A Living Archive: William McDonough

From Sustainable Brands

William McDonough, an American architect, is one of the first living archives. This New York Times article explains that McDonough "has started filming all of his meetings and recording all of his phone conversations. He will send them in something close to real time to Stanford, which will be making much of the material immediately accessible on the Internet." The article suggests that this will work in direct contrast with traditional archives in which an "aging famous person puts together his correspondence and drafts, hires an agent and sells the material to the institution that offered the most loot. [...] Scholars would then slowly come pick through the material, which sometimes carried restrictions for decades". 

The article’s tone suggests that the manner in which ‘traditional’ archives function should be superseded as they are based on commercial gain (loot), elitism (scholars) and cumbersome restrictions. The restrictions placed on traditional archives are sometimes requested by the author/donor, however, restrictions are also enforced by others – people referred to in letters, for example. Before it is made public, the archivist is responsible for combing the archive for material which may impinge on the privacy of third parties. The scholar using the archive is aware of the restrictions on the material.

Is the editing hand on McDonough’s ‘living archive’ as transparent? McDonough has to gain permission from those on the other end of the phone or in the meeting with him. McDonough suggests that refusal to allow permission has occurred “twice out of a thousand”. Although this assurance appears to dispel these queries and implies that we are receiving unmediated, open access into his life, the constant stream of material is still being shaped in hidden ways. For example, will third parties referred to in conversations have a say? The article admits that “The privacy implications of this are still somewhat murky”.

Another article on the subject draws attention to the opportunity for collaborative archiving. It notes “The libraries will use the digital components to create a set of open-source archival technologies allowing creators, archivists and selected contributors to actively participate in the project.” This sounds like, potentially, the most interesting and groundbreaking part of the project, although the details remain unclear at this point.

As archivists begin to create new parameters for dealing with privacy relating to born digital materials, ‘living archives’ offer both an exciting step forwards and a new set of difficult questions for archivists and scholars alike.

The Boundaries of the Literary Archive-- book listing and review now on Ashgate webpages

Exciting times -- the official listing, information and first review are up for our co-edited collection The Boundaries of the Literary Archive, released in August of this year with Ashgate.
Check it out here and here!

Virginia Woolf's fun side revealed in unseen manuscripts

Virginia Woolf's 'fun side' isn't really a revelation if you've read novels like 'Orlando', but new Woolf material is always welcome!

In this case, editions of 'The Charleston Bulletin' founded by Woolf's nephews Quentin and Julian Bell in the summer of 1923.

'"It seemed stupid to have a real author so close at hand and not have her contribute," he said of the project. Woolf agreed to get involved, and wrote or dictated a series of supplements – illustrated by Quentin – for the newspaper between 1923 and 1927. The booklets describe the escapades, characters and antics of Bell and Woolf's family, as well as their household servants and members of the Bloomsbury Group.'

The British Library will publish The Charleston Bulletin Supplements this June. You can read excerpts and see illustrations here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/feb/07/virginia-woolf-lighter-side-unseen-manuscripts?CMP=twt_gu

Missing Screenplays Unearthed in the Archive: Laurence Olivier's lost Macbeth

Exeter English academic Jennifer Barnes has recently stumbled across the kind of thing everyone secretly (or not so secretly) hopes to find in the archive -- a missing piece, a lost treasure. Very much in the manner of Possession's Roland Michell (although very much minus any hint of cheekily pocketing said lost treasures) Jennifer discovered 13 previous unstudied versions of Laurence Olivier's 1950s screenplay of Macbeth, a film that was never made, in the Laurence Olivier Archive at the British Library whislt working through production notes for a different Olivier production. Jennifer has subsequently brought to light this body of scripts previously thought to barely exist let alone be 'lost' (Olivier claimed that the only existing script planned for the production was 'not any better than a sketch').

Jennifer explains of the 13 manuscripts:

'... the final shooting script certainly does not correspond to Olivier’s reference to the project as a mere “sketch”. Rather, it offers intricate timings, set plans, set designs and technical notes alongside a finalized script. A reading of all of the catalogued manuscripts confirms that Olivier’s cuts to the play text (unlike those of Hamlet) are minimal. It also reveals that the running time for Macbeth would, like that of Henry V,Hamlet, and Richard III, reach approximately 155 minutes. I can only conclude that Olivier did not want the screenplays to be seen following the failure of the film to make it to the screen. But these documents are worthy of study in their own right, attesting to Olivier’s cultural significance as a Shakespearean icon in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.'

The details of this rather wonderful find and an exploration of the light it sheds on Olivier and his oeuvre can be found in Jennifer's recent article: “Posterity is Dispossessed”: Laurence Olivier’s Macbeth manuscripts in 1958 and 2012.’ Shakespeare Bulletin. 30:3 (2012): 263-297. A link to her academic profile can be found here.

Frida Kahlo's Closet opened 58 years after her death

'Imagine being in Frida Kahlo's childhood home and opening up a closet that has been locked for decades. Inside are hundreds of personal items – personal photographs, love letters, medications, jewelry, shoes, and clothing that still hold the smell of perfume and the last cigarette she smoked.

That is exactly what happened when Hilda Trujillo Soto, the director of the Frida Kahlo Museum opened the closets that had been locked since the Mexican artist's death in 1954. Inside were over 300 items belonging to Frida Kahlo, and now, a wide array of what was found is on display at the Casa Azul, the Frida Kahlo Museum in the Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City.

The exhibit, Appearances Can Be Deceiving: The Dresses of Frida Kahlo, a collaboration between the museum and Vogue Mexico, brings to an end an elaborate 50 year scheme to keep private the intimate details of Kahlo's life. It started when she died in 1954, as a distraught Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican muralist and Frida Kahlo's husband, locked the doors to her closet and never let anyone enter for fear that the contents would be mishandled and ruined.

When he died in 1957 the task of protecting its contents went to a dear friend and patron, Dolores Olmedo, who promised him that the closet would remain unopened until 15 years after his death. She kept her word. In fact, she decided to keep the closet locked until her own death. And she lived a long life, passing away in 2002 at the age of 93.

Eventually, museum personnel decided it was time to look inside. And what a discovery. Art historians and fashionistas already knew Frida was unique and ahead of her time. But, what the items in the exhibit show are that despite the disabilities, the monobrow, and the violent depictions of the female anatomy in some of her paintings, Frida Kahlo was a bit of a girlie girl who wore makeup, used perfume and dressed up her prosthetic leg with a red high-heeled boot. Her clothing aimed for style and self-protection but it also made a statement, both political and cultural.

This was especially true of the Tehuana dresses Kahlo wore like a "second skin," said Circe Henestrosa, the exhibit curator. Colorful and carefully made by indigenous artisans, they were a tribute to the matriarchal Tehuantepec society whose women were traders, considered equals with the men. Tehuana's long skirts were also the perfect way for Kahlo to hide her ailments, including a polio-deformed leg she would eventually have amputated.

"This dress symbolizes a powerful woman," Henestrosa said, adding: "She wants to portray her Mexicanidad, or her political convictions, and it's a dress that at the same time helps her distinguish herself as a female artist of the 40s. It's a dress that helps her disguise physical imperfections."

It is a fashion exhibit built around those two themes – disability and ethnicity. The highlights include several of the Tehuana dresses, corsets that Kahlo wore to keep her damaged spine straight and fancy embroidered satin shoes. Her cat-eye style sunglasses and a baguette clutch purse are among the surprising personal items displayed in a glass cabinet.'

Read the full article and watch a video here - http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/frida-kahlo-fashion-exhibit-opens-mexico-city/story?id=17810830#.UOrLPW-vGSo

Developing a Curriculum for Undergraduate Work in the Digital Archives

Rebecca Frost Davis has posted a really interesting consideration of teaching with digital archives. This key paragraph outlines what Frost Davis sees as the current issues facing universities:

"The seminar, “Digital Scholarship in the Online Archive,” is important because Coates, Mandell, and McGrane describe ways that undergraduates can use existing digital archives.  Too often, instructors are daunted by the prospect of undergraduate digital scholarship because it seems to require substantial digital work from scratch on the part of the instructor and student.  Or it may be that undergraduate digital scholarship only seems possible at those institutions with a digital humanities initiative (like Hamilton College) or digital scholarship lab (like the University of Richmond).  But, in fact, many digital resources are already available either openly online or through library subscriptions (see, for example, the resources aggregated by NINES); building projects on these resources is a significant skill in the digital age, whether we call that “remix,” “mash-up,” or “curation”.  And such work develops  literacy for archival work; as students become familiar with how digital archives are constructed, they are more prepared to do their own archival work."

See her full blog post here.

Thanks to @Alisonharvey_ for this.

The 'Real' James Bond: the Cold War MI5 Diaries Released

To coincide with the release of the new James Bond film "Skyfall" the National Archives Blog features a post concerning the ‘real’ James Bond and the MI5 Diaries which are available for a limited time to download for free.

The candidate for the 'real' James Bond is "Forest Yeo-Thomas, a Second World War secret agent, codenamed ‘White Rabbit’, whose Special Operations Executive file was released to The National Archives in 2003."

"The latest collection of Security Service (MI5) files are made public today and the undoubted highlights are the ten personal diaries of Guy Liddell, Deputy Director General of MI5 during the early Cold War.

Liddell dictated his personal thoughts on the day’s events to a secretary every evening and the pages of tightly-typed notes make fascinating reading."

You can download the files from their website free for one month.

Advice for Archival Study: paper resources for film

Tips for working in a film archive (paper resources and ephemera)

When someone says ‘film archive’, you might assume they mean old projectors, flammable film stock, concrete bunkers and digitized home movies.

Not exactly, in my experience at least. The study of ‘film’ is rarely just the text itself – it is the text embedded in context, industrial and cultural, and its interrelation with a vast array of other histories – advertising, leisure, urban development, print culture, visual culture, local industry, etc.

My own film archive experience is in this sense far more paper-based than moving image based. As someone who works with a history of cinema as one of cinemagoing, what people see on cinema screens is obviously just as important as how, where, why they see it, and questions about these practices cannot be researched or inferred through films texts alone.

While paper materials often accompany the big film archive centres that focus predominantly upon housing and preserving moving images – the BFI, for example, holds some 45,000 books, 20,000 unpublished scripts, 6000 collections of personal papers and 2,000 items of cinema ephemera plus 4 million still images – some centres, like the Bill Douglas Centre and Exeter, are exclusively ephemera based, retaining everything but the moving image itself.

The idea of a film archive as an exclusive entity is in itself problematic, just as a ‘literary’ archive very rarely contains only paper and text. You will find film related ephemera and material present in numerous other kinds of holdings and repositories not exclusively designated for film. When researching the filmmaker Elinor Glyn, for example, business records relating to her work with British film companies and major American studios in the 1920s were to be found in Reading Special Collections – by no means a film archive, but of course a logical home for the work of a woman who, despite professing herself as the ‘ savior of the British film industry’ was, first and foremost, a novelist.

Tip 1, therefore, is an obvious point, but worth stressing -- spread the net as wide as possible in beginning any kind of research that may seem on the surface relatively discipline-exclusive. Archiveshub  is one of the best ways to keyword search and throw up locations for materials, rather than going straight to a film archive to find, say, documents relating a screenplay writer or director. You may find materials housed in the most unexpected places, just as these materials themselves before they reach the archive are found in the most unexpected places (the original cut of Carl Dreyer’s haunting 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, for example, was thought lost for decades after a fire destroyed the master negative until rediscovered in the janitor’s closet of a mental institution in Norway some 50 years later).

Tip 2: Ephemera is confusing stuff. It’s fascinating, frequently amusing in its quirkiness, and will suck hours of your research time as you sift through a hundred weird and wonderful postcards or cigarette cards or deeply ugly Monroe memorabilia ...

Monroe dish: Peter Jewell Collection Bill Douglas Centre

...but what to do with all this critically can be daunting. How do you turn a bunch of interesting, fleeting, ephemeral stuff into something more concrete? The BDC’s curator Phil Wickham helps in explaining that the archive contains a history of film culture positioned in ‘the nexus between text and context’ where ephemera ‘can make meaning and create evidence’ (2010: 316). In considering that nexus, any research questions you take into the archive have to be broad enough to effectively accommodate the sometimes seeming randomness of what it contains, but structured enough to bring these material to bear on your project and its aims. My advice in this respect is to utilize the catalogue and squeeze as much info as possible out of it as possible to request the right things where you may be overwhelmed otherwise by a volume of materials, but also to utilize the archivist or curator wherever possible as a key resource—no one knows more about the collection that you’re using than them, after all.

Tip 3: Consider the practicalities of the kind of note taking you want do to. You may be working with objects rather than manuscripts – things that can’t be photocopied or transcribed for more detailed study later on. Always take a digital camera and check if you can use it to enable you to revisit, if possible, the materials you’ve encountered. Any archive is often about the tangible quality of working first hand with materials, but with film ephemera – toys, memorabilia --  these are things that were always meant to be handled, and that experience is significant and worth attempting to retain when writing up your findings.

Works cited

• Wickham, Phil. 2010. Scrap books, soap dishes, and screen dreams: ephemera, everyday life and cinema history. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 8(3), 315-30.

Archives: a temple and a cemetery

The Cape Archives Repository of South Africa 

I came across an interesting, quite poetic, description of archives from “The Power of the Archive and its Limits” by Achille Mbembe in Re-figuring the Archive (2002). The volume consists of essays developed from papers given at a conference in South Africa and focuses on refiguring archives with particularly difficult political histories of preserving, remembering, repressing and forgetting. In line with Derrida's Archive Fever, the definition of the word 'archive' is related to the building as well as the documents. It is particularly fraught and interesting when considering that the building which houses the Cape Archives Repository (South Africa) was once a prison building.

Mbembe writes:

“The archive has neither status nor power without an architectural dimension, which encompasses the physical space of the site of the building, its motifs and columns, the arrangement of the rooms, the organisation of the ‘files’, the labyrinth of corridors, and that degree of discipline, half-light and austerity that gives the place something of the nature of a temple and a cemetery: a religious space because a set of rituals is constantly taking place there, rituals that [...] are of a quasi-magical nature, and a cemetery in the sense that fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred there, their shadows and footprints inscribed on paper and preserved like so many relics.”

Writers and their Libraries Conference

An interesting looking history of the book and history of reading focused conference is coming up in March of 2013 through the Institute of English studies in collaboration with the University of the Andes, Colombia and the University of Lisbon. The IES at University of London is hosting the 'Writers and their Libraries' event at Senate House, focusing on the personal libraries of not just literary figures but of scientists, artists and philosophers, including figures such as: Friedrich Nietzsche, John Donne and  G.F. Watts.

The conference will explore issues of reclamation, representation and interpretation in regards to writers' reading habits, note-taking and other ways of recording and interrogating the experience of reading. Keynotes include: Keynotes include: Professor H.J. Jackson (University of Toronto) and Professor Dirk Van Hulle (University of Antwerp). [Professor Van Hulle is also the director with Mark Nixon (of the University of Reading) of the brilliant Samuel Beckett Manuscript project, which Carrie and I were lucky enough to see in action at the recent British Library Manuscripts Still Matter conference.]

For further details see the conference blog: http://writersandtheirlibraries.wordpress.com/ and the GLAM website: http://glam-archives.org.uk/