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- Convenors:
-
Nicolas Le Bigre
(Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen)
Cliona O'Carroll (University College Cork)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Archives, Museums, Material Culture
- Location:
- G31
- Sessions:
- Saturday 10 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Prague
Short Abstract:
Tradition archives are challenged to document concerns and uncertainties in everyday life. Simultaneously, the archives are dealing with their own uncertainties on many levels, from precarity to the looming question; what will post-digitisation archives look like?
Long Abstract:
In their mission to document everyday life, tradition archives document crises and uncertainty as well as continuity and stability. Many archives have initiated collection regarding current concerns and unpredictable events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Other issues with global and local implications, such as the climate crisis and war, as in Ukraine and elsewhere, present pressing questions of how to meet immediate threats to cultural heritage in situations of disaster and hostility.
At the same time, tradition archives are dealing with their own uncertainties on many levels. While digitisation has brought an array of challenges to overcome and opportunities to grasp, one might ask what will happen with “traditional” tradition archives in this new landscape.
Uncertainty means different things for different archives. Precarity is a core feature of everyday life for many smaller tradition archives, struggling with lack of resources and minimal staff. The question of what to prioritise leads to difficult or impossible choices between different potential – or essential – roles.
We invite contributions that discuss and address how uncertainty manifests on different levels in the context of tradition archives. What forms of uncertainty are there? Archivists working for archives, big and small, have faced various levels of precarity, while also having ‘lessons learned’ that could inform colleagues in similar situations. We hope to provide a context for discussion of the uncertainty that lies before us (e.g. post-digitisation), and of uncertainties that we have overcome, interacted creatively with, or learned to live with.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 10 June, 2023, -Marja-Leena Jalava (Finnish Literature Society)
Paper short abstract:
The Finnish Literature Society acquires a large part of its material via theme-based questionnaires, but the amount of responses has been decreasing. Competing with a variety of media and channels where people can share personal narratives, what steps should a memory institution take to stand out?
Paper long abstract:
Like many other memory institutions all over the world, the Finnish Literature Society (SKS) reacted quickly to initiate a questionnaire of everyday life in the midst of the Covid pandemic. Mainstream and social media soon exploded with pandemic-related surveys, blogs, and testimonies, as well. With worldwide uncertainty prevailing, people had a strong need to analyse, unburden, and understand. In terms of uncertainty, the collection process was unique as we were dealing with and working in exceptional circumstances. It also highlighted questions we at SKS had been aware of for some time. The SKS Archives acquire a significant part of material via theme-based questionnaires, calling on people to write about their memories and experiences of a particular topic. With social media we should be able to reach more people than ever before, however the number of responses has been decreasing dramatically. With the variety of media and channels available for personal testimonies, where do we stand and what kind of steps should we take in order to stand out? Not even great visibility is enough if potential respondents are uncertain of the function of the archives or the handling processes of their questionnaire responses. GDPR requirements may reassure, but also confuse or even frighten potential contributors. We recognize the benefits of life writing, as well as our expertise as a memory institution in preservation and making material accessible within regulations. How can we pass on this message to our potential contributors in a comprehensible - and preferably attractive - way?
Emese Ilyefalvi (Eötvös Loránd University)
Paper short abstract:
My paper will discuss problems and questions raised by conceptualizing and building a digital archive for the Department of Folklore at ELTE. The presentation will focus on ethical and methodological questions as well as the problem of dissemination.
Paper long abstract:
My paper will discuss problems and questions raised by conceptualizing and building a digital archive for the Department of Folklore at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. From the establishment of the department (1940s), in addition to a library, a physical folklore archive was established, which stored mainly manuscripts from various fieldwork trips, organized by the department and other affiliated materials. Although the archive is very rich (more than 1000 manuscripts), it was never a professional unit at the university, selection and archiving methods were haphazard and the archive never had a dedicated staff member. After the 1990s the expansion of the archive just simply stopped due to the changes in collecting techniques and archiving formats, to uncertainties of staffing, and to shifts in the aims and paradigms of the discipline. These changes led to a "digital dark age" in the history of the department. Although for the last 30 years the two departments (folklore and ethnography) organized summer fieldtrips for students nearly every year, the collected materials were not organized systematically; they are irretrievable and untraceable and thus most of them are lost for future research.
To change this practice, in 2021 we launched a new university course (Archiving methods in ethnology and folklore studies) using an open source content management system (Omeka S) to digitally archive and display the different Institute-related research materials. I will discuss the questions and problems raised by this initiative mainly related to ethical and methodological questions as well as the problem of dissemination.
Cliona O'Carroll (University College Cork)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines recent STEAM collaborations undertaken by the Cork Folklore Project. How does the availability of funding for such initiatives allow us to generate appreciation for cultural heritage and tradition archives methods, materials and approaches? And how does it shape our approaches?
Paper long abstract:
The work of the Cork Folklore Project, like that of many tradition archives, is underpinned with uncertainty with regard to resources. Recently, the most available source of funding allowing us to maintain expertise and develop small digital dissemination projects has been on programmes designed to support public engagement with Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM).
This is not the source of support that would come to mind first, and yet it has recognised value in what we do. 'Catching Stories of Infectious Disease in Ireland' (www.catchingstories.org) presents and explores oral testimony of infectious disease in order to contribute to conversations on public health, vaccination and community experience. 'Circular Tales' engages with mid-to-late-twentieth-century urban dwellers' and Irish Travellers' responses to precarity in the context of current-day discussions of circular economy. Broad-ranging tradition archives and ethnographic projects have interesting material or methods relevant to many STEM public engagement preoccupations.
Is this an opportunity to 'bring forth' the capacity that tradition archives have, to make connections through human experience, in a way that furthers our agenda regarding the revelation of archival richness? What might we be wary of, in a funding sector preoccupied with particular framings of societal challenges, and in a landscape where we may be relegated to providing illustration or sources of colour, rather than as interlocutors with something to say?
Audun Kjus (Norsk Folkemuseum (The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History))
Paper short abstract:
Imagine life on earth 30 years from now: How will people live? How will they eat, travel and dress? The paper reports from a recent documentation-and-research project. Methods and results are discussed, and the collected responses are compared with those from a similar project, carried out in 1999.
Paper long abstract:
The Norwegian Ethnological Research institute is a tradition archive that has specialised in documenting the history of everyday life through qualitative questionnaires. The paper reports from a documentation initiative carried out for the research project 'Imagine - Contested futures of sustainability'. The project aims at exploring the complex relations between how people imagine the future and how they act in the present.
The documentation initiative was designed to gather a variety of current ideas about the future. Informants were recruited mainly in two ways: from a list of regular respondents and through ads in social media. The questionnaire design allows for different response strategies, and some of them will be presented.
The collected texts have been analysed and sorted with a narratological framework, suited for extracting perspectives and priorities applied by the writers. Two of the dominant themes, labelled by us as 'The crisis ladder' and 'The Utopia of frugality', will be discussed. Finally, tendencies from the recent collection will be compared with results from a similar project, carried out in 1999, and an argument will be made for extended and repeated futurological documentation efforts.
Trausti Dagsson (The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies) Rosa Thorsteinsdottir (The Arni Magnusson Institute for Icelandic Studies) Luke O'Brien (Tiro) Finnur Ágúst Ingimundarson
Paper short abstract:
We present a project where speech recognition was used to transcribe over 2000 hours of Icelandic interviews from a time span from mid twentieth century to present times.
Paper long abstract:
The audio collection of The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík, Iceland contains over 2000 hours of interviews taken mostly in the years 1960 to 1980 although some of them are from the first decade of the 20th century. This includes examples of music and poetry, but the majority are narratives containing legends, fairy tales and descriptions of everyday life in the early 20th century. The collection is, almost in its entirety, available digitally on the website ismus.is, but although keywords and a summary are presented for each audio entry, the user must still listen to the whole recording to find relevant information.
In this paper, we present the results of a one-year project where speech recognition was used to create automatic transcriptions of audio recordings in collaboration with a technology company specialized in speech recognition. This involves adapting a general ASR system to our specific audio collection. The project, expected to be completed in early 2023, will provide a great amount of transcription that will add to the database's search functionality and give better access to the material. Currently this material is only searchable via very short abstract and keywords, forcing researchers to spend a long time listening through potential findings in the database.
We will discuss the project's process and challenges and evaluate the quality of the transcriptions. We will also show how it will change how this material can be used in folklore research as well as a text corpus for language research.
Fabio Mugnaini (Università di Siena)
Paper short abstract:
An academic archive is the by-product of research and academic life with much to show about subject areas and topics of the archive itself; public accessibility is an undisputed must, however, giving access to archival materials requires awareness and careful supervision by archive management.
Paper long abstract:
The University of Siena opened a full programme in anthropology and folklore in 1974; since then a rich store of material has accumulated from academic research and student dissertations, giving rise to the "Laboratorio/Archivio "Alberto M. Cirese". The archive stopped expanding after the university reforms of early 2000 and has survived three relocations in ten years. Its collections have become more significant with a number of early ethnographic essays by now internationally celebrated scholars, and its documentation of certain regions around the world which have undergone dramatic change over recent decades, through gentrification, climate change, or war. Beside its ongoing use for academic and didactic purposes, the archival material also acts as the memory of the studied communities, both local and distant; digital copies of its collections have been returned to local institutions or to individuals, in line with ethical principles of openness and restitution. However, the effects of returning archive materials are not always predictable. The past may be used for branding policies or may serve to nourish identity essentialism and even xenophobia, and there is the impending risk of a neo-nationalist representation of "nationhood", especially when items from the collection are perceived as having been endorsed by our archive as sanctified cultural relics. An archive must be open to returning to the public that which has been collected from the public, but this requires responsible and resolute ethical and political positions together with a sensitivity towards the possible misuses of the documented past.
Johannes Müske (University of Freiburg (D))
Paper short abstract:
The paper considers uses of folk song archives under uncertain conditions in a digital world. An argument will be made for small-scale, curated digitization projects within bigger online collection frameworks on the one hand, and local collaborations on the other, both reaching different audiences.
Paper long abstract:
The proposed paper deals with challenges faced by traditions archives focusing on folk songs: While historical collections are still available on paper (but are scarcely used), the question remains of how to collect folk songs digitally and make collections available in well-curated appealing formats, and for whom. Folk songs, like any 'intangible' cultural expressions, are safeguarded and disseminated by means of technology, e.g., archival systems or wax cylinder recordings. Two examples will be examined, the German Folk Song Archive (DVA, founded in 1914) and the Swiss Folk Song Archive (SVA, 1906). Four approaches can be distinguished that aim(ed) at making the collections accessible to distinctive audiences: (1) book editions for scientific use; (2) digital editions of songs; (3) the archives as a source for alternative movements (folk revival, 'long' 1970s); and (4) folk song collections online. While printed and digital editions (1, 2) represent exclusive scientific aspirations for scientific uses, the latter ones (3, 4) aim at opening the archives for the interested public by using participatory methods, e.g., ethnographically working and collaborating with folk enthusiasts. However, the success of such projects is uncertain due to differing goals and frameworks of projects and archives, as well as scarce resources and nebulous audiences. Further, online editions and participatory approaches call for constant maintenance and community management and they need stable resources. This paper discusses some provisional solutions to this situation based on the German and Swiss Folk Song Archives, focusing on digitization projects and local co-operation.
Mari Sarv (Estonian Literary Museum)
Paper short abstract:
In 2020 the Estonian Folklore Archives of the Estonian Literary Museum faced the danger of severe funding cuts. Communities who use the services of the Archives stepped up, spread word, initiated wider discussions on humanities funding, and made a public appeal to the government.
Paper long abstract:
The Estonian Folklore Archives forms part of the Estonian Literary Museum, a state-funded research and development institution. The funding of the whole institution had been project based for a long time, but with reorganizations in the research funding system it reached a point in 2020 when the future of the whole institution, but especially of the folklore archives, was insecure. The Estonian Literary Museum functions as a central memory institution containing important archival collections on Estonian culture and cultural history. Its archivists and researchers collect, archive, systematize, disseminate, and research the materials. The task of researchers, in addition to research, has been to contribute to the development of the archives and the public dissemination of the content of the archival collections. In Estonia, for historical reasons folklore has been perceived and interpreted as one of the main key components of cultural identity. Folklorists have served as mediators between the sources and wider audiences, guiding and counselling users of folklore materials. Recent decades have seen traditional and folk music flourish in Estonia, but folklore collections are also used by artists and writers, tourism companies, local people, etc. When the communities that use archival materials heard of potential funding cuts they decided to step up, using their creative talents to bring the issue to the attention of the public and politicians. The case demonstrates how communities, whose needs the archives serve, can offer invaluable support in extreme situations.