Making the leap from parts to whole: Evidence and inference in archival arrangement and description

American Archivist

Volumn 72, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 72-90

  Meehan, Jennifer ^a  

^a Association of Canadian Archivists 2004 Conference   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79956076383     PISSN: 03609081     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17723/aarc.72.1.kj672v4907m11x66     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. See, for example, Michelle Light and Tom Hyry, "Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid," American Archivist 65 (Fall/Winter 2002): 216-30;
2. Elizabeth Yakel, "Archival Representation," Archival Science 3 (2003): 1-25;
3. Heather MacNeil, "Picking Our Text: Archival Description, Authenticity, and the Archivist as Editor," American Archivist 68 (Fall/Winter 2005): 264-78.
4. Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, Society of American Archivists, available at http://www.archivists.org/glossary/ term-details.asp?DefinitionKey=294, accessed 29 July 2008) s.v. "arrangement."
5. Juridical-administrative context is defined as "the legal and organizational system in which the creating body belongs" and provenancial context is defined as "the creating body, its mandate, structure, and functions." The InterPARES Glossary (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2002), available at http://www.interpares.org/documents/ InterPARES%20Glossary%202002-1.pdf, accessed 17 November 2007.
6. Fredric Miller, Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1990), 60.
7. Terry Eastwood, "Putting the Parts of the Whole Together: Systematic Arrangement of Archives," Archivaria 50 (Fall 2000): 93-94.
8. Miller, Arranging and Describing, 57.
9. David Schum, "Evidence and Inferences about Past Events: An Overview of Six Case Studies," in Evidence and Inference in History and Law: Interdisciplinary Dialogues, ed. William Twining and Iain Hampsher-Monk (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 9-62.
10. Current manuals for writing history often address many of the issues related to using records that I am trying to raise here. For instance, one such manual maintains that existing sources are the basis of our knowledge about the past and that useful knowledge can be gotten from a critical engagement with the sources. At the same time, there remains a degree of uncertainty in our knowledge about the past, due to "the stubborn opacity of sources" as well as to "our inherent inability to get beyond the sources themselves." Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Resources: An Introduction of Historical Methods (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 3. This and other manuals usually go on to discuss methods for using sources, which typically involve establishing grounds for use and for interpreting or explaining the sources (that is, for connecting them into a story about the past). It remains to be explored whether any particular historical methods could be brought to bear upon methods for archival analysis.
11. Elsewhere, I have discussed ideas of evidence in archival discourse as part of outlining an archival concept of evidence as a relation between record and event and considering some of the possible applications and implications of such a concept for archival practice. See Jennifer Meehan, "Towards an Archival Concept of Evidence," Archivaria 61 (Spring 2006): 127-46.
12. Schum discussed in Twining and Hampsher-Monk, "Introduction," 5.
13. Schum, "Evidence and Inferences about Past Events," 11.
14. Carolyn Heald, "Is There Room for Archives in the Postmodern World?," American Archivist 59 (1996): 93.
15. The Canadian writer Alberto Manguel suggests that reading constitutes the very processes by which we come to understand the world and ourselves within the world, that it determines our interaction with and our interpretation of the objects, events, and places of the world, and that it establishes our knowledge of the world, giving shape to ideas and forming systems of ideas. See Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996).
16. Here, and in the rest of the discussion, I use the term fact not as a "verifiable, indisputable object of knowledge" (Howell and Prevenier, From Reliable Resources, 148)
17. Eastwood, "Putting the Parts of the Whole Together," 105-14.
18. Terry Cook, "The Concept of the Archival Fonds: Theory, Description, and Provenance in the Post- Custodial Era," in The Archival Fonds: From Theory to Practice, ed. Terry Eastwood (Ottawa: Bureau of Canadian Archivists, 1992), 52-53.
19. Tom Nesmith, "Still Fuzzy, But More Accurate: Some Thoughts on the 'Ghosts' of Archival Theory," Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999): 139-40.
20. Elsewhere, I have explored the idea of original order as a conceptual framework for analyzing and understanding personal records. Jennifer Meehan, " 'Everything in Its Right Place': Re-thinking the Idea of Original Order with Regard to Personal Records," paper presented at the Third International Conference on the History of Records and Archives, Boston, Massachusetts, 28 September 2007.
21. The idea of "cross-examination" of sources comes from Marc Bloch. He writes that "[cross-examination] is the prime necessity of well-conducted historical research" since the sources "will speak only when they are properly questioned." He goes on to say: "[E]very historical research supposes that the inquiry has a direction at the very first step. In the beginning, there must be the guiding spirit. Mere passive observation, even supposing such a thing were possible, has never contributed anything productive to science." Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), 64-65. I believe much of this applies to what I am trying to say here about analysis in arrangement and description and the role of archival principles.
22. MacNeil, "Picking Our Text," 273-74.
23. Light and Hyry, "Colophons and Annotations," 224.
24. For instance, Elizabeth Yakel puts forth the notion of "archival representation" as a more apt term for the processes of arrangement and description, one that, she argues, "more precisely captures the actual work of the archivist in (re)ordering, interpreting, creating surrogates, and designing architectures for representational systems that contain those surrogates to stand in for or represent actual archival materials." Yakel, "Archival Representation," 2.
25. Of the footnote, Anthony Grafton writes: "In documenting the thought and research that underpin the narrative above them, footnotes prove that it is a historically contingent product, dependent on the forms of research, opportunities, and states of particular questions that existed when the historian went to work. Like an engineer's diagram of a splendid building, the footnote reveals the occasionally crude braces, the unavoidable weak points, and the hidden stresses that an elevation of the façade would conceal." Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 23. I see the footnote as possibly serving much the same function in the finding aid and across archival description as a whole.