Tag Archives: week 11

The air we breathe

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Cloutier eloquently demonstrates the conventions of the archive through Wright’s discourse, ” I would hurl words into the darkness and wait for an echo”– this idea demonstrates how African American writers are marginalized and oppressed in darkness, later for their writings to be rediscovered and reinvented. Furthermore, if we deconstruct the concept or the idea of shadow books we are able to observe the amalgamation of works and writings that are composed by African Americans; together, forming a vast collection of invisible books. Intrinsically, the archive transforms and exegetes a different meaning than what we had originally thought– in this instance, the archive is not a static neutral place in which works can be found but one that is shaped by racism and exclusion; therefore, demonstrating that the archive has become a tool for political persecution.

Cloutier also exhibits the lifecycle of literature under Schellenberg framework, “enduring contributions to modern records management is the lifecycle concept, which appears early in the manual”. This lifecycle expands the realm of how literature is created and used, only to be discarded or disposed when not needed. However, because disposing of literature is part of the life cycle it demonstrates that Black archives are being marginalized, or in other words, history is being erased. Rather than putting an end to part of the archive we should not discard it but reinterpret African American literature– in this way, the shadow of the archive takes a different meaning and interpretation. The archive is not being discarded but works as an act of defiance that refuses to adhere to the traditional standards of the lifecycle of literature. It takes on a different meaning than the one we are accustomed to.

Finally, the archive works in a continuum. What this suggests is that when Black literature is rediscovered or reinterpreted it allows for new generations of literary scholars to disseminate and engage with literature in different manners– to engage with the world differently. Preserving material allows it to be in the archive which consequently allows scholars to redefine the present.

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. 

Reading the Archive in Two Ways

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When I read Katherine Bode and Roger Osborne, one thing stayed with me, the difference between the archive you can touch and the one you can search. On one side, there is the quiet room, the box, the folder, the paper. On the other, a glowing screen and a cursor. At first, they seem like two versions of the same thing. But the more I thought about it, the more they felt like two different languages.

Bode and Osborne write that archives hold “the material evidence of print culture” (p. 219). That line made me pause. Material evidence makes the archive sound like a witness, not just a container. The paper, its edges, its marks, even its weight are all part of the story. You don’t just read the text, you also read the object.The digital archive changes how we enter that story. It makes research faster and broader. You can map a question across thousands of records and find patterns you would never see by turning pages. It has a different rhythm with less waiting and more moving, less surprise by accident and more discovery through search.

Still, something feels different when reading on a screen. The page becomes an image surrounded by tools such as a zoom bar, a search box, or a download button. These tools help, but they also create a small distance. You can zoom in and see the ink in perfect detail, closer than you might in person, but you cannot feel the give of old paper or the tightness of a stitched spine. Bode and Osborne describe how the “weight, smell and feel” (p. 233) resist translation. That line captures exactly what gets lost. You can see everything, and yet something is missing.

It is not about choosing one side. The best work happens when both worlds meet. Digital archives open up scale and connections, while physical ones remind us of size and texture. One teaches us to ask and the other teaches us to look.

Even the idea of chance changes between them. In a reading room, coincidence happens in the margins, like a note on the back of a letter or a slip of paper left behind. Online, it happens in the search results, when a word you did not expect brings up something new. Both moments matter, they just belong to different kinds of touch, one physical and one digital.

Bode and Osborne end by saying that different archives serve different purposes and that neither is naturally better. That feels right. It reminds me that reading today means being bilingual, fluent in both dust and data. The slow turn of a page and the fast scroll of a screen. Dust reminds us that knowledge has a body. Data reminds us that it has a pattern. Reading the archive in both languages lets us hear both.

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.

As a Bookseller

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“The bookseller frequently takes a gamble with the
books stocked on the shelves and serves the community in a similar way to
libraries by providing a meeting place for book talk and a collection of books
that reflect the taste of the community served” (Bode and Osborne 222).

This quote hit me in the face with the force of a medium-sized paperback book, that is to say not hard but also not gentle. I’m mainly interested in the very last part, the part about it reflecting the taste of the community and the gambling part. For context, I do work at Barnes and Noble, and have for almost a year (I think today is actually my one year anniversary), so I’ve learned a thing or two that customers aren’t exactly privy to, or at least it’s not common knowledge.

While different Barnes and Noble do fluctuate based on their customer base—i.e. some stores have bigger mystery and thriller sections, while others have smaller mystery and thriller sections—and we do take a gamble based on the books we shelve, there are some instances where this is not the case.

There are certain things Barnes and Noble does, that changes the dynamic between the customers and booksellers—because after all—it is a corporation. This becomes recognizable when you know the relationship between Barnes and Noble and publishers. The publisher tends to have all of the leverage when it comes to selling their books to Barnes and Noble. But, the company added a few years ago something called ‘our monthly picks,’ which are Barnes and Noble’s hand selected picks of (usually) 6 books that are deemed as must reads that month. But really, it’s a way to gain leverage over publishers. If Barnes and Noble can make a book a bestseller by putting it on the monthly pick list, then the company gains more leverage over the publishers (they can negotiate the price). So even if the booksellers haven’t actually read the books, or even hated them, they are still required to claim all the books as ‘their’ monthly picks and sell them to customers. (I remember flat out refusing to sell one of the monthly picks because I was ethically opposed to it.) While they don’t encourage flat out lying, it seems to be implied in order to sell a monthly pick. If most customers knew this, it could break the trust created between bookseller and customer.

So, instead of the customer base really making up some of the top selling books in a Barnes and Noble, it is often the set monthly picks that do well. Now that is not to say that all monthly picks are bad, it’s just that we are actively told to influence customers into buying a book they might have not purchased before for a reason that goes against one of our sayings, ‘to put the best book for the customer in their hands.’ It’s no longer a complete gamble because there are ulterior motives and factors at play.

It’s similar with the bestseller’s list, publishers pay Barnes and Noble to be on the list. Whoever pays the most gets the top spots. This is all to promote the book, and not actually name bestsellers, while also basically preemptively making them bestsellers. It is a way to influence people. By setting these books a part from the rest, and also signaling to the customer that ‘this book is more valuable’ Barnes and Noble is able to make that list into ‘reality.’ Because who doesn’t look at a bestsellers’ list and think, ‘oh I should read this because it’s on the list, so it must be good.’

It’s different from a library, because it is a business.

Switching focus into the gambling aspect of the quote, it’s more of a calculated risk than anything, especially when it comes to opening a new store. For instance, the store I work at now, I helped with setting it up. And when doing so, I though that some of the sections were small, or not as well stocked as they should be for the area we are in. We barely got any manga, and we are basically right next to a college. A big demographic for manga is college kids, so it seemed like there should’ve been more than what we got. While they predicted correctly that we would have a big CD and vinyl record customer base, they did not correctly predict the manga customer base (which lead to some loss in revenue due to some manga not being available at the store right that moment). In this way we are able to adapt to our customer base, and also know the community better so those calculated risks become safer and safer.

I just thought my perspective on this might be interesting.

(P.s. You didn’t hear any of this from me. I’m not trying to get fired💀, because I do love the job for every other part.)

Posthumous Rights

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The debate over what constitutes a human life is always an interesting topic. Some might say a heartbeat, others might say a soul, but no matter the definitive answer, the case remains it’s always a debate. Taking ideas and narrative from the introduction of “‘Not Like An Arrow, but a Boomerang,’ or The Lifecycles of African American Literary Papers,” I’ll question whether writing and other art forms serve the role of human life. And further, should posthumous works continue to be judged and released?
As is the nature of most actions, the author puts their time and effort into a work, and therefore, can call it their own. When it comes to publishing, a piece of that ownership is put to the test. Take an example from the narrative detailing Richard Wright’s experience, saying, “he wanted Wright to eliminate the discourse against fascism that lies at the heart of the novel [The Outsider].” Whether in support of his politics or not, the editor asks Wright to revoke his original intention. That intention is what his life decided, and an extension of himself. Whatever Wright decides to do is ultimately still up to him, but the point exists that it’s a discourse. For the most part, no decision will result unless both parties agree.
Like posthumous work, when the factor of discourse is taken away, the book loses its true intention. Though editors or archivists may try to piece together works and frame them in the “intended way,” like Arnold Rampersad with Wright’s work, citing that he “tried to give him back his book,” it’s inherently impossible to predict the author’s intention. For uncompleted works, it is important to recognize their existence, but another thing is to try and fill in the gaps. And for that reason, the life of the author may be gone from the work, but any other workers may have their effect.
When archiving, the reclamation of works mimics the judgment of purgatory. This metaphor comes from the narrative’s description of book “lifecycles,” saying, “it assists in determining which of them should be consigned to the ‘hell’ of the incinerator or the ‘heaven’ of an archival institution.” Similar to publishing, the book undergoes a judgment day that will determine its future; though unsimilar to publishing, no one can defend the work. No author stands to make revisions, answer questions, or further put themself into the work.
This whole issue has sparked a lot of controversy, especially in the music industry. With entire posthumous albums being released, some being regarded as clearly unfinished, the motives are then called into question. While works may be devoid of the life once effused, for that same reason, they should be withheld from future actions.

What Remains, and What Rusts

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Reading this excerpt of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier was very interesting, and had me thinking deeper about both the politics of archiving and the general public’s perception of archiving. Personally, I would define an archive as a collection of preserved items. While I do think this definition is pretty accurate, it says more about the archiver rather than the people who might use the archive. Cloutier writes “The archive is never an end in itself— otherwise we might as well call it a dumpster— but rather a speculative means to possible futures, including unknowable teleologies guided by unborn hands.” This sentence is extremely heavy, and the strong word choice here shows exactly what an archive is and isn’t.

With the first half of the quote, Clouteir is writing about the physical archive itself. Although ‘dumpster’ is being used negatively, it means that it doesn’t matter where an archive is or who runs it if nobody uses it. A pile of books sitting unused is akin to a dump. If somebody wanted it, it would be read. A preserved, polished piece of trash is still a piece of trash. The goal of writing and bookmaking shouldn’t just be to sit in an archive. The goal, for some, is that the book is important enough that the people reading the book today want people in the future to read it as well. It seems to be a shallow distinction, separating the archive from the archivers to the patrons. But without each cog in the machine, the archive becomes nothing more than a dump. Archivers are ‘speculating’ what these ‘unborn hands’ will want and need. This is where archiving becomes a necessary tool for everyone, yes, but also for marginalized communities. In terms of African American literature, it could be argued that the civil war would have gone slightly differently without the accounts of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, but the way slavery and the civil war is taught would be completely different if their writings weren’t archived. People had to decide that these stories would survive, because they thought that those of us in the future would need them.

And towards the end of the chapter I reflect on my time spent in Special Collections this semester. While the library is an archive, I have only ever used it to read books. Some of them were old books, some were old stories repackaged and republished for the next generation. Courtier has captured how I felt working with what felt more like artifacts than books; ”This is the pledge and promise of shadow archivisim, where the preservation of records anticipates a future where the dream may once again grow young, where the vicissitudes of blackness, the split and fragmented, the delayed and deferred, the incomplete and indecipherable nature of these archives become the message.” For the books that are written languages unreadable, the words stop becoming the message. They were the originally message, but time has passed. The frayed edges of the page tell their own story, and while the archivist has saved them so they could be seen, it’s the job of the people to read them.

Archive as Opportunity to Disrupt the Status Quo

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I did my undergrad at Texas State, and I kick myself, often, for having failed to capitalize on the opportunity to use our library’s archival collection of Cormac McCarthy’s papers. At the time, I had only a passing interest in McCarthy and had read one or two of his books. Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men. A professor in one of my English courses even offered to take anyone interested to the archive, and I thought at the time, “Wat would be the point in that?”

That was before I spent years poring over the vast majority of McCarthy’s bibliography and before I became obsessed with the ways in which he manufactures the sentence. I did not understand then the wealth of information I had at my disposal. As Bode and Osborne say in The History of the Book, the viewing of these archives of correspondence provide the opportunity to better understand authorial intention and “destabilize established arguments by directing attention to new information” (221). Right now, those very same archives are being scoured for any new information about McCarthy’s much younger muse and their very eyebrow-raising love affair. Destabilization is the key to the creation of greater understanding.

Research of this depth can give the researcher the opportunity to better understand the author and to also upend the status quo surrounding their work. Take, for example, the case of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which existed in its final form only after the dedicated work of archival researchers unearthed new material, with part 2 of the novel appearing seventeen years after Wright’s death and a complete edition finally being published fourteen years after that, in 1991 (Cloutier 1-2). The status quo around Wright’s work was to shun it, but to resist that through research has allowed us the opportunity to create a new narrative around the author and his work.

I do wonder at the future of archival research, and how it might change, in some ways for the better, as a digital archive of writers’ correspondence would be much easier to navigate, but this ease of navigation might lead to less discovery, as we may only find what we are looking for and lose the opportunity for surprise that would disrupt that status quo. When information must be combed through, that is the only time you really get the chance to uncover what many may have tried to keep hidden.

Digital Archives – The Illusion of Everything

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While reading Katherine Bode and Roger Osborne’s Book History from the Archival Record, one sentence in particular made me pause and think. “Digitization of archival material also increases search options.” (p. 232) It sounds simple, positive and even obvious at first. Of course digital archives make everything easier. You can sit in your room and open a document that once sat in a box on another continent. What used to take days now takes seconds. It feels like progress. Fast, endless and modern.

But the more I thought about it, the more I started to feel uneasy. Because every time something becomes easier to reach, it also becomes easier to lose. Later in the chapter, Bode and Osborne write, “If these versions are neglected or destroyed, we could witness a reduction in, rather than expansion of, our cultural record.” (p. 233) That sentence opens a whole new perspective, as suddenly the digital archive does not feel infinite anymore, but selective. It’s also about choice. What gets scanned becomes what survives. What isn’t digitized starts to disappear. The screen gives us the illusion of everything, but really it only shows what fits inside its frame. And while giving us the illusion of everything, digital archives make us lose some things we don’t really notice at first. It’s not the words, they stay. It’s everything around them that quietly fades. The little things that once made a book feel alive. The fold of a corner, the mark of a thumb, the way the ink sometimes bleeds through thin paper. All those details that told you someone had been there before.

The worry that something gets lost once it turns digital isn’t new. The same debate has been happening for years in other digital spaces. In movies, in music, in games. It’s the conversation around physical versus digital media. What seems like progress often hides a quiet loss of ownership. When you stream a film, it doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the platform. Even when you buy it digitally, you are only buying permission to watch it. Last year, Sony removed several films from its online store and even people who had bought them suddenly lost access. They just vanished. The same thing happened in gaming. The Crew, a racing game, went offline and even though the full game still sits on the disc, it became unplayable when the servers shut down. The game still sits there, complete, but locked. Unfortunately, that’s a risk of everything becoming digital. Ownership turns fragile. What you hold today might not be yours tomorrow.

At first, I thought digitization would make the archive belong to everyone. And in a way, it still does. But something about it still feels distant, like we can enter it but not really be there. Maybe that’s the strange thing about this new kind of access. The easier it becomes, the less we seem to meet what’s actually there. We don’t enter the archive anymore, we pass through it. Maybe that’s what this text leaves behind. A small reminder that access isn’t the same as presence. That the more we reach, the less we touch. The digital version remembers the words, but forgets the world that once held them. In the end, maybe the question isn’t how much we can access, but how much we are still willing to hold.