introduction to this dissertation, I argued that not all
documents are meant to become archival. Similarly, not all archival documents have historical
value. Documents become archival when they have been appraised to have possible value to
future generations of researchers. Archival appraisal usually takes place once such documents
are no longer being used or have not been in regular circulation for a long period of time. Such
documents are then preserved as a collection that together communicate something about their
creator or the organization they came from. Hence archival appraisal, description, preservation
etc are processes of preserving documents in the context in which they were created. Certain
documents are kept not because they are valuable in and of themselves, but because they provide
supplementary information of some kind. In other words, an archival collection is a complex
network of documents that depend on each other to be understood. Some of these documents
become historical when they are used to interpret a larger cultural phenomenon. History is
largely a matter of interpreting archival documents that work as clues to the past. During this
interpretation process, some documents – such as the Leale Report about Lincoln’s death - tend
to stand out over others and are therefore deemed to have greater historical value.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
33
David Gold’s essay in Beyond the Archives is a good illustration of such a conflation. The
narrator in that essay is a researcher, and not an archivist and yet the title of the essay “The
Accidental Archivist” suggests something entirely different and confusing.
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Broadly, however, the two articles in The Atlantic also pose a larger question to those of
us interested in archival research: how much do we really understand about how archives are
constituted before we begin our work? More and more instructors in Rhetoric and Composition –
at the graduate and undergraduate level – are requiring students to engage in some form of
archival research. And yet, I am not sure we provide our students with enough information about
what archival records are and how they function in this context. We’ve developed a great deal of
instructional materials and resources when it comes to research in libraries, but we haven’t done
enough when it comes to archival research. This dissertation creates a better understanding of
how archivists describe and catalog their holdings in order to help researchers. It also highlights
the status of archival records as material objects rather that are cataloged in the context of their
creation rather than as isolated artifacts. I believe even such a basic understanding of archival
objects and catalogs is essential before we send our students out to do archival research. This
awareness might help make archival research less frustrating for our students and for archivists.
--------When I call for a greater awareness of how archives are constituted, I am also calling for
a greater awareness of their material realities. When I think about how I imagined archives when
I started this project, I am keenly aware of how I had turned away from material archives
towards more discursive or metaphorical archives. We also live in an age where almost
everything is being deemed an “archive.” In a recent issue in Quarterly Journal of Speech on the
ACT UP movement, Charles Morris poetically writes:
“In the cityscape of my queer mnemonic imagination there shines on a well-trod
thoroughfare of quotidian lives an ‘ACT UP lamp shop,’ like the one that used to
be on Hudson Street in New York: ‘For several years its colorful street-front

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windows have contained a constantly changing panorama of framed photos,
newspaper obituaries, and other mementos of local people who have died of
AIDS.’ For me, the ACT UP lamp shop represents the HIV/AIDS archive; its
always shifting displays curated by archival queers appear in windows by which
we daily pass in village, town, and metropolis, always mingling among and
interrupting our preoccupations, always bringing forth some feeling or another,
naughty or noble, dark and light” (52).
I do not want to claim here that what Morris calls the “ACT UP” archive is not an archive at all.
As I have pointed out in this dissertation, there are many differing conceptions of archives, but
that does not mean that each of these archives can be easily conflated with one another. Here
Morris’ conception of the ACT UP archive bears very little resemblance to some of the material
archives that we visit as researchers. In fact, Morris’ archive functions more as a memorial. All
archives do have some memorial purpose, but memorials are curated differently for very
different audiences. Memorials often isolate particular objects and place them on display to
evoke –as Morris rightly points out- some feeling or reaction in the viewer. Archives, on the
other hand, do not necessarily isolate documents or artifacts: they collect and preserve them as
part of a larger whole so that they may together communicate something about the context of the
collection’s creation. Archives often create exhibits that display parts of a larger collection, but
an exhibit is not an archive in the way archivists understand it.
The larger purpose of this dissertation has been to clarify how it is that archivists
understand archives. In order to do this, I analyzed archivists’ material practices such as writing.
By turning to such practices, I have demonstrated that archives are constituted via a series of
unique communicative practices that are meant to capture an archival record’s entire context,

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materiality and identity. While writing is only one aspect of these communicative practices,
archives depend on language to create context and meaning. Language mediates what gets
represented in archival catalogs and finding aids. It mirrors the values of a given culture: when a
particular cultural phenomenon or practice is suppressed to the extent that there are no words for
it, archives mirror this reality as well. So for instance, given the absence of the word “lesbian”
from mainstream culture a few decades ago, there were literally no archival records about lesbian
lives. The absence of archival records created the reality that lesbians did not exist. Archives do
influence this tautological cycle of cultural presence and erasure. As Joan Nestle explained to
me, no archive is ever a comprehensive representation of the past. And no archive can ever be
final arbiter of power. As Lacan and Foucault have explained, power always shifts and is never a
stable formation. When cultural power shifts, so do archives. Such shifts in power allow archival
records to be coded with vocabulary that was previously “forbidden.”
In this dissertation, I have also tried to underscore the cultural nature of archival projects
and also their utility in the construction of particular identities. Given that archives are used to
mobilize particular formations of identity, issues of power can never be ignored in the study of
these spaces: archives are always political, no matter if they are institutional or communitybased. And yet, abstract questions of politics and power should not lead us away from the
material spaces of archives: instead, we can learn a great deal about how institutions and
communities manage their politics by looking at the concrete artifacts that they preserve and how
they describe these artifacts. Archival description inevitably exposes how cultures create
narratives around archival objects in order to preserve particular aspects of their identities.
Indeed, archives help us understand that identity is a rhetorical process of embracing particular
narratives and rejecting others.

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In this dissertation, I have looked at a range of archives, including physical and digital
archives. However, in each case, I have emphasized the materiality of these archives. That is, I
have argued that each of these archives has a material presence even if they exist in the
digital/virtual sphere. In general, our conversations about digital archival records need to
emphasize their existence as material objects. The common conceit holds that if something is
digital, it is also “dust-free” (Sullivan, Graban 2010). However, the notion that born-digital
records are material objects has been an ongoing conversation within Archive Studies for a
while. For instance, in a special issue of Archivaria (2011), digital archivists made the argument
that there is a greater need to understand the internal structures of computers and electronic
machines; such an understanding would allow us to see that born-digital records are material
artifacts that are physically encoded within the micro-structures of computes. As Ciaran Trace
explains: “ If the [computer’s] black box is opened for examination, we can find the equivalent
of the record, the file folder and the filing cabinet, even if they exist at the most basic level as
material traces in electronic and magnetic form. Indeed, as anyone who has opened a computer
case recently will attest, even the dust is still there!” (27). The computer’s hardware and software
collude to create a material presence for the record. This awareness of the materiality of borndigital records seems to be missing in scholarship in a lot of fields, including Rhetoric and
Composition. In the next stage of my work with archives, I hope to create an intervention that
will allow researchers to think of born-digital records as material artifacts.
---------And what about me? Where do I stand at the “end” of this dissertation? Aside from being
exhausted, I see this work opening out in several new ways. In general, do I know more about
archives than I did almost a year and a half ago when I started this process? Yes. But I believe

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there is so much more that I need to learn, read and understand. I am excited that this project has
opened up possibilities for more learning and more research.
There are at least three strands that I hope to follow in the next phase of my life as a
scholar. The first strand is the process through which archives build and sustain identities and
communities. As a scholar working at the intersections of cultural rhetorics, historiography and
rhetorical theory, I see this as a logical strand to follow. I also believe this dissertation has
already laid that groundwork for it.
The second strand is one I have mentioned about: creating resources for scholars within
rhetoric and composition that allows us to see digital archives and records as material artifacts. I
believe such a view of digital records might help us create better methodologies for digital
archival research.
The third strand pertains to my interest in better understanding the links between archives
and writing. This dissertation has ironically taught me as much about writing as it has bout
archives. I emerge from this process as a more careful researcher and writer, deeply aware of
how my writerly choices create and impose particular narratives and identities about my chosen
area of study. These are dilemmas that archivists grapple with on a daily basis. I hope to have
more conversations with me about these ideas.

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