Afterglow: Conceptions of record and evidence in archival discourse

Archival Science

Volumn 2, Issue 3-4, 2002, Pages 311-342

  Brothman, Brien ^a  

^a Rhode Island State Archives and Public Records Administration   (United States)

Author keywords

Concept of record; Evidence truth

Indexed keywords

EID: 18844458185     PISSN: 13890166     EISSN: 15737519     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF02435627     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. For example, the word "evidence" appears neither in the table of contents nor in the index of Hilary Jenkinson's A Manual of Archive Administration (London: Percy Lund, Humphries and Co., 1966),
2. nor in T.R. Schellenberg's The Management of Archives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).
3. On Jenkinson's notion of evidence, see 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.
4. For a recent discussion of the record-evidence relationship, see Heather MacNeil, "Trusting Records in a Postmodern World", Archivaria 51 (Spring 2001): 36-47.
5. The afterglow analogy can become unwieldy. The richness of light as a metaphor and analogy can take us in many directions and open up many interpretive frameworks. Looking at the study of gamma ray burst (GRBs) in high energy physics, for example, GRBs and the spectra in their afterglows are providing scientists with evidence related to various original events in the history and structure of the universe. Physicists who study these phenomena also refer to "dead time," an intrinsic feature of any system set up to detect events. Dead time refers to the moments when a system is not active. This minimum time is what makes it possible for such detection systems to delineate activities as discrete, separate events.
6. On the influence of cultural context on notions of evidence and knowledge, see "Introduction", in Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols (eds.), Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology (Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing, 1986).
7. On the process of institutionalization, homogenization, and imitation among social groups and organizations, see Paul DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields",
8. and other essays, in Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (eds.), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
9. For one such exception, see the analysis in Terry Cook, "The Impact of David Bearman on Modern Archival Thinking: An Essay of Personal Reflection and Critique", Archives and Museum Informatics 11(1) (1997): 15-37.
10. See, however, John McDonald, "Research Issues in Interfaces for the Capture of Business Processes", Section 3.3: paper given at Electronic Records Meeting, University of Pittsburgh, 29 May 1997.
11. This distinction between strong sense and weak sense is not entirely original. Hilary Jenkinson similarly distinguished between a "highly technical and narrow" sense and an "exceedingly loose" sense, which is found in "ordinary usage." Part of the argument of this essay is that Jenkinson underestimated the significance of any but the narrow, technical sense. Jenkinson, Manual of Archive Administration, pp, 2-3.
12. We will not be using the philosophical language of theories of truth here - coherence, correspondence, and pragmatist theories of truth, for example - though one of the main points of this essay is that facing this matter might help to elucidate the several epistemological standards embedded in archival discourse that still need flushing out. For a succinct description of the several philosophical positions on truth, see Crispin Wright, "Truth: The Traditional Debate Revisited", Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Supplementary Volume Series. Pragmatism 24 (1999).
13. One might argue that archivists' preoccupation with evidence arises out of concern with justifiable belief rather than with truth. Philosophers have been arguing about the substance of the difference between an interest in truth and an interest in justification for many years. Unfortunately, it is not something we can undertake here, even though it certainly has a bearing on the claims that will be made in this essay and, more generally, on what work archivists believe records and evidence do. My sense is that the archival community routinely makes statements that imply some sort of commitment to one or the other.
14. For example, the notion of reliability, which comes from diplomatics, specifically addresses concerns about the controlling of conditions under which record creation takes place.
15. In the interest of brevity, we will be ignoring discussions of differences between the notion of "records" and "archives" within any one and across several archival transitions.
16. On the mutual influence of "domain-specific or institutional sub-system specializations in evidentiary standards," see Susan U. Phillips, "Evidentiary Standards for American Trials: Just the Facts", in Jane H. Hill and Judith T. Irvine (eds.), Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 258.
17. Benedetto Croce, Theory and History of Historiography, Douglas Ainslie, trans., (London: George G. Harrap, 1921), pp. 11-26.
18. Jenkinson writes of archives in their "primary sense" to convey the view that "archives" include those documents made during the event (Manual of Archive Administration), p. 4.
19. Schellenberg similarly refers to historically unself-conscious record production as perhaps not necessarily truthful, but nevertheless "more likely to be impersonal and impartial" (Management of Archives, p. 92).
20. For a brief discussion of this issue in the context of archival practice, see Susan Grigg, "Archival Practice and the Foundationsof Historical Method", Journal of American History 78 (1991).
21. J.L. Austin, How To Say Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 6;
22. Georg Wilhelm Frederich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 2.
23. Mike Featherstone, "Archiving Cultures", British Journal of Sociology 51 (January/ March 2000), p. 169.
24. Schellenberg, Management of Archives, p. 91ff.
25. Croce, Theory and History, p. 63.
26. On the paradoxes involved in this issue, see Brien Brothman, "Declining Derrida: Integrity, Tensegrity, and the Preservation of Archives from Deconstruction", Archivaria 48 (Summer 2000): 65-84.
27. Bearman's strategies for record keeping, for example, run from "policy" to "design" and cover a spectrum of options from patterned human decisions to automated record-keeping systems.
28. E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).
29. On the paradoxes of the archivist's position with respect to contexts, see Brothman, "Declining Derrida: The Preservation of Archives from Deconstruction."
30. It is necessary to point out that the relationship between meaning and truth has occasioned arguments among philosophers: whether truthful statements necessarily imply that their terms are understandable, or, conversely, that if a statement is meaningful, it must be so because it is true.
31. There are exceptions, however. See, for example, Terry Cook, "Fashionable Nonsense or Professional Rebirth: Postmodernism and Archival Records", Archivaria 51 (Spring 2001): 14-35.
32. As we noted earlier, philosophers have been arguing for some time about the relations between meaning and truth, particluarly about whether one necessarily implies the other.
33. For example, the International Standards Organizations's November 1999 draft standard for Records Management lists authenticity, reliability, integrity, usability, accuracy, adequacy, and completeness. In the discussion of these terms, the draft talks about interpretation and understanding, and requires that a record "correctly reflect what was communicated, decided or done," as if the three did not each imply important differences for practice. Draft International Standard: Records Management, ISO Committee Draft 15498-1, Section 4. In addition, the insistence that authenticity, reliability, and credibility, for example, are (presumably necessary) " characteristics" of a "record" is constantly undermined by tautological references to "authentic records" and "reliable records". Thus, the language of discussion simultaneously makes claims about record as an entity with certain natural or necessary properties, while also referring to "authentic records" as if it was a subset of the class record. If the claim is that records are necessarily authentic or reliable, there is no need to say "authentic records" or "reliable records." Such apparent tautology, which permeates the entire discourse, betrays the conceptual confusion about records we have been describing.
34. The ISO's draft international records management standard, shaped largely by members of the records community, offers an interesting juggling of record-making and record-keeping roles. It talks about the advantages of identifying those business processes susceptible to improvement from "better records creation or management." See Section 4.7, and note 28 above.
35. The rise of the notion of corporate memory offers an opportunity to promote the value of archival records to address current corporate concerns. According to some, the concept of memory has little to do with the past. Archivists might be able to demonstrate that old records concern the present, and, within the framework of memory, have nothing to do with the past. This is the focus of a current research I have undertaken on the nature of memory, and what place archival records might occupy in the various memory models that philosophers, organizational theorists, neuro-scientists, social psychologists, cognitive psychologists and neuro-psychologists have been developing.
36. Marc Bloch, La Societe Feodale: La Formation de Liens de Dependance (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1949), p. 146.
37. Justus Buchler, The Concept of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 124-129. Some have described methodology as an anlysis of method.
38. Note however the contradiction highlighted in sources in note 34 below.
39. David Bearman, Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations (Pittsburgh: Archives and Museum Informatics, 1994), passim.
40. See also Luciana Duranti, "Reliability and Authenticity: The Concepts and Their Implications", Archivaria 39 (Spring 1995): 5-10.
41. Also see the University of British Columbia's project, "The Preservation of the Integrity of Electroinic Records," Template 1, "What is a Record in the Traditional Environment," which is available at http://www.interpares.org/UBCProject/ tem1.htm (as of July 10, 2002). No definition of evidence was found in the template for electronic records.
42. Two widely regarded electronic records preservation projects follow Bearman's formulation. See Philip Bantin, "Developing a Strategy for Managing Electronic Records: The Findings of the Indiana University Electronic Records Project", American Archivist 61 (Fall 1998). This project refers to records as those documents that comprise "sufficient content, context, and structure to provide evidence or proof of the [institution's] activity." The Australian Victorian Electronic Records Strategy's glossary definition of a record also pretty much follows Bearman's lead. In turn, the ISO draft records management standard draws inspiration from the Australian Records Management Standard AS4390.
43. See also Charles Dollar, Authentic Electronic Records: Strategies for Long-Term Access (Chicago: Cohasset, 1999).
44. Anne J. Gilliland-Swetland, Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunities: The Value of the Archival Perspective in the Digital Environment (Washington: Council of Library and Information Resources, 2000), p. 10.
45. Michael Stanford, The Nature of Historical Knowledge (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 64.
46. On the relation between facts and evidence, Lorraine Daston writes: "Evidence might be described as facts hammered into sign-posts, which point beyond themselves and their sheer brute thingness to states of affairs to which we have no direct access. . . . Facts owe no permanent allegiance to any of the schemes into which they are impressed as evidence." See her "Marvellous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe", in James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (eds.), Questions of Evidence. Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 243.
47. See also Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1998), ch. 1 and pp. 94-97.
48. In the field of diplomatics, for example, the adoption of the view of the records creator is quite explicit. In accordance with this view, archivists are instructed to submit to the record creator's view of what evidence a record possesses. Luciana Duranti and Maria Guercio, "Research Issues in Archival Bond", Electronic Records Meeting, University of Pittsburgh, 29 May 1997.
49. Frank Burke, cited in Gilliland-Swetland, Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunity, p. 10.
50. Cited in Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 48.
51. Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History (Ibid., p. 49.
52. Arthur Marwick, "A Fetishism of Documents? The Salience of Source-Based History", in Henry Kozicki (ed.), Developments in Modern Historiography (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), p. 121.
53. See also R. Stephen Humphreys, "The Historian, His Documents, and the Elementary Modes of Historical Thought", History and Theory 19(1) (1980), p. 6.
54. Marwick, "A Fetishism of Documents", 120.
55. Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Totawa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983), p. 56, emphasis added.
56. Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Ibid., pp. 74-75.
57. Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys. The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 62.
58. The differences between source and trace are significant and complex. G.J. Renier, History: Its Purpose and Its Methods (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1962), pp. 96-105 and ch. 2;
59. John Dagenais, "That Bothersome Residue: Toward a Theory of the Physical Text", in A.N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternak (eds.), Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages (Madison: 1991), pp. 246-259.
60. Finally, the notion of trace is an important concept for Jacques Derrida. See his "Differance", in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
61. For an analysis of Derrida's notion of trace in the context of historical practice, see Marian Hobson, "History Traces", in Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (eds.), Poststructuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 101-115.
62. See Kevin J. Porter, "'Games of Perfect Information' : Computers and the Metanarratives of Emancipation and Progress", Substance, 79 (1996): 24-43.
63. Hilary Putnam, cited in Richard W. Miller, Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and Social Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 386.
64. See James C. Scott, Seeing Like the State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Conditions Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), passim;
65. Keith W. Hoskins and Richard Macve, "Accounting as a Discipline: The Overlooked Supplement", in Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway and David Sylvan (eds.), Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), pp. 29-34;
66. Kevin Newmark, "Beneath the Lace: Mallarme, the State, and the Foundation of Letters", in E.S. Burt and Jane Vanpee (eds.), Reading the Archive: On Texts and Institutions, Yale French Studies No. 77 (1989);
67. Marc Berg and Geoffrey Bowker, "The Multiple Bodies of the Record: Toward a Sociology of an Artifact", The Sociological Quarterly 38(3) (1997);
68. Richard Harvey Brown, "Postmodern Representations, Postmodern Affirmations", in Richard Harvey Brown (ed.), Postmodern Representation: Truth, Power, and Mimesis in the Human Sciences and Public Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 6;
69. Ann Pederson, "Empowering Archival Effectiveness: Archival Strategies as Innovation", American Archivist 58 (Fall 1995), p. 451.
70. It may be interesting to note that Huizinga suggested that the scholar's tendency to carry system to extremes that are detrimental to observation and inference is a form of play. See Renier, History, p. 97. This series of inversions of cause and effect adds a wrinkle to Giddens account of the institutional basis of meaning generation. Here, records systems shape what institutions mean before institutions imbue records with meaning.
71. For a sample of the nature of the discussion about the state of the profession, see Richard J. Cox, "Searching for Authority: Electronic Records in the New World at Fin de Siecle", First Monday 5(1) (January 2000) available electronically at: http://FirstMonday.org/issues/issue5_l/cox/ index.html
72. See Chris Gardner and Yvonne Mitchell, "The Cultural Biography of Objects", World Archaeology 31 (October 1999): 169ff.
73. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, "The Social Life of Documents", in FirstMonday, available at http: www.firstmonday.dk/issues/ issuel/documents/index.html.
74. On the interaction between ideas, objects, actions, and institutions, see also Barbara Czarniawska and Bernward Joerges, "Travel of Ideas", in Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevon (eds.), Translating Organizational Change (New York: Walter De Gruyter, 1996), pp. 26, 46, and passim.
75. Embedded in recent archival discussion of accountability, effectiveness, efficiency, community interests, and corporate responsibility, particularly that part of it focusing on the public sector, are several different views of the role of public administration in government, politics, and society. For a discussion of the issues, see, for example, Gary Walmsley and James Wolf, "Introduction," and O.C. McSwite, "Postmodernism, Public Administration, and the Public Interest", in Gary Walmsley and James Wolf (eds.), Refounding Democratic Public Administration. Modern Paradoxes, Postmodern Challenges (London: Sage, 1996);
76. D.H. Rosenbloom, "Public Administration Theory and the Separation of Powers", Public Administration Review 43 (1983), p. 219;
77. Gary Wallace, "Toward a Reconciliation of Bureaucratic and Democratic Ethos", Administration and Society 30 (March 1998);
78. and David John Farmer, The Language of Public Administration: Bureaucracy, Modernity, and Postmodernity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995).
79. Finally, see also selections from the on-line periodical, Electronic Journal of Radical Organization Theory.