The forensic imagination: interdisciplinary approaches to tracing creativity in writers’ born-digital archives

Abstract

In 2013, Matthew Kirschenbaum advocated for increased collaboration between digital archivists and digital humanities specialists to make the most out of borndigital archives. Since then, researchers and archivists have experimented with innovative interfaces for access to writer's archives that emerge from individual research cultures and practices. Simultaneously, archives such as the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia are beginning to collect the work of authors who work in inventive digital ways. This article will therefore explore the following question: how might archivists, authors, and researchers profitably collaborate to explore the nature of creativity in the borndigital archive, so that both digital preservation and digital scholarship take place? In doing so, we look to the complementary fields of genetic criticism and digital humanities to inform the development of archival tools as 'hermeneutical instruments.' We will explore how such instruments might allow us to read horizontally across archival strata, building on an 'esthetic of the possible' to develop a 'jouer avec les fonds,' supported through collaboration between researchers, archivists and writers. Finally, we consider how this approach challenges archival practices, and propose forms of collaboration that might address both archival practice and emerging forms of scholarship.

Visualisation of hard drive content to support archival processes for personal digital archives

“…To summarise, the visualisation serves as a foundation for "a generous interface" which "would also enrich interpretation by revealing relationships and structures within a collection" (Smith et al, 2019) and facilitate actions based on these relationships.…”

“…Within an archive, the next step after material acquisition is usually appraisal, whereby materials are reviewed for sensitivity, meeting legal mandates, and determining archival value. Standards and workflows defining this selection and appraisal process are less than consistent for digital archives (Smith, Gooding, & Mann, 2019). One of the most challenging, yet important, aspects of appraisal and cataloguing of PDAs is the vast quantities of material they contain.…”

More Data, Less Process: A User-Centered Approach to Email and Born-Digital Archives

“…The British Archive for Contemporary Writing, as it is called, is a direct response to the loss of writers' archives to US institutions. 60 Exploring McEwan's email correspondence was a fascinating task, but not an easy one. There were many duplicates, and the organization was not clear to me: emails were sometimes listed in chronological order, but sometimes not.…”

Death and Transmediations: Manuscripts in the Age of Hypertext

“…One path is to develop new skills in digital humanities and new collaborations with librarians and computer scientists, such as digital-specific manuscript archives. For example, the British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) at the University of East Anglia is collecting born-digital manuscripts from contemporary authors and is developing methodologies for co-designing tools and infrastructures together with scholars and archivists [22]. A digital manuscript archive should enable, for instance, the reconstruction of a virtual replica of the "writer's desks" [28] by presenting file structures, calendars of events that occurred during composition, or music played while writing.…”