Postmodern Polar Bears and Paper Bags

The postmodern turn. Who would have expected to find that discussion buried in the evaluation and analysis of a digital finding aid?  “Postmodern archival theorists point to inadequacies in archival description…call[ing] for the researcher input and assert[ing] that the record is not a static artifact, but rather a ‘mediated and ever-changing construction’ affected by its use.” (Krause & Yakel, 288).  Let’s start with some definitions and then examine how postmodernism might fit with the digital archive.

Finding Aid:  Narrowing the scope of this definition for this brief reaction paper, “finding aid” will mean a search tool for digitized materials made available to (re)searchers online. Whether available online via the rather vague cloud (out there somewhere) or on a locked down on a local area network, finding aids assist in site and archival access, linking, understanding, participation, browsing and searching activities.

Positivism:  The scientific method which values empiricism; an analytic movement basing knowledge on quantitative results.

Postmodern:  Made famous by Jacques Derrida in 1966, “postmodern” has shifted the arts and social sciences. It approaches truth as an objective, qualitative experience, difficult to pin down, suspect if a claim is made that it has indeed been pinned down, and with an emphasis on the meta-narrative, a master (universal) narrative. Which brings us to a phrase for digital archivists: meta-data, “data about data” or “content about content.”

Finding Aid + Positivism + Postmodern = Archival Revolution?

The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections developed a “next generation” finding aid which invites user contribution to the archival content.  Believing that the prejudices of the archivists’ interpretations create a condition of subjugated knowledge, the Polar Bear team has an open and participatory format, which collects macro-appraisals from the population of visitors in the belief that collections of artifacts take on meaning in a societal context.

Aldred S. Buckler in a multiple image taken in Murmansk, Russia.  Buckler served with the U.S. 339th Infantry during the American intervention in North Russia, 1918-1919.  http://polarbears.si.umich.edu/index.pl?node=Aldred%20S.%20Buckler%20photograph%20collection&lastnode_id=356

Beyond Brown Paper, a collaborative effort at Plymouth State University, invited participation from an interested public at their 2008 exhibition around the closing of the pulp mill in Berlin, New Hampshire.  A transcript and interview from the Brown Paper team is available in the New Hampshire public radio archives.  Public participation at the physical and online exhibits places the objects in a social context that would have been lost if only the archivists meta-tags had been attached to the digitized images.

Archived Image and the online public comment: "The Cole Primary School was built in 1895, which replaced the first Cole School that was moved almost across the street. In the late 1920’s it became Berlin’s police station, which before was in the basement of the City Hall. They remained there until going into the present building in the late 1960’s. It was on the corner of Cole Street and Mason Street. It is now a parking lot." http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/40854#comment-20181

The physical sciences have been slower to pick up the linguistic turn, and archivists, members of this group, have a particular attachment to the physical object within the laboratory backdrop.  The postmodern archivist distrusts the positivist process as incomplete and tries to incorporate cumulative evidence of the populace in the broader understanding of archival collections and materials.  It is a contemporary tool of the digital archivists skill set.