The weavers of memories (04)
III. The why of things. The reasons behind the shuttle (A)
[This post is the fourth of a series in which I will share a text entitled Los tejedores de memorias (“The weavers of memories”), which I produced as the final work for my master’s degree in Historical Archives and Memory at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota (Colombia). All posts can be viewed on my website, while the original text, complete with quotes and notes, can be downloaded here].
The literature on scientific archives related to memory practices in the natural sciences is scarce. Beyond the aforementioned work of Bowker, Daston’s compilation and the largely unpublished research of some groups framed within the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany), there is little material on the subject.
Overall, the present literature reveals a poor relationship between the sciences in general and memory spaces (such as archives) in particular. In the introductory chapter to the compilation she edits, Lorraine Daston emphasizes the importance of archives as containers of “…carefully crafted links that connect past, present and future,” adding that their storage, classification, and retrieval practices “are the precondition for (and often the essence of) research.” However, and as mentioned above, the author cannot help but point out the disconnect with the sciences: “the historians’ archives dominate our collective imagination of all archival research.”
The rest of the articles compiled in Daston’s selection show that, in the cases in which they are used from a scientific position, archives are used to search for “raw” information in order to establish a timeline or a substantial background: a sort of data mining, generally analogical and somewhat dusty. Thus, and in very general terms, archives would have a value that is limited to the provision of specific documents that complement research practices, sometimes applying modern technologies of data extraction and management. Their use for other purposes is hardly addressed, and the latter certainly do not include the recovery and management of memory, or the identification of alternative / “other” perspectives, discourses and narratives about events, objects, processes, and phenomena related to the work of the natural sciences.
Geoffrey Bowker’s work is one of the few that unites the words “memory” and “science” in its title. The content of the text, however, does not go beyond some philosophical disquisitions on the nature of memory in the scientific endeavor, touching the archival theme only tangentially.
Contemporary archival science — particularly the most critical — has dedicated itself to undoing a good part of those visions that understand archival work and “…the idea of an engagement with documentary evidence, collected together in a particular kind of place, as a foundational and paradigmatic activity of historians”. The space of knowledge and memory represented by the archive is open to different searches and to other processes of research, elaboration and construction of discourses and knowledge: processes that go far beyond historical work. Although the literature of this archival current does not make the links with the natural sciences specifically evident, the possibilities presented by a less classical and orthodox archival management seem numerous and interesting.
Moving forward a few steps, a still incipient archival discourse points out that in the last quarter century an awareness has grown, on the part of scientists in general (and of the social disciplines in particular), of the ways in which scientific practices extend or limit the body of knowledge that scientists produce and the worlds (social and natural) with which they work. This opens up the possibility of a potential opening of the (natural) sciences to interact with memory and the institutions that manage it, with the consequent broadening of their production, their perspectives, and their results.
Other texts suggest somewhat more radical ideas and tendencies, opening up a range of paths. Szoniecki and Bouhaï propose a much richer notion of archive: one that….
… covers not only data produced by the organizations during their function … but also vast corpuses of data assembled in the scope of a research project that, without creating proper collections, are already the result of a selection process and have a structure of their own.
In this looser framework, we speak of a rogue memory and archival system, which takes advantage of the existing record as a repository for new cultural, artistic, and intellectual productions. And a multitude of values — openness, freedom, creativity, reproducibility, transparency — are promoted by the creative and critical use of archives and their collections. Examples of practices that promote such values are proposed by the authors included in Hannah Levi’s excellent compilation for Routledge, among whom Bethany Nowviskie stands out.
In summary, although the archival literature on the work (actual and potential) of natural science archives is scarce, the literature on the many possibilities offered by the archive is sufficiently numerous and varied to provide clues and ideas for proposals on the work of such spaces.
[To be continued…]
