Problem-Solving Questions

Dear Seminar Members:

Today marks the halfway point in our first Archival Problem-Solving Exercise, so I thought I should offer a set of questions that has been building from our reading and discussion the past few weeks. Several of these questions came to fruition for me last week, while watching you investigate the Mary Hatt papers and the Dames Club Records and while talking about how those collections formed. I offer them here, as a kind of interpretive lens onto what we are doing, and I encourage you to take up one or multiple of these in your Research Journal or your Problem-Solving Report (as you wish):

• For all of these writers (Mattias, Sharer, Bradsher, Hunter), what is at stake in “collecting” something, i.e., if we were to stop collecting, how bad would that be or what effects would that have?

• How many of those assumptions/beliefs do you see reflected in the scope and arrangement of the Mary Geraldine Hatt collection or in the Dames Club collection?

• How does gender seem to get represented in this archive (or these collections)? What about race (if at all)? What about class (if at all)? What about other things?

• What assumptions might a researcher make about gender, race, class based on this archive (or these collections)?

• Was it provenance or original order that determined its arrangement? How might each system (provenance or original order) cause certain items to be more visible than others? Or less visible?

• Does the collection represent what you think is “full” or “fair” coverage of the subject? If so, why? If not, why not? What drives your expectations of “full” and “fair”?

• In what ways does/could this collection carry intellectual value (i.e., what questions does it raise or processes does it make possible, or concepts does it complicate or disrupt)?

• Would this collection equip us to think about archiving more as literary investigation, or cultural interpretation, or civic engagement, and why (i.e., does it appear to hold more literary value, cultural value, or civic value)?

Good luck and have fun with this,
Professor Graban