Session 1 Recording and Representation : Philosophy Archive : Investigating the Archive

Session 1 Recording and Representation

Thursday 10 April 11.15-12.45

Geoffrey Yeo

School of Library, Archive and Information Studies
University College London

Records and representations

The concept of representation is extensively discussed in the literature of many disciplines, from Hobbes and Descartes in the 17th century to innumerable essays by writers and scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries. Representation is an issue in disciplines as varied as art, computer science, film and media studies, history, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, psychology and semiotics, to name but a few.

In archival discourse, representation is normally considered in connection with the processes or products of description; or as a synonym for representativeness in discussions of appraisal or collecting policy or in responses to social inclusion initiatives. This paper will touch on some of these usages, but will chiefly consider representation in connection with our understanding of the concept of the record. It will explore the notion that records are persistent representations of activities or occurrents. It will draw on the literature of many of the disciplines mentioned above, but especially on literature of cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind. It will set out some basic propositions about representations and representational systems as they are understood by scholars in cognitive science, and consider how these might map to aspects of records and record systems as commonly understood by archivists and records managers.

Representations are 'things which stand for something else', and are usually assumed to have some kind of correspondence to the things they represent. The purpose of many representational systems is to provide surrogates for phenomena that are unavailable or difficult of access, or expected to become so. Records are used as surrogates for past activities and events that otherwise lie beyond our reach.

Representation is controversial, and different explanations are offered of the nature of the correspondence between representations and their targets. In any case, representation is never perfect, and is always constrained by the nature of whatever representational system we employ. No representational system captures the full complexity of its targets. The activities that records represent are gone; records allow us a picture of them, created or authenticated by those who were present when the activities occurred, but it is necessarily an imperfect picture.

Finally, the paper will examine the notion of metarepresentation (the possibility of a chain of representations, in which one representation represents another) and its applicability to our understanding of archives.

Geoffrey Yeo has worked as a Senior Research Fellow and as Director of the Masters programme in Archives and Records Management at University College London, where he is now a part-time lecturer. He is co-author (with Elizabeth Shepherd) of Managing Records (Facet Publishing, 2003), and editor of Facet's series of professional texts Principles and Practice in Records Management and Archives. His research interests include the nature of records and recordkeeping; records classification, arrangement and description; and relationships between records and organizational systems. His paper 'Concepts of Record: Evidence, Information, and Persistent Representations' will be published in American Archivist vol.70 (Fall/Winter 2007).

James Girdwood

University of Glasgow

The ontology of recording and memory

The suggestion that there is a relationship between memory and technologies of recording has a very old provenance. It was in the Phaedrus that Plato presented the case through Socrates that the knowledge of writing altered the capacity for memory, that it introduced 'forgetfulness into the souls of those who learn it'. Since the adoption of literacy as a technology of recording and communication alongside that of the older orality the 'print revolution' occurred, increasing the dissemination of knowledge and ideas to individuals through increased access to recorded information. Some commentators now argue that the 'digital revolution' of computing and in particular the information networks it enables most notably in the form of the internet, represents a similar paradigm shift in the dissemination of information. It could be argued that with the development of each technology of recording and communication - orality, literacy, print and the digital - the development of a strong 'internal' memory as a cognitive tool becomes less necessary as access to 'external' memory becomes increasingly available. This expansion of the substrates of 'external' memory inevitably results in the need to question the very concept of the archive, which Derrida precociously observed in Archive Fever when he noted that nothing today is less reliable or clear than this word 'archive'. However, the impact of technological advances on the recording, remembrance and communication of information do not only affect what Heidegger would refer to as the ontic issue of how to conceive of the structure of the archive, but it also affects the ontology of how such conception is carried out in relation to how participants in a meaningful world can come to understand their world as meaningful. It is argued therefore that the flux in the concept of the archive effected by technological change presents more than a question of how information is recorded and communicated between individuals but also how such effected change can transform the potential constitution and sedimentation of a meaningful world to those individuals.

James Girdwood is a PhD student in the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute at the University of Glasgow. He has studied social anthropology and archival theory at the universities of St Andrews and Glasgow respectively. His study and research interests include hermeneutics, post-structuralism and phenomenology, and in particular the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger whose philosophy he is applying in his PhD research towards the phenomenon of memory and its ontological relationships with identity and technology.

Jim Burant

Manager, Art and Photography Archives
Visual Heritage Division
Canadian Archives and Special Collections Branch

Archives and absences: the graphic records of disorganization, disorder, and dissidence

Archives in general reflect the dominant cultures in which they operate. Publicly-funded and operated archives, such as state (federal, provincial, and municipal) and university archives acquire records which in general demonstrate the progressive nature of historical/social developments (the winners in debates on social and political progress normally write the historical narrative, and assure the dominance of their storylines both in recordkeeping and records destruction), and are not readily disposed to focus on movements and individuals which display dissident or unacceptable behaviours, and on events which reflect badly on dominant interest groups both in the past and in the present. The records of the economically disadvantaged, of political, ethnic and indigenous minorities, and of political interest groups whose concerns are not voiced through mainstream political parties, for example, are neither actively acquired because of acquisition policies which are targeted at the records of funding agencies nor easily acquired because they are ephemeral or non-existent.

Jim Burant completed his Honours B.A. (History and Art History) in 1974, and his M.A. (Canadian Studies) in 1979, both from Carleton University, Ottawa. He has also taken numerous management and other public service courses throughout his career.

Mr. Burant has been with Library and Archives Canada in various capacities since 1976. He has written numerous articles on archives, on aspects of Canadian art history, and on Canadian photography in various publications and periodicals, and has contributed to or coordinated several publications, exhibitions, and website projects produced by LAC. His most recent publication is Drawing on the Land: The New World Travel Diaries and Watercolours of Millicent Mary Chaplin, 1838-1842 (published by Penumbra Press in 2004).

Mr. Burant has also organized exhibitions for LAC, as well as the National Gallery of Canada, the London Regional Art Gallery, Carleton University, and the Ottawa Art Gallery, as well as contributing to several LAC online exhibitions. He has been a speaker at conferences on topics related to archives, art history, and the history of photography in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia, and frequently gives public talks to various interest groups across Canada. He is also member of the Content and New Media Advisory Committee of the Historica Foundation, and the Special Interest section on Aboriginal Archives of the Association of Canadian Archivists.

Mr. Burant is an active member of a number of archival and historical associations at the provincial, national and international levels. He completed a research fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada in 2002, and in 2003 received a Queen’s Jubilee Medal in recognition of his work for the Archives and for Canada, particularly the acquisition of the Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana.

Jim is an off-reserve member of the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan (Golden Lake, Ontario) First Nation, and is married with two children. A fuller resumé with bibliography is available on request.