Library Faculty/Staff Scholarship and Research

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Author: search.filters.author.Sly, JordanSubject: search.filters.subject.Digital Humanities

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    Brutal Hands and the Shaping of Historical Memory: How Digital History Can De-Archive Material for Increased Access and Responsible Stewardship
    (2021-07-06) Sly, Jordan
    In Arlette Frage’s classic work The Allure of the Archives, she discusses the notion of the “brutal” hand of the archivist collecting, storing, and classifying the material in their care. Frage is discussing the utilitarian nature of the archive as a storage facility for access to the past, but no organizing structure can be neutral. We can expand this notion of the “brutal” into a more provocative usage if we are considering the archivist’s hand as an additional force in history preserving but also obscuring history through the acquisitions, descriptions, colocation, and retention practices. Hierarchies and institutional biases privilege access to certain stories over others which can create an obscuring effect despite the best efforts and intentions of archivists. Additionally, the confines of the archival box or folder can belie important nuances of history swept aside to privilege alternate narratives. In this paper I will discuss how digital history allows for a “de-archiving” of valuable material in a way that not only adds to more general accessibility, but also allows for new interpretations, comparisons, and from of analysis. To do this I will provide a brief survey of the trends in archival literature beginning with classics of archival theory, associated movements such as the so-called “New Museology,” and trends into the more recent postcolonial and social justice inspired methods in recent archival literature. Additionally, I will discuss associated trends in digital history and the digital humanities which seek the remediation of primary archival materials to favor access and a grander scale of digital analysis. I will briefly discuss my previous project titled The Recusant Print Network Project as an example, some of the lessons learned from this experience, and how these lessons can be applied to a document analysis project like the Slavery, Law, and Power project.
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    TRPNP: Phase 1
    (2017-10-13) Sly, Jordan
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    The Recusant Print Network Project, Phase I [poster]
    (2017-01-30) Sly, Jordan
    This project illustrates how the use of data-driven visualizations of sixteenth and seventeenth-century title page imprint information can illuminate aspects of the recusant printer network in the era of high-recusancy, c.1558-1640. This period represents the era of the Recusancy Acts which made non-conforming- that is non-Protestant- practice of faith illegal. Recusant literature, therefore, represents the body of literature designed to maintain the faith (through both materials for hidden priests and or personal devotion) of the Catholic communities in England to actively work to subvert the message of the Protestant Church). This project is largely one of experimental remediation with the goal of investigating whether new insight into an established field can be gained by collating, analyzing, and graphically displaying like information —in this case Recusant literature— that is distinct from traditional forms of scholarship. I argue that by removing the impediments of shelf-bound and geographically separated volumes and by quantifying elements of their creation, the network and nature of recusant literature is made more immediate by illustrating trends and anomalies at the same level of access and visibility and thereby potentially opening new avenues of research. Additionally, the aim is to combine methodological approaches of traditional book history — in this case merging bibliographic studies with quantitative history— and also utilizing new methods of corpus mining and data visualization to help make the obscure known. While much has been written about recusancy, there are still new stories to be told by investigating new forms of evidence made available through newer methods of humanities scholarship. New methods can potentially lead to new evidence to help settle old historiographical debates such as the lingering tails of the John Bossy and Christopher Haigh debate that still consumes much of the scholarship on recusancy.