Of Mosaics and Books and Archival Things

Growing up, I had a poster in my room of Darth Vader. This picture was one of those pictures of the type that, when viewed from far away, is clearly a picture of the Dark Lord of the Sith's head, looking straight on at the observer. When the observer gets in close, the pieces of the picture become more visible. Darth Vader's portrait here is made up of hundreds of screenshots from the Star Wars films, each treated with color in some way or other so that when combined and viewed from a distance, the observer only sees Darth Vader. I don't have this poster anymore (alas), but I did find a similar picture via Creative Commons that gets the same idea across, a picture of a seagull made up of dozens of smaller pictures of birds:

Fig 1. Mosaic Seagull. Clicking on the link will take you to a full-size image.

I bring up these types of mosaic images because this week I read Provocations: Reconstructing the Archive, a collection edited by Patrick W. Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe. This book is a collection of four multimodal chapters, each of which examines and presents archival research in new ways. Like the mosaic pictures above, the authors in the collection--Jody Shipka, Alexandra Hidalgo, Erin R. Anderson, and Trisha N. Campbell--all use pieces gleaned from various archives to put together some kind of picture. Shipka discusses a crowdsourcing archival project in which she examines, narrates, and perpetuates the scrapbooks of a couple who passed away decades ago. Hidalgo uses archival research to tell the story of her father, who went missing in Venezuela when she was a child. Anderson uses family archives as well, to tell about one of her grandmother's traumatic childhood experiences, and Anderson's own attempts to connect with it. And Campbell uses photographs and writings of poet and compositionist Josephine Miles to create an audiovisual portrait of Miles that also interacts with Campbell herself. 

If my description sounds imperfect and incomplete, it is because it is difficult to adequately summarize these multimodal works with words. While all four authors introduce their work with a brief essay, Shipka, Hidalgo, and Campbell primarily use video in their chapters, while Anderson uses a mixture of text, image, audio collage, and video. But they all work to both demonstrate the potentials of archival research, the importance of acknowledging one's own positionality within that research, and the difficulty--and even impossibility--of ever accurately representing reality with discourse. Paul Prior notes in the Introduction:

In the haunting mystery that is our semiotic being in the world, it's not just words that fail us. Images fail. Film fails. Digital representations fail. All signs fail. Our capacity to express our being never catches up to the totality of our ever-evolving being-in-the-world. What is provocative in Provocations is the way these pieces edge into the disorienting borderlands of dialogic semiotics, into the dense unending mix of illumination and insight with obscurity, confusion and silence. Our goal then cannot be to succeed in some hegemonic dream of transcendent representation, but just to multiply and amplify, disrupt and critique, our knowledge, perceptions, assumptions, feelings, and being in the short span we have on this planet. 

This difficulty in using discourse to represent both reality and ourselves is a major challenge of archival research, but is also the challenge of discourse in general. Can we truly represent reality and ourselves? What pieces are lost as we choose which elements of discourse with which to represent ourselves? How do our own backgrounds influence the choosing of these archival elements? And how do we account for times when choice is taken from individuals, when the artifacts and archives that represent them are but scant traces that tie us to them and to their time? 

I'll conclude here with another brief story. A few years back, my former father-in-law became heavily involved in buying old houses in Minnesota and flipping them. There was one house that he purchased in an auction that also included all of the house's contents. The owners had both passed away and none of their heirs (if indeed there were any heirs) wanted anything from the house. My father-in-law, knowing that I had an English degree, that I liked books, and that I especially liked old books, sent me three packages filled with books he found in this home.

Fig. 2. An Accidental Archive of Books

Some of these books are in perfectly serviceable condition. Others are barely holding together and even opening them fills me with existential dread (I can hear my elementary school librarian standing behind me with judgmental eyes even now as I think about the potential damage I could do to them). There is so much here that paints so many interesting potential pictures of this now-deceased couple. There is a complete set of all five volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There is a collection of AAA travel booklets (including maps and hotel lists) from the 1930's. There is an 1877 copy of The Statesman's Yearbook, and a book of Cornell's Grammar-School Geography. Inside the Geography book, among other items, was a folded-up flyer detailing the benefits of The Mutual Life Insurance Company. It says it was printed in January of 1889. I do not know if it is original or a copy. 

Fig. 3. AAA travel booklets circa 1935

Fig. 4. The Statesman's Year Book - 1877

Fig. 5. Grammar School Geography Book and Life Insurance Flyer

I wonder about my own archives. How much of my writing, of my material possessions, of me, will remain when I am gone, and how will those be reconstructed? More, how am I constructing myself and others as I try to represent reality in my own discourse? 

Work Cited

Berry, Patrick W., Hawisher, Gail E., & Self, Cynthia L., ed. (2016). Provocations: Reconstructing the archive, featuring the work of Erin R. Anderson, Trisha N. Campbell, Alexandra Hidalgo, and Jody Shipka. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/reconstructingthearchive.