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To build upon my prior exposition, on the Ethics of Care in archives, how do we confront our failure of care around the heritage of communities traditionally diminished in our archives? How do we address the diversity (or lack thereof) in our historical records? As police brutality and extrajudicial executions allude, who gets represented and to whom we deem worthy of memorializing, is directly related to violence perpetrated.
This is the patrimony of the concept of, “Symbolic Annihilation”, that Michelle Caswell so eloquently captured in her essay, “To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives”. Symbolic Annihilation, that is, the moment that precedes and succeeds actual annihilation, is where “communities are rendered nonexistent, invisible, or expendable before they are subject to violence.”
The erasure from the record is largely to blame for why media and the system accepts and invents inverted justifications for violent acts. When you don’t exist before, then it never happened after.
In his novel, Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison seeks to address the struggle of American identity, who constructs it, who claims it, who hides it:
If we examine the beginnings of the colonies, the application of this worldview is not, in its economic connotations at least, too farfetched or too difficult to see. For then the Negro’s body was exploited as amorally as the soil and climate. It was later, when white men drew up a plan for a democratic way of life, the Negro began slowly to exert an influence upon America’s moral consciousness. Gradually he was recognized as the human factor placed outside the democratic master plan, a human ‘natural’ resource who, so that white men could become more human, was elected to undergo a process of institutionalized dehumanization.
Ellison Ralph. 1964. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House.
Here, Ellison delves into the symbolic role of blackness in white America’s imagination which allows for distortions and violence. Ellison builds his argument, to suggest the notion of “freedom” can emerge only from the reception and relationship of the user (or viewer) connecting to the record (or art), working from their own position and interpretations.
The traditional professional polices in archives negate these freedoms and replicates institutional dehumanization. The lack of care around the most vulnerable in our institutions that are held up as sites which legitimize history in America, directly impacts the lives of our communities and victims of historical violence.
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I feel responsible for these silences, absences, distortions and failures of care. I want the archives to declare the humanity of : black women, immigrants, victims of police violence, trans people, indigenous peoples, Latinx, the incarcerated (to name a few), is directly connected to my (our) own humanity. I want the record to confront the complexities of our collective history. To tell the stories of America by prioritizing these lives, is how we build a care ethic with our collections going forward.
We as archivists are afforded a powerful position of deciding what is knowledge, what is data, who get’s access, under what circumstances, if at all. It is important then to acknowledge our failings to connect with stakeholder priorities for differential access to cultural content and what this means when developing informed exchanges for digital preservation. One way I have found to confront my failures of care, around the heritage of communities traditionally diminished, is by my involvement in community archives, including the digital preservation project, Documenting The Now.
Documenting The Now explores the ethical issues arising from digital aggregation and archiving of social media content created by percipients and activists of political movements, most notably, Black Lives Matter. The internet offers the specter of distance, to be voyeurs or gaze upon another. It allows us to consume large quantities of information generated by, or about, a person(s). It enables us to collect this data without participating in an equitable engagement or acts of reciprocity, for the stewards or their stakeholder’s needs, concerns or lives.
Social media platforms like Twitter provide windows into our contemporary social experiences, but documenting them presents archivists with unique challenges and opportunities; both practical and ethical. Practically, how do we sift through the incredible bulk and preserve the content accumulations with care? Ethically, how can we provide privacy, consent and control with care?
Practically, professional archival best practices are difficult to maintain with the sheer volume of data generated; these practices being: careful appraisal, selection and acquisition of records.
DocNow, is not only a community, but also an open-source web app tool that hopes to alleviate some of the foibles with web archiving. In DocNow, archivists can readily preserve, analyze, collect the content and preserve it for scholarly or community research purposes, using preservation standards. This allows us too, to move away from the preoccupation with professionalism and towards a more holistic community of archivists and memory workers in symbolic interaction.
Ethically, there are many concerns when preserving the web. This can have negative implications on people already targeted or marginalized, involved in direct protest and closely watched by authorities. Another concern is a lack of awareness of how social media platforms store and use data. Then, there is the consideration that the content generators do not necessarily mean for their material to be preserved in an archive in perpetuity.
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So, what are some best practices that archivists can engage in with community preservation of web-based activism? For starters, in organizations like Documenting The Now, archivists must participate in collaborating with the communities they are documenting on the web. The positionality of the archive as synergic within this power constraints is essential. The values of the community being documented must be upheld first. Therefore, there must be a direct relationship of mutual consent formed by the archivists and content creators. This will undoubtedly develop a richer collection of media, correspondence and oral histories, beyond simply web-based data.
Finally, when possible, we must try to apply archival best practices and donor relation standards to our web archives. Maintaining these concepts, providing context and agency matter more than ever, and is why I do this work. We as archivists have a responsibility to act. Web-based activist archives have lessons for all archivists and memory workers. We must encourage each collection to prioritize mutualism through confronting veiled truths and protecting freedoms of those who have been harmed by a legacy of silences and erasures. Our goal as archivists must be for the archives to reflect our personal and professional acknowledgment of responsibility for creating collections of care, to steward, with community for the future.
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Here are some other organizations doing similar community-centered, digital preservation that I wish to elevate and encourage you to engage with (this is by no means a comprehensive list):
A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland
EMILY ECKSTRAND 
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