Short Abstract:

This panel explores the ways writing communicates but also selects, confines and conceals in the archives. Many collections consist of “beyond text” material, such as sound, photography and video. How do different formats document e.g. the sensory, tacit knowledge and non-normative experiences?

Long Abstract:

Folklore archives developed out of the ambition to document and preserve oral culture for the future. Making notations – sometimes phonetically to reflect different dialects – became the primary way of documenting folk culture. However, writing permeates the whole archival process from collecting to cataloguing to making the material accessible. In each step, writing may act as a tool of preservation and communication, but equally as a problematic practice that selects, limits, confines and conceals the original.

In this panel, we aim to critically explore the ways different forms of writing influence and form archive material. Many tradition archives have the main part of their collections in the form of sound recordings and/or photographs (as well as video, drawings, maps etc). Voice recordings often have an immediacy difficult to convey in writing. How do different forms of documentation help us to communicate the sensory and non-verbal? How are tacit knowledge, body memory and non-normative experiences documented? What can be read beyond the written words, e.g. in ego documents such as letters and diaries? What does the materiality of archive material tell us, and what is gained, or perhaps lost, in the digital archive? Can emotions be archived, and can the senses be a gateway to understand the archive?

This Panel has so far received 5 paper proposal(s).
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