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).