Michelle Caswell

Collecting the easily missed stories: digital participatory microhistory and the South Asian American Digital Archive

This paper defines and delineates the concept of participatory microhistory through an examination of the South Asian American Digital Archive’s First Days Project, a community-based online project that solicits short audio, video and written narratives about South Asians immigrants’ first day in the United States. First, this paper provides a brief overview of the history of the South Asian American Digital Archive and the First Days Project. Next, this paper highlights three important functions filled by participatory microhistory projects: they generate new records that represent perspectives not commonly found in archives, they convey an important sense of emotion and affect, and they effectively solicit community participation in the archival endeavour. Throughout, this paper explores participatory microhistory projects as tools to harness technology for community empowerment and build support for archives.

False promise and new hope: dead perpetrators, imagined documents and emergent archival evidence

When those accused of being high-level perpetrators of human rights abuse die before publicly yielding their secrets in legal and archival arenas, victims may simultaneously express relief about the perpetrators demise and grief that, along with it, possible crucial information about the past is lost forever. Although the accused do not usually directly admit their actions and the teasing out of what actually happened is dependent upon the complex processes of cross-examination of their testimony and of records and other forms of evidence, victims project such moments of revelation onto the public act of holding accused perpetrators to account. In their deaths, the accused become forever-from-now-on unavailable and thus unassailable evidence – in essence; they are transformed into imagined documents that can never be cross-examined. In this construction, the would-be testimony of perpetrators is given epistemological validity over that of victims, offering up the false and unfulfillable promise of establishing a singular truth. Complicating this scenario, however, is the increasingly open-ended hope offered to victims, judicial processes and historians alike by the application of new forensic methods, for example, in the examination of gravesites and human remains, and by satellite footage, that are generating additional categories of evidence. Using the juridical and archival legacies of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Yugoslav Wars as case studies, this article argues that when perpetrators die before giving legal testimony, survivors and victims’ families construct them as unavailable documents with imaginary agency to settle competing versions of history. Such imagined documents enter into a complex landscape of human rights archives that has heretofore been exclusively focused on tangible evidence. First, this article frames the case of Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes, who died before giving his testimony in a hybrid tribunal. In the face of diverse archival documentary evidence capable of presenting a more complete and complex picture of atrocities, it contemplates why survivors and victims’ family members placed high hopes on his potential testimony, essentially constructing him as a now-dead living document. Second, it explores a parallel case, that of the death of Slobodan Milošević while being tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and argues that the notion of a dead perpetrator as imagined document has less sway when the public has the opportunity to hear the perpetrator defend himself, regardless of the perpetrators own admission (or denial) of culpability. Third, it proposes the notion of imaginary documents. It argues that such imaginary documents challenge dominant conceptions of the evidentiary qualities of tangible records and the archival legacies of trauma by insisting on a more dynamic and holistic view of records that takes the affect of survivors and victims’ family members into account.

‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: community archives and the importance of representation

Abstract Through data gleaned from semi-structured interviews with 17 community archives founders, volunteers and staff at 12 sites in Southern California, this paper develops a new tripartite framework for understanding the ontological, epistemological and social impact of community archives. Throughout, it reflects the ways in which communities marginalized by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender and political position experience both the profoundly negative affective consequences of absence and misrepresentation in mainstream media and archives (which it calls ‘symbolic annihilation’) and the positive effect of complex and autonomous forms of representation in community-driven archives (which it terms ‘representational belonging’).

Community-centered collecting: finding out what communities want from community archives

Community-Centered Collecting: Finding Out What Communities Want from Community Archives Michelle Caswell UCLA 214 GSEI Cook, 2013; Crooke 2010; Bastian and Alexander, 2009). Community archives are often positioned as alternative venues for groups that have been marginalized, ignored, or shut out of mainstream institutions to seize the means by which to document their own pasts and engage in self- representation, identity construction, and empowerment (Flinn and Stevens, 2009). Indeed, the logic of community archives discourses is built on the assumption that rooting collection priorities, appraisal decisions, descriptive choices, fundraising and governance structures within communities leads to a more straightforward relationship between archival collections and community needs. Web 2.0 technologies have been held out as particularly productive venues for encouraging community participation in the archival endeavor (Krause and Yakel, 2007; Shilton and Srinivasan, 2007). Yet, little empirical work has been done to study the connection (or disconnection) between the collection priorities of community archives and the wants and needs of the communities they serve. This study attempts to remedy this gap by exploring what one subgroup of users of one community archive (the South Asian American Digital Archive) (SAADA) would like to see the archive collect. While the needs of the particular community served by SAADA are unique to its specific history, this study aims to reach some generalizable

‘A process where we’re all at the table’: community archives challenging dominant modes of archival practice

Abstract Community archives have compelled shifts in dominant archival management practices to reflect community agency and values. To analyse these shifts, we ask: In what ways do community archives and their staff challenge traditional archival modes of practice? Do community archives work within or against dominant frameworks for institutional sustainability? Do community archives challenge or replicate dominant custody practices? Based on semi-structured interviews with 17 founders, staff and volunteers at 12 Southern California community archives, this research examines the diverse models of practice utilised by community archives practitioners that diverge from and challenge standard practices in the field. By addressing these questions, our research uncovers a variety of models of practice employed by communities in Southern California to autonomously create and sustain their archives.

Archives and Human Rights: Questioning Notions of Information and Access

Abstract Purpose The purpose of this chapter is to delineate a number of factors unique to archives that problematize commonly accepted rhetoric in library and information studies (LIS). Methodology/approach This study reports on an analysis of several core concepts in archival studies (evidence, access, and power) and delineates how such concepts differ from dominant conceptions in the study of libraries. Findings Our research shows how archives call into question three dominant discursive tropes in LIS: the primacy of informational value (as opposed to evidential value in archives); universal access as a professional and ethical obligation; and the assumption that information institutions are universally benevolent. Although such tropes have been increasingly challenged by growing numbers of critical LIS scholars, we argue that they remain dominant discursive formations in LIS and reflect key areas of divergence that differentiate archives from libraries and distinguish the professional ethos of archivists and librarians. Originality/value This is the first chapter to delineate how archives differ from libraries in regard to human rights concerns and will spark discussion about such differences between the fields.