5/24/2023 0 Comments Quiet definitionWhether these silences occur as the result of limited definitions, the choice of communities to withhold their archival collections, the process of record creation, the intentional exclusion of particular narratives, the unintentional exclusion of perspectives, or a host of other reasons, these silences have an impact upon the materials available to future archival users and the evidence of the past that will be available to them. Doolan 2016The gaps currently present in the archival record are referred to as archival silences. Tansey 2016Being a records manager has taught me that nothing could be farther from the truth because those with the most power within organizations are rarely the same individuals tasked with carrying out records mandates, there will always be archival silences despite archivists’ and records managers’ best efforts. Theimer 2016We all-or at least I certainly hope we all-now work as professionals in a world in which archives are actively engaged in trying to ensure no new archival silences are created, and that where silences exist in our understanding of the past, we do what we can to help researchers find the voices that survive to fill the void. For a dynamic and interdisciplinary group of artists, scholars and theorists, archival silence serves as a productive metaphor as well as a kind of shorthand to refer to gaps, omissions and distortions in the historical record. Manoff 2016, 63Recent theorizations of archival silence signal a heightened and expanding concern with information that is lost, concealed, destroyed or simply not available for scholarly use. Hobbs 2015, 31The continued “archival silence” of the Extension Service narratives is a loss not only to researchers seeking detailed family histories, but also to rural communities facing twenty-first-century economic, climate, and cultural challenges. Anderberg 2015, 552The second dimension of archival intelligence involves being able to cope with the inevitable archival silences and dead ends in primary source research and to develop strategies for reducing uncertainty and managing unstructured problems. Klein 2013, 665Drawing instead on digital methods, this essay demonstrates how a set of techniques that derive from the fields of computational linguistics and data visualization help render visible the archival silences implicit in our understanding of chattel slavery today. Decker 2013Some archival silences are not inherent in the records, but the result of a research process where sources can only speak selectively-either as a result of source analysis or of different sampling techniques. Theimer 2012First, when I hear the phrase “archival silences” my initial assumption is that it refers to gaps or “silences” in a body of original records (in which “body” can be defined in many ways). Henderson 2010, 160That students of Canadian history know little about Doughty’s intimate and personal experiences archiving Canada’s past is further compounded by the archival silence that surrounds his life prior to his appointment to the Archives Branch. Jimerson 2009, 300The archival silences in colonial societies echo in indigenous communities around the world. a gap in the historical record resulting from the unintentional or purposeful absence or distortion of documentation (View Citations) Carter 2006, 217It examines archival silences, including how they are manifested, the implications of silence for the groups that are excluded, and the impact on societal memory in general.
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