Recent scholarship on archival research has raised questions concerning the character and impact of 'the archive' on how the traces of the past are researched, the use and analysis of different kinds of archived data, methodological approaches to the practicalities involved, and what kind of theory is drawn on and contributed to by such research. The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences builds on these questions, exploring key methodological ideas and debates and engaging in detail with a wide range of archival projects and practices, in order to put to use important theoretical ideas that shed light on the methods involved. Offering an overview of the current 'state of the field' and written by four authors with extensive experience in conducting research in and creating archives around the world, it demonstrates the different ways in which archival methodology, practice and theory can be employed. It also shows how the ideas and approaches detailed in the book can be put into practice by other researchers, working on different kinds of archives and collections. The volume engages with crucial questions, including: What is 'an archive' and how does it come into existence? Why do archival research and how is it done? How can sense be made of the scale and scope of collections and archives? What are the best ways to analyse the traces of the past that remain? What are helpful criteria for evaluating the knowledge claims produced by archival research? What is the importance of community archives? How has the digital turn changed the way in which archival research is carried out? What role is played by the questions that researchers bring into an archive? How do we deal with unexpected encounters in the archive? A rigorous and accessible examination of the methods and choices that shape research 'on the ground' and the ways in which theory, practice and methodology inform one another, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in archival and documentary research.

Refiguring the Archive at once expresses cutting-edge debates on `the archive' in South Africa and internationally, and pushes the boundaries of those debates. It brings together prominent thinkers from a range of disciplines, mainly South Africans but a number from other countries. Traditionally archives have been seen as preserving memory and as holding the past. The contributors to this book question this orthodoxy, unfolding the ways in which archives construct, sanctify, and bury pasts. In his contribution, Jacques Derrida (an instantly recognisable name in intellectual discourse worldwide) shows how remembering can never be separated from forgetting, and argues that the archive is about the future rather than the past. Collectively the contributors demonstrate the degree to which thinking about archives is embracing new realities and new possibilities. The book expresses a confidence in claiming for archival discourse previously unentered terrains. It serves as an early manual for a time that has already begun.

Though today’s LGBTQ people owe a lot to the generations who came before them, their historical inheritances are not always obvious. Working with the archives of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society, artist E.G. Crichton decided to do something to bridge this generation gap. She selected 19 innovative LGBTQ artists, writers, and musicians, then paired each of them with a deceased person whose personal artifacts are part of the archive. Including 25 pages of vivid images, Matchmaking in the Archive documents this monumental creative project and adds essays by Jonathan Katz, Michelle Tea, and Chris Vargas, who describe their own unique encounters with the ghosts of LGBTQ history. Together, they make the archive come alive in remarkably intimate ways.

Perspectives from educators, archivists, and students involved in efforts to deconstruct and transform the institutional authority of archives

This book examines the use and re-use of digital archives in a unique manner, by combining theoretical and practical approaches to the contemporary digital archive. The book brings together a range of writers - specialising in media and cultural studies, contemporary art and art history, digital and networked culture, library and museum studies - to explore the cultural impact of digital archives. Several of the essays describe the process of constructing a digital archive as a specific case study – in digitising a physical archive and designing a searchable digital database as the core of the digital archive. Other chapters explore the cultural significance of digital archives in more general theoretical terms. These considerations include: the specific properties of the digital archive; its similarities and differences to the traditional paper-based archive; the ethical decisions made in the design of an archive; and the potential for creative re-use of online archived materials.

Music, Dance and the Archive reimagines records of performance cultures from the archive through collaborative and creative research. In this edited volume, Amanda Harris, Linda Barwick and Jakelin Troy bring together performing artists, cultural leaders and interdisciplinary scholars to highlight the limits of archival records of music and dance. Through artistic methods drawn from Indigenous methodologies, dance studies and song practices, the contributors explore modes of re-embodying archival records, renewing song practices, countering colonial narratives and re-presenting performance traditions. The book’s nine chapters are written by song and dance practitioners, curators, music and dance historians, anthropologists, linguists and musicologists, who explore music and dance by Indigenous people from the West, far north and southeast of the Australian continent, and from Aotearoa New Zealand, Taiwan and Turtle Island (North America). Music, Dance and the Archive interrogates historical practices of access to archives by showing how Indigenous performing artists and community members and academic researchers (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) are collaborating to bring life to objects that have been stored in archives. It not only examines colonial archiving practices but also creative and provocative efforts to redefine the role of archives and to bring them into dialogue with contemporary creative work. Through varied contributions the book seeks to destabilise the very definition of “archives” and to imagine the different forms in which cultural knowledge can be held for current and future Indigenous stakeholders. Music, Dance and the Archive highlights the necessity of relationships, Country and creativity in practising song and dance, and in revitalising practices that have gone out of use.

Earth’s present-day environments are the outcome of a 4.5 billion year period of evolution reflecting the interaction of global-scale geological and biological processes punctuated by several extraordinary events and episodes that perturbed the entire Earth system. One of the earliest and arguably greatest of these events was a substantial increase (orders of magnitude) in the atmospheric oxygen abundance, sometimes referred to as the Great Oxidation Event. Volume 2: The Core Archive of the Fennoscandian Arctic Russia - Drilling Early Earth Project provides a description of the newly generated archive hosting ICDP's FAR-DEEP drill cores through key geological formations in Russian Fennoscandia. The book contains several hundred high-quality, representative photographs illustrating 3650 m of fresh, uncontaminated core documenting a series of global palaeoenvironmental upheavals linked to the Great Oxidation Event. The core exhibits sedimentary and volcanic formations that record a transition from anoxic to oxic Earth surface environments, the first global glaciation (the Huronian glaciation), an unprecedented perturbation of the global carbon cycle (the Lomagundi-Jatulian Event), a radical increase in the size of the seawater sulphate reservoir, an apparent upper mantle oxidising event, the Earth's earliest documented sedimentary phosphates, one of the greatest accumulations of organic matter (the Shunga Event) and generation of the Earth's earliest supergiant petroleum deposit. The volume highlights the potential of the FAR-DEEP core archive for future research of the Great Oxidation Event and the biogeochemical cycles operating during that time. Welcome to the illustrative journey through one of the most exciting periods of planet Earth! Earth’s present-day environments are the outcome of a 4.5 billion year period of evolution reflecting the interaction of global-scale geological and biological processes punctuated by several extraordinary events and episodes that perturbed the entire Earth system. One of the earliest and arguably greatest of these events was a substantial increase (orders of magnitude) in the atmospheric oxygen abundance, sometimes referred to as the Great Oxidation Event. Volume 2: The Core Archive of the Fennoscandian Arctic Russia - Drilling Early Earth Project provides a description of the newly generated archive hosting ICDP's FAR-DEEP drill cores through key geological formations in Russian Fennoscandia. The book contains several hundred high-quality, representative photographs illustrating 3650 m of fresh, uncontaminated core documenting a series of global palaeoenvironmental upheavals linked to the Great Oxidation Event. The core exhibits sedimentary and volcanic formations that record a transition from anoxic to oxic Earth surface environments, the first global glaciation (the Huronian glaciation), an unprecedented perturbation of the global carbon cycle (the Lomagundi-Jatulian Event), a radical increase in the size of the seawater sulphate reservoir, an apparent upper mantle oxidising event, the Earth's earliest documented sedimentary phosphates, one of the greatest accumulations of organic matter (the Shunga Event) and generation of the Earth's earliest supergiant petroleum deposit. The volume highlights the potential of the FAR-DEEP core archive for future research of the Great Oxidation Event and the biogeochemical cycles operating during that time. Welcome to the illustrative journey through one of the most exciting periods of planet Earth! Earth’s present-day environments are the outcome of a 4.5 billion year period of evolution reflecting the interaction of global-scale geological and biological processes punctuated by several extraordinary events and episodes that perturbed the entire Earth system. One of the earliest and arguably greatest of these events was a substantial increase (orders of magnitude) in the atmospheric oxygen abundance, sometimes referred to as the Great Oxidation Event. Volume 2: The Core Archive of the Fennoscandian Arctic Russia - Drilling Early Earth Project provides a description of the newly generated archive hosting ICDP's FAR-DEEP drill cores through key geological formations in Russian Fennoscandia. The book contains several hundred high-quality, representative photographs illustrating 3650 m of fresh, uncontaminated core documenting a series of global palaeoenvironmental upheavals linked to the Great Oxidation Event. The core exhibits sedimentary and volcanic formations that record a transition from anoxic to oxic Earth surface environments, the first global glaciation (the Huronian glaciation), an unprecedented perturbation of the global carbon cycle (the Lomagundi-Jatulian Event), a radical increase in the size of the seawater sulphate reservoir, an apparent upper mantle oxidising event, the Earth's earliest documented sedimentary phosphates, one of the greatest accumulations of organic matter (the Shunga Event) and generation of the Earth's earliest supergiant petroleum deposit. The volume highlights the potential of the FAR-DEEP core archive for future research of the Great Oxidation Event and the biogeochemical cycles operating during that time. Welcome to the illustrative journey through one of the most exciting periods of planet Earth!

Artists in the Archive explores the agency and materiality of the archival document through a stunning collection of critical writings and original artworks. It examines the politics and philosophy behind re-using remains, historicising this artistic practice and considering the breadth of ways in which archival materials inform, inflect and influence new works. Taking a fresh look at the relationships between insider know-how and outsider knowledge, Artists in the Archive opens a vital dialogue between a global range of artists and scholars. It seeks to trouble the distinction between artistic practice and scholarly research, offering disciplinary perspectives from experimental theatre, performance art, choreography and dance, to visual art making, archiving and curating.

African political writing of the mid-20th century seeks to critically engage with questions of identity, history, and the state for the purpose of national and human liberation. This volume collects an array of essays that reflect on anticolonialism in Africa, broadly defined. Each contribution connects the historical period with the anticolonial present through a critical examination of what constitutes the anticolonial archive. The volume considers archive in a Derridean sense, as always in the process of being constructed such that the assessment of the African anticolonial archive is one that involves a contemporary process of curating. The essays in this volume, as well as the volume itself, enact different ways of curating material from this period. The project reflects an approach to documents, arguments, and materials that can be considered “international relations” and “world politics,” but in ways that that intentionally leaves them unhinged from these disciplinary meanings. While we examine many of the same questions that have been asked within area studies, African studies, and International Relations, we do so through an alternative archive. In doing so, we challenge the assumption that Africa is solely the domain of policy makers and area studies, and African peoples as the objects of data

Melancholy and the Archive examines how trauma, history and memory are represented in key works of major contemporary writers such as David Mitchell, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami and Jose Saramago. The book explores how these authors construct crucial relationships between sites of memory-the archive becomes a central trope here-and the self that has been subjected to various traumas, various losses. The archive-be it a bureaucratic office (Saramago), an underground bunker (Auster), a geographical space or landscape (Mitchell) or even a hole (Murakami)-becomes the means by which the self attempts to preserve and conserve his or her sense of history even as the economy of trauma threatens to erase the grounds of such preservation: as the subject or self is threatened so the archive becomes a festishized site wherein history is housed, accommodated, created, even fabricated. The archive, in Freudian terms, becomes a space of melancholy precisely as the subject preserves not only a personal history or a culture's history, but also the history of the traumas that necessitates the creation of the archive as such.