Category Archives: Week 11: Archives & Design- Bode & Osborne

What is Lost and What is Unseen

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When I taught ECL 220, I had a section of the class devoted to understanding the Great Migration, where we looked at Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and other Black authors of the early half of the twentieth century, how they became voice for a generation of Americans who were systemically denied one. However, it became apparent when I was preparing for this section of the course that by only analyzing the written word of Black Americans and how they experienced the Great Migration, we would be continuing to turn a blind eye to many others who never had the opportunity to put their experiences down in prose. I think this is a critical misstep to avoid when considering the literary canon in regards to Black authors.

In Shadow Archives, Cloutier states that Kevin Young “proposes a triadic taxonomy of ‘shadow books’: the unwritten, the removed, and the lost He suggests that the legion books by African American authors that ‘fail to be written’ symbolize ‘ the life denied [them], the black literature denied existence.'” This, Cloutier argues, is why it is so important to visit special collections and learn to understand the unpublished work of these writers. However, I think that, particularly for the time period, it is important to focus on other aspects of storytelling, particularly music.

For Black Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and today), access to the written word was very difficult to come by, especially in the Jim Crow South. As a result, we have very little literature from this time, from this place. Richard Wright is one of the rare exceptions to this and had he not moved away from the South we may never have gotten Native Son or Black Boy.

When we look at the archives of these Black authors, we must also wonder what was not included in the archive, or what was destroyed, and we must consider all of Black literature from the time period through this lens. The fixity of the book also lends its contents a fragility. A book can be burned, can be shredded, can be thrown in the river, so even for those lucky enough to successfully learn how to read and write in a world that told them they should not, their words were always under threat.

With music, especially the blues during this time period, there is an ability to circumvent these policies and threats. Music, unlike the book or the written word, is very difficult to regulate. Black storytellers of the time used this to accomplish the fixity that the book promised white and educated members of the society. Lead Belly, an infamous blues artist, was the first to record “Midnight Special” and “Cotton Fields,” songs he heard while in prison in Arkansas, which would later both be covered by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Without Lead Belly’s recording of these songs, they would likely be lost. Much of what transpired during the time of the Great Migration, particularly in the South, would be lost without being transcribed in song. The victims of the worst racism were often the poor and uneducated. They did not have the same opportunities to move to places like Harlem and Chicago. RL Burnside wrote songs on the porches of his Mississippi homes, playing in juke joints not much bigger than a chicken coop. Blind Willie Johnson, who was blinded by his stepmother throwing lye into his eyes, spent most of his life homeless and in abject poverty, but his “Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground” was included on the Voyager spacecraft to best exemplify the human emotion of loneliness to extraterrestrial life.

The point is, that when we look at the special collections of Black authors of this time, yes we must consider how their writing was shunned and ostracized by the literary world, as Cloutier explores, but we must also consider the lives of the even lesser privileged among the Black community, which, more often than not, means the experiences of people from the South. And so to properly consider the “literature” of the time, we must also consider the oral storytelling present in these communities and those that came before, where stories were passed from generation to generation in slaves’ quarters, often retellings of tales handed down from passages across the Atlantic in the hull of slave ships, often things that had been handed down from a more ancient tradition in Africa, where these stories would be told more as performance, often accompanied with stringed instruments and drums, following rhythms that, over time, would persist all the way until the advent of the blues in America some centuries later, where these chords would intermix with those of poor white people in Appalachia during front porch sessions, ultimately giving us country music and rock and roll and hip hop.

We think of the book as fixed, but we cannot ignore its obvious shortcomings in some areas, especially when a people who have been denied access and denied a say in the world are trying to make their voices heard. Fixity can be lost, and to fill in the gaps we must look around and listen.

(Got a little confused on the reading assignment for this week, so I’m uploading late.)

Lifecycle Archives and Identity

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In the first chapter of “Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature”, I saw that the lifecycle of archives and how they are used throughout time can be a representation of giving new life to history and black representation. On page 9, Cloutier writes, “the forensic imagination that informs much of the contemporary African American scholarship (re)establishes the authority of a collective provenance, conjuring a kinship that, at its best, allows contemporary black life to imaginatively reclaim irretrievable losses.” By looking through different archives over time, it can tell us about the political climate and how people were seen at the time depending on how and who curated it. Through past curations, we’re able to examine beliefs that people held over what is deemed important and how much representation Black people had in archiving Black history.

On pages 9 and 10, a different perspective of archivists is shown. Cloutier states that “collecting practices of individual authors offers a unique counterpoint to the dominant forms of institutional thinking under whose shadow black writers lived. The archives become a site where an author’s hidden identities, affiliations, and political ambivalences and fantasies can be hammered out, notably when these things became too difficult, messy, shameful, or inchoate for public presentation.” When we examine individual writers and are able to piece together their whole story, it fills in gaps and helps the history of important writers to move forward and not be forgotten. Looking at writers’ personal histories and documents and not already curated archives can give insight about the political history of Black writers of a specific decade and its relationship to public perception at the time. For example, American writers such as Richard Wright have had likings towards communist ideas but may have not been open about it because of public perception and possible ostracization. Uncovering this and putting into future archives tells the next generation of the relationship between identity, politics, and what led to having certain ideologies.

I liked on page 11, where the lifecycle of an archive is brought up in relation to time. The text says, “It is only at the end of this period of closure that the archived document is as if woken from sleep and returned to life”…“the use of an archive “results in the resuscitation of life, in bringing the dead back to life by reintegrating them in the cycle of time.” Keeping the usage of an archive going over time, even if it diverts from its original purpose, keeps important history, content, and context alive. By remembering documents or archived mementos of a person with new perspectives, it helps represent the relationship that historical identity has when interacting with life.

Institutions and Archives

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Cloutier discusses the function of archives: “what capture really means is that a record’s information must be inscribed or seized in some kind of storage medium…this piece of paper then needs to be pulled into a records management system—which still requires a physical infrastructure—in order to be used and controlled” (8).

The organization of archives is political, influenced by the culture and systems of power that surround it. The organization of archives emphasizes the human touch and consideration involved in this ‘medium,” similar to the way the human touch is involved in all technological processes we might assume run themselves (book publishing, AI).

I’m currently in Dr. Y Howard’s trans and queer cultural studies class, and we’re having similar discussions about the limitations of archives. Last week, we read Andy Campbell’s Bound Together, specifically the chapter, “Yellow, or reading archives diagonally” in which Campbell observes that something like the Leather Archives and Museum is effected by social influences like stigma surrounding kink and BDSM. Due to this, people are less likely to donate possible archival material from deceased people who used to be in the leather community. With the limitations of the archive’s organization in mind, Campbell reads through the archives diagonally, creating his own methods of categorization (organizing by the color yellow in reference to the hanky code) in order to come to a different result than would have been available had he followed the normative or offered organization of the archive: “What emerges to return to Foucault’s comment, is not just a collection of objects, but a way of life, yielding… ‘intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized'” (Campbell, 103).

Week 11: Digital Texts “Brought Back to Life”

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In both Katherine Bode and Roger Osborne’s chapter “Book history from the archival record” and Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s introduction to Shadow Archives, the authors reveal that archives are never neutral spaces. Archives are shaped by the cultural values, power structures, and technological conditions of the eras in which books are produced and preserved. Bode and Osborne explain that a book exists far beyond its physical covers, arguing that “no book was ever bound by its covers” (220). By tracing the “book network cycle,” they highlight how the creation and circulation of a text passes through numerous stages and hands including writers, editors, printers, publishers, distributors, collectors, and archivists. Each of these agents plays a role in determining which works are preserved and recognized as culturally significant. Therefore, archives become curated reflections of dominant ideologies.

Cloutier also argues that archives reveal the values and exclusions of their historical moment, especially when examining African American literature. He describes African American archives as “shadow archives,” existing in the margins because mainstream institutions historically excluded or undervalued Black writers and cultural production (12). His metaphor of the archive as a “boomerang” suggests that texts may disappear from view but can return to relevance when cultural interests shift or when scholars retrieve and reinterpret neglected materials. In this way, Cloutier illustrates how archival life cycles are deeply tied to questions of race, access, and institutional power.Both Bode and Roger Osborne’s text and Cloutier’s introduction raise questions about whether “dead” texts can return to life. The idea feels especially relevant in the digital age. I started to think about our last class in the Digital Humanities Center. Amaranth Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen demonstrates how a work can temporarily “die” and then be brought back to life. For example, when Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen’s software aged out, her work could not be read or shared. However 5 years later,it was revived through technical migration to new platforms. This digital example parallels Cloutier’s boomerang metaphor because texts can fall out of circulation not only due to cultural exclusion but also technology that continues to evolve and update rapidly.

The ‘Talking’ Archive

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When I was reading, “Book Histoy from the Archival Record,” by Katherine Bode and Robert Osborne, I was intrigued by how much information can be gleaned from archives. Within Bode and Osborne’s chapter they are adamant about conveying how archvies are able to tell so many stories beyond the content of the collection. For example neart the start of the chapter, they write, “Quite simply, achival research provides the principal way for book historialns to explore and understand the history and nature of authorship, publication, distribution, and reception of print culture.” They discuss the corresondence that happens between the people who are involved in bookmaking and how it can reveal so much about the context of the product or the book’s market. The letters can offer a lot of insight into the industry. Although archvies seem simple, merely collections of media used for remembrance or preservation, the can reveal so much more than that. The act of creating the archive is one of its most crucial aspects. Bode and Osborne write, “Most records have already undergone a process of ‘archiving’. Individuals make decisions about what documents they want to keep or discard… All archives are formed in relation the methods, rules and spacial limitations of their managers, whether the archivist is professional or ameteur.” This quote brought to mind the act of reading that we have discussed in class. Just as no two people can read the same way, there are no two archives that are identical. The thought and intention that goes into the archives are what makes them crucial to society. The archives provoke questions such as “who determines what is kept in or out of the archives?” or “why is the media worth preserving?” So many factors can be at play for this, including accessibility, time, space, and money. The items stored in an archive can say a million things about the owner or curator. Studying all aspects of the archive can reveal a lot about the archivist, society, and the content. After detailing these archival studies, Bode and Osborne write, “such studies as these draw attention to the content of archives by compiling rich and compelling narratives that make the archives ‘talk’.” The ‘talking’ archive was extremely fascinating to me because the media stored within the archives have a conversation with the ones who are studying it which leads to questions and ideas flowing back and forth between them.

Week 11: Bode and Osborne

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In Chapter 13 of The Cambridge Companion to The History of the Book, Katherine Bode and Roger Osborne remind us that “no book was ever bound by its covers” (Bode and Osborne, 220). While we’ve been re-learning the importance of the materiality of the physical book, Bode and Osborne, in section “Reading the qualitative archives: sources”, remind us that archiving extends beyond the physicality of the book itself. Archives preserve not just the book, but the traces of the people, relationships, and decisions that shaped it during its creation, and over time. Bode and Osborne highlight the three main and most used categories of archival records used in book history as “correspondence, publishers’ records and booksellers and library records”, each providing insight into the book’s life. Authors’ letters may reveal how a manuscript evolved through editing and negotiation, while the correspondence between booksellers or librarians may show how works reached, or failed to reach, specific readers. This correspondence may even “provide specific reasons why a book was or was not purchased for a particular group of readers” (Bode and Osborne, 220). As they write, correspondence “provides some of the most direct evidence of relationships between individuals in print culture” (Bode and Osborne, 220). With these records, scholars are able to reconstruct the “communications circuit” of print, tracing how various works moved from private creation to public consumption. In fact, archival research reshapes our understanding of authorship and authority. Scholarly editions, such as the digital Mark Twain Project, reveal that previously undiscovered correspondence can “destabilize established arguments” about a text’s purpose or meaning. Archives keep literary history alive, and are continually reshaping the boundaries of what we know, or think we know. Bode and Osborne push us to see that studying the history of the book means studying a network of human activity and correspondence, that is the archive is a living and continually growing space. 

Week 11: Book History from the Archival Record

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In “Book History from the Archival Record” by Katherine Bode and Roger Osborne, one sentence really stood out to me. They describe archives as places that hold “the material evidence of print culture” (p. 219). I like this idea because it captures how archives are not just about preserving old objects but about keeping the story of how literature comes to life and travels through time.

Bode and Osborne explain that archives reveal the hidden parts of literary history, the relationships between writers, editors, publishers, and readers. For example, letters between authors and publishers can show how a book changed before it reached the public. I think this makes literature feel less like a finished product and more like an ongoing process. A book is not just written by one person sitting alone, it is shaped by conversations, negotiations, and small choices that we never see as readers.

What I also found interesting is how the authors connect traditional archives with digital ones. They describe how new technology allows us to access huge collections of documents from anywhere in the world. As someone who studies abroad, I can really appreciate that. I can imagine how, in the past, researchers had to travel long distances just to look at certain papers. Now, a lot of that information is available online, opening up possibilities for people who would never have had access before.

Still, the reading also made me think about what might get lost in this shift. Physical archives have a sense of presence, the smell of paper, the handwriting, the feeling of being surrounded by history. Digital archives are incredibly useful, but they can feel distant and less personal. It makes me wonder if we lose part of the human connection when we turn everything into data.

What stayed with me most is the idea that archives are never truly finished. Each time someone studies or digitizes them, they create new ways of understanding the past. That makes archives feel alive, constantly reshaped by new questions and new technologies. I think that is what Bode and Osborne mean when they say archives provide “the material evidence of print culture.” They are the living memory of literature, showing how stories continue to evolve long after they were written.

Worries of the Digital Archive

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After reading The Book History of Archival Record by Katherine Ode and Roger Osborne, I can safely say that digital archives are a double edge sword. It is so powerful because it has the ability to archive anything very easy, but it can also be taken away easily and have their original meaning/history erased. They go in to explain that representing one digital record for every copy of a book is simply not enough and dangerous for our history. “The danger also exists that a single digitized record will be considered sufficient to represent all versions of a work (regardless of manifestation and physical characteristics, such as marginalia and other page markings). (233)

We must also understand that there are benefits to the digital archive in which time is cut short, and we are able to process more information faster into the archive. It saves everyone time, money and hassle, but it also erases the physical history of what it is. The physical aspects are beyond crucial as they teach us a huge piece of history from the book’s life. Of course, you can add descriptions of its physical aspects on the digital archive document, but it’s not the same as having it in your hands to inspect and analyze correctly. The history being erased is now another worry that I have about digital archives because my only worry about them before was the fact that you need a license to access most digital media. These digital licenses are not ownership licenses which allow for companies to pull away any digital media whenever they want which is terrifying. While I do believe that digital archives can serve us great purpose; I do believe that we should find ways to preserve the physical history of whatever book is being talked about. Representing one piece of work would essentially silence and erase many voices about how they treated their copy of the book. This is something that ultimately worries me but makes me wonder how we will tackle it.

While I am worried about how digital archives will act in the future, I am very much open to the idea of how they can still benefit us as a society in any way that wouldn’t hurt our history.

The Archive

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I never viewed books under the framework presented; books as a quantitative and qualitative objective measures–books for me, for the most part, are a vessel of knowledge and entertainment; I have never viewed books as an archive– specifically how archival records interject with different modes of medium– physically and digitally. In this instance the archive is defined or categorized as “a place in which public records or other important historic documents are kept. Whether in a library museum or an online database”. This allows to not look at records but understand the perplexities of the history and the science behind the book– not merely at the content of the book but as an artifact, as a medium. Echoing Derrida’s scholar take on the archive. Derrida deconstructs the archive, the notion of archiving and scrutinizing a meditation on time and technology– both factors interjecting on how the archive has transmogrified. The archive are not merely process of keeping documents boxed up but demonstrate a relationship between the different modes of inscription and the technological advancements of the time period the records were written. Such processes, laudable yet problematic. As mentioned earlier, qualitative measures analyze books for its content and meaning, exhibiting the relationship between time and values; on the other hand, the quantitative measure seeks to find patterns across literary records– both metrics seek to accomplish to understand the archive. Furthermore, this archive duality demonstrates how digitalization shapes and reconstructs our perception regarding the permeance of objects. It guides our thinking through an “extended meditation… on time and technology”. Just as the archive shift from paper to screen, its contents become widely accessible yet unstable– bouncing between the different modes of medium online. The traditional standard of the archive carries from within its original content matter– annotations, missing pages, highlights; the online archive loses those privileges, yet privileges accessibility and equity– facilitating the process for those who seek it. The archive operates in a spectrum, constantly being redefined as our understanding changes.

Week 11: Rethinkin Archives

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Rethinking Archives: More Than Just Dusty Documents

Reading Bode and Osborne’s chapter on book history and archival research really made me think back on our early lectures for this class when archives were first mentioned and to reconsider what archives actually are and how historians use them. I’ve always thought of archives as these neutral spaces where old documents just sit waiting to be discovered, but this reading completely challenges that assumption.

What stood out to me most was the authors’ argument about how archives aren’t neutral at all. “Archival records are not only incomplete and mediated by various levels of archival intervention; they are also subjective. The records of individuals and institutions are strongly influenced by the beliefs, perspectives, values, interests and aims of those that produce them” (224). This quote really hit home for me because it means we can’t just take archival sources at face value. Someone made deliberate choices about what to save and what to throw away, and those choices were influenced by their own biases and interests.

Additionally, the discussion of quantitative versus qualitative was really interesting. I hadn’t thought much about how book historians use statistical methods to analyze things like print runs, sales figures, and distribution patterns. Never thought statistics would come back to haunt me in this reading but here we are. The authors make a compelling case that both approaches are necessary. You need the numbers to see broader trends, but you also need the close reading of individual documents to understand the human stories behind those trends. It’s not an either/or situation.

I was also particularly interested by the section on correspondence in archives. The idea that we can trace relationships between authors, publishers, and readers through their letters gives us such an intimate window into how books actually got made and circulated. It’s not just about the final published product. It’s about all the negotiations, rejections, and compromises that happened along the way. That makes book history feel much more dynamic and human than I’d previously thought.

Overall, this reading made me think and approach differently about doing historical research. I have learned through this and our midterm that archives aren’t just repositories of facts, they’re shaped by power dynamics, personal decisions, and institutional limitations.