Out of all the readings we’ve covered as a class this semester, Kristi Girdharry’s Crowdsourcing Traumatic History: Understanding the Historial Archive has stuck with me the strongest. The title alone is even hard to forget – the phrase “crowdsourcing traumatic history” is certainly intriguing in any context. That aside though, it served as a solid piece of inspiration for my own final project, although not so much in terms of format, but rather in the sense that the ideas present in it give my final project some grounding.
Informal crowdsourcing plays a massive role in a lot of projects I do, predominantly solo ones, and archiving collections of work or images from the web that I find interesting has been something of a hobby to me since I learned that content on the Internet can be deleted or otherwise become inaccessible. Girdharry writes that “scholars from the social sciences and humanities understand that archives have important scholarly and political functions,” or that collections of work serve purposes beyond simply existing. To me, the social function of archives is most interesting, but the fact stands that an archive or collection of anything can realistically have an application.
At NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, my area of concentration was something I called “Applied Narrative Studies” – that is, studying the ways in which narrative can be used. Girdharry’s article’s “Storytelling” section thus stuck out the most to me. She writes that “in [a] philosophical approach to historicizing a moment, subjectivity and its malleability are key,” and that “rather than relying on examples from the natural sciences to represent historical knowledge,” scholarly works and works of art such as literature could also be used as “important links to historical understanding.”
Other classes I’ve taken have covered this as well, as well as the history of these sorts of philosophies. However, her idea that “to memorialize something means to create an object that serves as a focus for the memory of an event or person(s) in a more static fashion” is one that has remained fixed in my mind. Without historicization (something I became intimately familiar with at Gallatin), context, perhaps some form of metadata too, an archive loses not only integrity, but meaning as well.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
