SCHOOL OF INFORMATION SCIENCES

LIS 3100 SEMINARS IN PROFESSIONAL ISSUES:

HISTORICAL RESEARCH METHODS IN ARCHIVAL AND LIBRARY SCIENCE;

“This is the Age of the Memoir”

Diaries, Blogs, and Historical Research

Spring 2010

Instructor: Richard J. Cox

Office: SIS 614

Office Hours: Tuesdays 1:30-4:30; and by appointment

Telephone: 412-624-3245

Email: rcox@mail.sis.pitt.edu

“This is the age of the memoir. Never have personal narratives gushed so profusely from the American soil as in the closing decade of the twentieth century. Everyone has a story to tell. And everyone is telling it.” William Zinsser, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998), p. 3.

“Diary writing is both rehearsal and substitution for making a death mask; it is motivated by the desire to commemorate.” Kathryn Dianne Carter, “Death and the Diary, or Tragedies in the Archive,” Journal of Canadian Studies 40, no. 2 (2006), p. 54.

Purpose

This course introduces doctoral students to historical research methodologies, with the first part of the course focused on discussion of readings in historical research methods and the second part of the course emphasizing students’ research using primary sources. The course has students consider historical research methodologies, and students’ own research efforts supplement the discussion about such methods and approaches. Each week's discussion of readings and reports on students' research will incorporate a consideration of the appropriateness of a particular historical research methodology, and how well it has been carried out. The focus of the course is on a particular type of archival source, the diary, and what some consider its digital replacement, the blog. Doctoral students will prepare a research paper on a diary or blog.

This course is a methods course. Students will not learn about a formative aspect in the development of libraries and archives except as their own research immerses them into a particular area and generates discussion in the class sessions or except as is used as a case study in exploring various historical research methods and approaches. The course will help students develop critical thinking skills in evaluating historical research conducted in archival, library, and information science and a research tool they can use in their future scholarly work.

Assignments and Grading

The course grade will be based on the completion of a research paper and class participation. Class attendance is mandatory. This course is a seminar, and class participation is an integral part of the seminar experience. Doctoral students should come to class prepared to discuss the readings and their research. The research paper constitutes 70 percent of the course grade, with participation in class representing the remaining portion of the grade. Since a substantial part of the class sessions will consist of reports by students on their individual research projects, it is mandatory that students be prepared to participate in class discussions. The class experience will be richer as well as students draw on the assigned and other recommended readings about historical research methods and explain their own individual research projects.

The paper is due on the last day of class (April 20, 2010). The paper must be submitted in electronic format as a Word document (the latter sent as an email attachment to the instructor).

Students will not pass the course unless they have satisfactorily met all the requirements described in this syllabus. Students may opt to take an incomplete if the instructor is informed of the student's interest or need to do this by week twelve of the course (April 6, 2010) and the incomplete assignments are completed within four weeks (by May 31, 2010) of the end of the course. Extenuating circumstances or other valid reasons for not making up the course assignments will be considered by the instructor, but the student will be required to provide evidence of the severity of the circumstances preventing the student from completing the assignments.

Students with Disabilities

If you have a disability for which you are requesting an accommodation, you are encouraged to contact both the instructor and the Office of Disability Resources and Services, 216 William Pitt Union – 412-648-7890 or 412-383-7355 (TTY) – as early as possible in the term. DRS will verify your disability and determine reasonable accommodations for the course.

Research Paper

The doctoral student's main obligation is to prepare a research essay with potential for publication. Since this is a course on "historical studies," these papers must reflect the student's original research and dependence on "primary sources." There are many approaches students can follow in preparing such a paper. Primary sources need not mean manuscript or archival records; depending on the nature of the student's topic, they can be newspapers, popular magazines, or even early professional literature appropriate to the subject of the paper. Students, as part of the normal process of conducting a research study, should be prepared to make a case for the types of historical sources they intend to use. The nature of primary sources will be discussed as part of the seminar.

Students must write a paper about a particular diary or blog, incorporating relevant historical and other scholarship in their essay. There are a number of ways the student can do this. They can visit a local archives, such as the Archives Reference Center of the University of Pittsburgh or the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania (Heinz Regional History Center) and work with the archivists there to identify a diary. The University of Pittsburgh Archives Service Center is located on the second floor at 7500 Thomas Boulevard and its telephone number is 412-244-7091. 7500 Thomas Boulevard is two blocks north of Penn Avenue and Braddock Avenue, one block west of Braddock Avenue. It is the last building on the right side of Thomas Boulevard. The entrance is on the south (Thomas Boulevard) side of the building. Information about the Archives Service Center can be found at http://www.library.pitt.edu/libraries/archives/archives.html. The Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania is located at 1212 Smallman Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15222. The Library & Archives Reading Room, located on the sixth floor of the History Center, is open to the public from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Use of the Library & Archives is free to members of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. Non-members may use the Library & Archives with History Center admission. Information about the library and archives of this institution can be found at http://www.pghhistory.org/archv_lib/library.htm.

Students also could explore doing a study of some aspect of a manuscript diary that has been digitized and made available online. There are a growing number of such diaries available. Some examples include small pocket diaries of Emma Wedgwood Darwin (1808-1896), the wife of Charles Darwin (http://darwin-online.org.uk/EmmaDiaries.html); Martha Ballard’s diary, January 1, 1785 to May 12, 1812 with a total of almost 10,000 entries (http://dohistory.org/diary/) (and the subject of an award winning book by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich); and the 1881 diary of Alice Cunningham Fletcher, an anthropologist who, at age 43, spent six weeks with the Sioux (http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/fletcher/fletcher.htm).

Students also could consider a blog or a cluster of blogs reflecting a particular topic or perspective, how bloggers often bond together in ways diarists could not, and how bloggers consider their audiences and objectives for these audiences. There are many avenues to finding blogs, such as ArchivesBlogs (http://archivesblogs.com/) which syndicates content from weblogs about archives and archival issues and then makes the content available in a central location in a variety of formats; Military Blogs (http://www.aapavatar.net/blogs.htm) providing a convenient list to the increasing number of blogs written by soldiers; or sites with lists of blogs concerning a particular hobby or interest, such as one on book collecting (http://blogville.us/book_collecting-custom.htm).

The focus of the paper is to be either on 1) the nature of the diary or blog as historical documents or 2) the implications of the changing nature of the diary form for the preservation of archival sources and as historical evidence. The paper must be an in-depth analysis of a particular diary or blog, drawing on the rich contextual scholarly literature on document forms, archives and archiving, and recording technologies. Other than this, the instructor is open to the particular diary or blog, and the approach to considering its use for historical research and as documentary source. Doctoral students, especially those pursuing archival studies, should become familiar with the growing literature on archival documentation and recordkeeping.

Background Readings on Archival, Documentary, and Recordkeeping History

Since only the first part of the course will be devoted to discussions of readings in historical research methods, the reading requirements will first have students focus on how individuals conduct historical research and then focus on the research, historical and otherwise, being done on diaries and blogs. Because the focus of this course is on preparing a historical research paper, the readings and other class discussions will focus on readings about methodology and actual work being done by the instructor and other students (with some exceptions concerning case studies intended to demonstrate research methodologies).

The background readings below are representative of the variety of research being done on the topic of archival, documentary, and recordkeeping history; this is not a comprehensive reading list. It is intended to show the various approaches scholars and professionals are taking in their work in these areas. The reading list also is intended to assist doctoral students working on their research papers in this seminar.

Reflections on and Assessments of Archival History

For my own views about the importance of the history of archives, archivists, and the archival profession, see my "American Archival History: Its Development, Needs, and Opportunities," American Archivist 46 (Winter 1983): 31-41; Closing an Era: Historical Perspectives on Archives and Records Management (New York: Greenwood, 2000); “The Failure or Future of American Archival History: A Somewhat Unorthodox View,” Libraries & Culture 35 (Winter 2000): 141-154; "On the Value of Archival History in the United States," Libraries & Culture 23 (Spring 1988): 135-51; and "Library History and Library Archives," Libraries & Culture 26 (Fall 1991): 569-93. All of these suggest how much research is yet to be done, and the possibilities for new and interesting research.

Others have provided general assessments of the status of archival history, such as Barbara L. Craig, “Outward Visions, Inward Glance: Archives History and Professional Identity,” Archival Issues 17, no. 2 (1992): 113-124; Luke J. Gilliland-Swetland, “The Provenance of a Profession: The Permanence of the Public Archives and Historical Manuscripts Traditions in American Archival History,” in American Archival Studies: Readings in Theory and Practice, ed. Randall C. Jimerson (Chicago, IL: The Society of American Archivists, 2000), 123 – 141; and James O’Toole, “The Future of Archival History,” Provenance 13 (1995): 1-24. While these authors bring different perspective, the general conclusion is about the same – archival history is a wide-open field for new scholarship.

Much of the early work on archival history, such as in library history, concentrated on institutional histories or historical assessments of archival program types, such as Leslie W. Dunlap, American Historical Societies 1790-1860 (Madison, WI: Privately printed, 1944); Dennis East, “The Ohio Historical Society and Establishment of the State’s Archives: A Tale of Angst and Apathy,” American Archivist 55 (Fall 1992): 562-577; Victor Gondos, Jr., J. Franklin Jameson and the Birth of the National Archives 1906-1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); Sally F. Griffith, Serving History in a Changing World: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Kevin M. Guthrie, The New-York Historical Society: Lessons from One Nonprofit's Long Struggle for Survival (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996); Benjamin Hufbauer, Presidential Libraries: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005).; H. G. Jones, For History's Sake: The Preservation and Publication of North Carolina History, 1663-1903 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966); Donald R. McCoy, The National Archives: America's Ministry of Documents 1934-1968 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); David D. Van Tassel, Recording America's Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America 1607-1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); and Timothy Walch, ed., Guardian of Heritage: Essays on the History of the National Archives (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1985).

Another prominent means of examining archival history has been via the study of the evolution of particular archival cultures or traditions of recordkeeping such as, Robert F. Berkhofer III, Day of Reckoning: Power and Accountability in Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Alfred E. Lemmon, “The Archival Legacy of Spanish Louisiana’s Colonial Records,” American Archivist 55 (Winter 1992): 142-155; Lawrence J. McCrank, "Documenting Reconquest and Reform: The Growth of Archives in the Medieval Crown of Aragon," American Archivist 56 (Spring 1993): 256-318; Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Sandra Raban, A Second Domesday? The Hundred Rolls of 1279-80 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). The American archival community also has sponsored some major self-assessments of the state of its work, often including important insights into the evolution of the field and its institutions (as well as its own culture). These include Ernst Posner, American State Archives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Walter Rundell, Jr., In Pursuit of American History: Research and Training in the United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970); and Walter Muir Whitehill, Independent Historical Societies: An Enquiry Into Their Research and Publication Functions and Their Financial Future (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1962).

Some prominent events, publications, or individuals have been the focus of serious historical analysis, such as Robert F. Reynolds, "The Incunabula of Archival Theory and Practice in the United States: J. C. Fitzpatrick's Notes on the Care, Cataloguing, Calendaring and Arranging of Manuscripts and the Public Archives Commission's Uncompleted 'Primer of Archival Economy,'" American Archivist 54 (Fall 1991): 466-82; Anke Voss-Hubbard, “’No Documents – No History’: Mary Ritter Beard and the Early History of Women’s Archives,” American Archivist 58 (Winter 1995): 16-30; and Robert M. Warner, Diary of a Dream: A History of the National Archives Independence Movement, 1980-1985 (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1995), the only substantial memoir written by a leading archivist.

From time to time, there has been sustained scholarly debate about particular aspects of the history of archives, most notably concerning ancient archives. Compare Ernst Posner, Archives in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), James P. Sickinger, Public Records and Archives in Classical Athens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Other interesting assessments of ancient orality and literacy include Maria Brosius, ed., Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions: Concepts of Record-Keeping in the Ancient World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library, trans. Martin Ryle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Jean-Jacques Glassner, The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer, translated by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1988; 1982 reprint); Denise Schmandt‑Besserat, How Writing Came About (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996; abridged ed.); Karel Van Der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

The history of reading (and closely associated with writing) has provided another strong focus on the nature, value, and use of documents. For studies with some interesting commentary on manuscripts and archives, see David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) and Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989).

General Studies on the Importance of Archives, Documents, and Records in Society

A few popular and scholarly studies have tried to assess the general or sweeping importance of documents in society, including Howard S. Becker, Telling About Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000); Michael K. Buckland, “What is a ‘Document’?” Journal of American Society of Information Science 48 (September 1997): 804 – 809; David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001); and Annelise Riles, ed., Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), the latter from the perspective of an ethnographer. There are many ideas presented in such writings yet to be explored.

Some archivists have grappled with the notion of a record because of the increasing reliance on digital information systems, such as Terry Cook, “Electronic Records, Paper Minds: The Revolution in Information Management and Archives in the Post-Custodial and Post-Modernist Era.” Archives and Manuscripts 22.2 (November 1994): 300-328; Richard J. Cox, Managing Records as Evidence and Information (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2001); Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002); and Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed, and Frank Upward, eds., Archives: Recordkeeping in Society, Topics in Australasian Library and Information Studies, No. 24 (Wagga Wagga, New South Wales: Center for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, 2005). The international breath of these kinds of efforts most likely attests to the importance of figuring what a record is and how to keep it (at least some sort of surrogate of it).

Students might also familiarize themselves with the intellectual history of the archival field, influencing how the field views documents, such as Nancy Bartlett, "Respect des Fonds: The Origins of the Modern Archival Principle of Provenance," Primary Sources & Original Works 1, nos. 1/2 (1991): 107-115; Maynard Brichford, "The Origins of Modern European Archival Theory," Midwestern Archivist 7, no. 2 (1982): 87-101 and "The Provenance of Provenance in Germanic Areas," Provenance 7 (Fall 1989): 54-70; Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997): 17-63; Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 1-19 (this is the introductory essay of a special double issue of this journal focusing on archives, memory, and postmodernism); Luciana Duranti, "The Odyssey of Records Managers," Records Management Quarterly (July 1989): 3-6, 8-11; (October 1989): 3-6, 8-11; Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Lara Jennifer Moore, Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870 (Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, LLC, 2008); Gary Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); and John Ridener, From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory (Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, LLC, 2009). These studies represent perspectives about various aspects of archival culture from both within and outside of the archival profession and most of these go past the normal navel-gazing of professional writings (some of my own included) to offer ideas and concepts about the importance of trying to manage the documentary heritage.

There also have been some massive, profession-wide inquiries into the nature of certain kinds of archival documentation, including Clark A. Elliot. Understanding Progress as Process: Documentation of the History of Post-War Science and Technology in the United States. Final Report of the Joint Committee on Archives of Science and Technology (Chicago IL: SAA, 1983) and Joan K. Haas, Helen Willa Samuels, and Barbara Trippel Simmons. Appraising the Records of Modern Science and Technology: A Guide (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985). These reports have served more as useful benchmarks in research about documents than as effective calls for basic professional practice, but they are oft cited and have inspired some important research in the years since they were initially published.

Document Forms and Their Histories

All students (especially those focused on archival studies) in this course should be familiar with some of the seminal works on the history of various document forms, their connection to the emergence of writing and literacy systems, and the implications of later digital information systems for the transformation of certain fundamental document forms when writing their papers and in discussing historical research methods. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) provides an important background study for understanding how records and information systems have been created and managed. There are a number of excellent studies of the history of writing students should be familiar with, including Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). The writings of anthropologist Jack Goody are particularly useful and include The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986), The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and The Power of the Written Tradition (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). Steven Roger Fischer’s trilogy – A History of Language (London: Reaktion Books, Ltd., 1999), A History of Writing (London: Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2001), and A History of Reading (London: Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2003) – is another broad analysis providing many insights into the nature of writing and the production of documents. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, eds., Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994) provides a perspective on non-textual documentary forms.

Examples of case studies of various critical document forms include Margaret O’Neill Adams, “Punch Card Records: Precursors of Electronic Records,” American Archivist 58 (Spring 1995): 182-201; James Aho, Confession and Bookkeeping; The Religious, Moral, and Rhetorical Roots of Modern Accounting (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); .M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066- 1307 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979; rev. ed. 1991 Blackwell); Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Patricia Donahue and Gretchen Flesher Moon, eds., Local Histories: Reading the Archives of Composition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), an interesting analysis of the varieties of records created by college students; H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), transforming printed books into manuscript records; William E. Jarvis, Time Capsules: A Cultural History (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co., 2003); Martin Lloyd, The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document (Thrupp-Stroud-Glouchestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2003); Sonja Neef, José van Dijck, and Eric Ketelaar, Sign Here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006); Frank Salomon, The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), a fascinating analysis of a non-textual documentary form; Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Anne L. Bower, ed., Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), encompassing both manuscript and printed cookbooks and a study that will never allow you to look at a cookbook in quite the same way again; Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler. The Scrapbook in American Life. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), including contributions from archivists who turn the tables on the standard view of scrapbooks as preservation nightmares; and Deidre Simmons, Keepers of the Record: The History of the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), perhaps the best analysis of corporate records. These studies reflect the work of many different disciplines considering archives in both the traditional sense and from the postmodern perspective.

Some documentary forms have been the topic of close scrutiny. Mark Monmonier, the prolific scholar of cartography, provides a window into the nature of maps with a bookshelf full of works, including Spying with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Drawing the Line: Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995); and Maps with the News: The Development of American Journalistic Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). The history of cartography can fill a library with scholarly efforts.

Letters have been one of the most prevalent documentary forms and it has drawn considerable scholarly scrutiny, including Edith B. Gelles, Abigail Adams: A Writing Life (New York: Routledge, 2002); David A. Gerber, Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Anita Helle, ed., The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); Ruth Morello and A.D. Morrison, eds., Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell, eds., Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historical and Bibliographic Studies (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2007). The ever growing quantity of advice books also provides windows into the nature of the letter as document, such as Kitty Burns Florey, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting (Brooklyn, New York: Melville House Publishing, 2009); Margaret Shepherd, The Art of the Handwritten Note: A Guide to Reclaiming Civilized Communication (New York: Broadway Books, 2002); and Margaret Shepherd with Sharon Hogan, The Art of the Personal Letter: A Guide to Connecting Through the Written Word (New York: Broadway Books, 2008).

Another growing area of scholarship has focused on moving images, including Karen L Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman, eds., Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), a remarkable analysis of just what digital images represent; Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson Longman, 2006); and David R. Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003). Moving images have been described by some as the most important documentary form of the twentieth century, and their value as a documentary medium have been discussed in Roxana Waterson, “Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of Testimony.” History and Anthropology 18, no. 1 (March 2007): 51-73. Indeed, every aspect of visual evidence has become of growing interest. A number of scholars have written interesting and important assessments of how to use particular types of historical evidence, such as Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Photography has been the topic of considerable study, from a variety of perspectives, including Gregory Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press for the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 2004); Rob Kroes, Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, University Press of New England, 2007); Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young, On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Martha Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Archival scholar Joan M. Schwarz has established a new analytical foundation for photographic archives in her series of essays, including, “Negotiating the Visual Turn: New Perspectives on Images and Archives.” The American Archivist 67 (2004): 107-122, “‘Records of Simple Truth and Precision’: Photography, Archives, and the Illusion of Control.” Archivaria 50 (2000): 1-40, and “‘We make our tools and our tools make us’: Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics.” Archivaria 40 (1995): 40-74.

Forgery, resulting in a kind of anti-document, has emerged as a particularly revealing sort of document form, and the scholarship has grown in variety, richness, and utility, including Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Nick Groom, The Forgers Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (London: Picador, 2002); Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 2 vols.; Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2004); Ingrid D. Rowland, The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Judith Ryan and Alfred Thomas, eds., Cultures of Forgery: Making Nations, Making Selves (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Simon Worrall, The Poet and The Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery (New York: Dutton, 2002). Figuring out why people forge documents reveals much about the societal importance of records and recording, and forgery is not always an effort to make illicit financial gains. Literary manuscripts have often been the targets of forgers and these documentary forms have also attracted some attention, including JoAnn McCaig, Reading in Alice Munro’s Archives (n.p.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002) and Domhnall Mitchell, Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).

There has been increasing scholarly inquiry into the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of recording, with some notable examples including Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Francis X. Blouin, Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, eds., Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006); Antoinette Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Margarey W. Davies, Woman's Place Is At the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers 1870-1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994; Benjamin Hufbauer, Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005); Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelbaum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007).; Estelle T. Lau, Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009);; and JoAnne Yates, Control Through Communication (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999) is an intriguing study about how fundamental differences in oral and written communication between European colonists and the indigenous peoples played important roles in warfare in late seventeenth century New England; this is an excellent example of how historians studying the past often provide interesting insights into the nature of records (even when ignoring the work of archivists on this topic).

History and the Technology of Recordkeeping

Having some understanding of the history of the computer and information science is necessary to understand the evolution of archives and recordkeeping in the past half-century and can be found in Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996); and Joel Shurkin, Engines of the Mind: The Evolution of the Computer from Mainframes to Microprocessors (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1996). One of the few efforts to consider how to harness digital technologies for both historical research and for mining archival materials is Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

Other technologies, in addition to the computer, have had an immense impact on activities such as reading, the acquisition of information, and the creation of documents, as reflected in Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), considering the role of other technologies such as the phonograph and the typewriter; Merritt Ierley, Wondrous Contrivances: Technology at the Threshold (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2002); and Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). Such studies are critical for evaluating predictions about the role and impact of information technologies in shaping the future of society, such as Michael L. Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997) and James J. O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Some recording technologies, such as those associated with sound, have generated a wonderfully diverse set of scholarship, some emphasizing using the technologies for historical and other research – such as Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, eds., Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008) and Anna Green and Megan Hutching, eds., Remembering: Writing Oral History (Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 2004) – and others considering the historical development and societal implications of the technologies – such as Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) and Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound, 2^nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Oral history as an archival source has prompted a range of commentary, both positive and negative. Some examples of reflections on oral history include Ellen D. Swain, “Oral History in the Archives: Its Documentary Role in the Twenty-first Century,” American Archivist 66, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2003): 139-58.

The instructor will comment from time to time about some of the above studies (and others) demonstrating various historical research methodologies and approaches to examining the development and use of documentary sources.

Course Schedule

Week 1. January 12, 2010. Introduction to Course and Course Requirements (and Research about Historical Sources)

Students should read the following essay before coming to the first class: Anne Gilliland and Sue McKemmish, “Building an Infrastructure for Archival Research,” Archival Science 4 (December 2004): 149-197. Abstract: This article chronicles the rapid expansion since 1990 of research within archival science and characterizes contemporary archival research culture. It examines the role and state of key factors that have led to the development of the existing research infrastructure, such as growth in doctoral education, forums for presenting and publishing research, the numbers and size of graduate archival education programs, availability of diverse funding for research, transdisciplinary and international research collaborations, and application of innovative research methods and tools appropriate for investigating increasingly complex and wide-ranging research questions. An Appendix articulates and names archival research methods, including those derived and adapted from other disciplines, with a view to adding to the “literary warrant” for archival research methods, promoting the rigorous application of research design and methods, and providing sources for the teaching of research methods for professional and research careers. The article concludes with recommendations about how to sustain and extend the emerging research front. Anne Gilliland is Professor, Information Studies & Moving Image Archive Studies; Chair, UCLA Department of Information Studies; Director, Center for Information as Evidence; and Director, MLIS Specialization in Archival Studies. Sue McKemmish is currently Head of the School of Information Management and Systems and Director of the Enterprise Information Research Group at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Week 2. January 19, 2010. Historical Research Methods as a Type of Research

All students should read and be prepared to discuss Jim Cullen, Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think About History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). The Cullen volume is a practical guide aimed at undergraduate students, but it provides a good introduction into all the basics of historical research and methods.

Week 3. January 26, 2010. Historical Research Methods and the Cult of the Archive

Russell J. Barber and Frances F. Berdan. The Emperor’s Mirror: Understanding Cultures Through Primary Sources (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998).

Terry Cook, “The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape,” Canadian Historical Review 90 (September 2009): 497-534.

Read Barber and Berdan, written from the perspective of ethnohistory, and compare with Cook’s perspective as both historian and archivist. Come prepared to consider how scholars desiring to reconstruct some version of the past find, use, and interpret historical sources.

Week 4. February 2, 2010. The Diary as Evidence

Read Steven Stowe, "Making Sense of Letters and Diaries," History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/letters/, July 2002. Then evaluate Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) and consider why Ulrich was able to be so successful in using this previously neglected and generally considered quite ordinary diary.

Be prepared to discuss your idea for a research project on a diary or blog during this class session.

Week 5. February 9, 2010. Sorting Out Diaries, Memoirs, Journals, and Autobiographies as Evidence

These are all closely related documents. Start with the following basic, but perhaps not very helpful, definitions.

Autobiography: The biography of a person narrated by himself or herself.

Diary: A document, usually bound, containing a personal record of the author's experiences, attitudes, and observations. – 2. A blank book, usually lined and often dated, to be used to create such a record.

Journal: An impartial record of an organization's events, proceedings, and actions. A personal account of events in the individual's life.

Memoir: A narrative composed from personal experience.

Read one of the following and come to the seminar session prepared to discuss what you have learned about the documentary form or forms.

Jennifer Jensen Wallach, “Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact’: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008)

Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett, Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)

Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May, eds., Tell Me True: Memoir, History, and Writing a Life (St. Paul, MN: Borealis Books, 2008)

Peruse one of the following self-help guides and come prepared to consider what such guides tell us about the documentary form.:

Stephanie Dowrick, Creative Journal Writing: The Art and Heart of Reflection (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2009)

Samara O’Shea, Note to Self: On Keeping a Journal and Other Dangerous Pursuits (New York: Collins Living, 2008)

Margaret Shepherd with Sharon Hogan, The Art of the Personal Letter: A Guide to Connecting Through the Written Word (New York: Broadway Books, 2008)

Alexandra Johnson, The Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Creative Life (New York: Anchor Book, Doubleday, 1997).

Go to the American Memory project at the Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html), examine diaries that are available there, and come prepared to discuss the diary and its utility as potential historical evidence.

For some background to the American Memory project, see Roy Rosenzweig, "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era," The American Historical Review June 2003 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/108.3/rosenzweig.html> (28 Sep. 2009). Or peruse Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

Week 6. February 16, 2010 And What Do We Make of Blogs?

What is a Blog? Start with this definition: A Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.

Read several of the following essays and come prepared to discuss the similarities and differences of blogs to diaries and other traditional personal narratives:

Andreas Kitzmann, “That Different Place: Documenting the Self Within Online Environments.” Biography 2003 26(1): 48-65.

L. McNeill, “Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet.” Biography 26 (2003): 24-47.

Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker. “Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool”, Mar. 2002. Researching ICTs in Context: SKIKT Researchers’ Conference. 30 Oct. 2002 <http://www.intermedia.uio.no/konferanser/skikt-02/docs/Researching_ICTs_in_context-Ch11-Mortensen-Walker.pdf>

Catherine O’Sullivan, “Diaries, On-line Diaries, and the Future Loss to Archives; or, Blogs and the Blogging Bloggers Who Blog Them,” American Archivist 68 (Spring/Summer 2005): 53-73.

Viviane Serfaty, “Online Diaries: Towards a Structural Approach,” Journal of American Studies 3 (2004): 457-471.

Madeleine Sorapure, “Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the Web.” Biography 26 (2003): pp. 1-23.

Elayne Zalis, “At Home in Cyberspace: Staging Autobiographical Scenes,” Biography 26 (2003): pp. 84-119.

Do a bibliographic search and come to class with one or two additional citations on blogs and blogging as historical evidence, the issues affecting their access, and how to find and use them. Students will be asked to post their annotations on the discussion board on Blackboard after class discussion.

Week 7. February 23, 2010. Digging Into the Diary or Blog as Evidence

Pick one of the following, read it closely, and come prepared to discuss what it reveals about the use of diaries or blogs as historical sources:

Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, eds., Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).

Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries By Nineteenth-Century British Immigrants (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995).

Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries (New York: Hungry Minds Publishing, 1984).

Vivian Serfaty, The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004).

Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)

Karin Barber, Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006)

Zlata Filipovic and Melanie Challenger, Stolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries, From World War I to Iraq (New York: Penguin Books, 2006)

Lily Koppel, The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal (New York: HarperCollins, 2008)

Week 8. March 2, 2010. Doing History: Lester J. Cappon and the Golden Age of Archival Scholarship; Cappon the Diarist

The instructor will present about his research into the life and career of Lester J. Cappon. The relationship of history, archival studies, and the emergent information disciplines was and continues to be a topic of debate and dissension in the modern archival profession. In the middle of the twentieth century, archival theoreticians like Hilary Jenkinson, Theodore Schellenberg, and Margaret Cross Norton built a foundation of archival principles and methodologies that both generated some of this debate as they tried to resolve these relationships. Subsequent writings by the next generations of archival thinkers repeatedly comment on these three, especially the relationship between historical scholarship and archival principles and practices as we continue into the Digital Age. Another figure, Lester J. Cappon (1900-1981) also contributed a substantial body of writing with insights about the nature and parameters of archival knowledge, education, and work that is in some ways clearer and more revealing of the origins and reasons for the continuance of such debates. Cappon, recipient of a Ph.D. in history at Harvard in 1928, had a long-term career as archivist, historical administrator, and documentary editor, capping off his archival career as President of the Society of American Archivists in 1957. Cappon worked as an archivist at the University of Virginia, editor of publications and then director of the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia, and a research fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago, spanning six decades all marked by important essays. Cappon also wrote seminal (and still insightful) articles on book history, historiography, historical research methods, archival appraisal, archival professionalism, archival scholarship, the definition and nature of historical manuscripts, documentary editing, autograph collecting, the history of cartography, religious archives, and the nature and purpose of archival theory. Some of his writings remain classic statements, such as his 1956 “Historical Manuscripts as Archives: Some Definitions and Their Application.” It is especially the case, however, that Cappon’s most substantial writings on archives in the 1950s through the 1970s provide an excellent window on the origins of the changing nature of the archival field and its relationship to other records professions and the information and historical disciplines, much as subsequent writings by individuals like Hugh Taylor have done. It is interesting that Cappon’s last essay, published posthumously in 1982, was part of a debate on archival theory that has continued for the past two decades. Cappon’s career and scholarship provides a glimpse back into the pivotal era of the mid-twentieth century when records management was developing and splintering away from archives administration. Cappon’s continuing emphasis on the centrality of historical understanding and the need for careful scholarship about records and record-keeping systems long before such themes became prominent or popular is a reminder of both earlier contributions to such issues and their continuing importance even in the early twenty-first century.

Richard J. Cox, "Archivists and Historians: A View from the United States," Archivaria 19 (Winter 1984-85): 185-90 (an earlier assessment of Cappon by the instructor as part of a debate within the archival community about the relationship between history and archival theory and practice).

Richard J. Cox, “Lester J. Cappon and the Relationship of History, Archives, and Scholarship in the Golden Age of Archival Theory,” American Archivist 68 (Spring/Summer 2005): 74-111.

SPRING BREAK March 8-12, 2009

Week 9. March 16, 2010. Doing History and Then Presenting It

In this class session we will discuss how to define an audience for your research, structure and present an essay for publication, and seek the appropriate venue for publication. Since there are few “historical” analyses of blogs and blogging, given the relatively recent emergence of blogs as a documentary form, we will discuss how blogs have been the topic of research by information scientists, reading and critiquing the essay by Susan Herring and her co-authors. We will read, as an example of historical research on diaries, the essay by historian Gayle Davis. And, as a way of considering the future of research about blogs, we will read and discuss archivist Catherine O’Sullivan’s reflections on blogs and blogging.

Susan C. Herring, Lois Ann Scheidt, Elijah Wright, Sabrina Bonus, “Weblogs as a Bridging Genre,” Information Technology & People 18,no. 2 (June 2005): 142 -171.

Gayle R. Davis, “The Diary as Historical Puzzle: Seeking the Author Behind the Words,” Kansas History 16 (1993): 166-179.

Catherine O’Sullivan, “Diaries, On-Line Diaries, and the Future Loss to Archives; or Blogs and the Blogging Bloggers Who Blog Them,” American Archivist 68, no. 1, (2005): 53-73.

From this point on in the course, each student will provide a detailed description of progress on his or her research and the class will critique and evaluate the research. The Instructor may assign additional readings as required to assist students in their research. Students should make ample use of the discussion board on BlackBoard for commenting on their research and that of other students.

Week 10. March 23, 2010. Doing History: Students Present About Their Research

Week 11. March 30, 2010. Doing History: Students Present About Their Research

Week 12 April 6, 2010. Doing History: Students Present About Their Research

Week 13 April 13, 2010. Doing History: Students Present About Their Research

Week 14 April 20, 2010. Doing History: Final Presentations

Students will make the final presentation of their research. Each student will send as a Word attachment to email a copy of their final paper to other students in the class and the instructor; these papers need to be sent by Monday April 12, 2010. The Instructor will post the papers to Blackboard for review by other students before the final class session.