NoraSawyer.com

Very suddenly, about a month and a half ago, Brian and I decided to buy a boat.

So, buy a boat we did, and so we spent November getting rid of things. Bags and bags of clothes to goodwill, 24 boxes of books to the Friends of the San Francisco public library.

So now we live on the water. We watch birds and seals and talk mostly about the wind, and when I cook everything we own smells like cooking, and when we open the windows it smells a bit like salt and weeds.

And when I wake up in the morning, it’s often still dark. One morning, the moon was setting in the north-west, almost opposite the sunrise. I should have taken a picture, but I didn’t think of it in time.

My first week of yoga, I was feeling very virtuous. Beer? Nah, I’m trying to stay hydrated. Up early for yoga class? Nothing I’d rather do. The only problem is, I spent the last three years living pretty indolently, exercising only incidentally (the hills on the walk to and from work, sitting up to grab some more corn chips, etc). So today it’s catching up to me. I was up and at yoga at 8:15, and I sweated through and twisted into all sorts of different shapes (which, in a room heated to 110 degrees is a bit like trying to wrestle with a dolphin), but since them I’ve been pretty much useless — barely pulling together enough to get schoolwork done, take a nap, and drink yet more water (being a dolphin takes a lot out of you). There’s only so much virtue a girl can take.

Hey there, it’s October!  I just finished polishing off a plate of eggs and vegetables that Brian made for breakfast, and I’m still hungry. It’s my first week of doing Bikram yoga, and it seems as if all I do is eat, drink water, and go to another yoga class. Oh, and schoolwork. And work work. Busy.

Anyway, it’s the perfect time to start blogging again. Not only have I woefully neglected this here blog (seriously. February?), October is 31-for21, my friend Tricia’s post-every-day challenge for Down’s Syndrome awareness. See? They even have a button:

Grab This Button

One of the odd things about yoga is how much memory and emotion seems to be stored inside the body. My ankles, for example, seem to have a lot of sadness in them — whenever I sit with my feet underneath me and my toes pointed back, I get this funny urge to cry. Not sadness really, just tears welling up and that back-of-the-throat feeling. Other poses will, out of no where, remind me of a nothing moment from years ago. It’s odd, especially since I’m not in the habit of doing Utkatasana in a my day to day life.

I’m surprised by how much I’m enjoying Yoga, and “hot” yoga at that. Particularly since being hot and exercising in a room full of underdressed people are not things I generally enjoy. But I got a Google deal for two months of unlimited classes, and it turns out that getting a deal is really all the motivation I need to get out of bed in the morning and put on my modest yoga pants. And once I’m there, sweating in a room full of bikini-and-spandex clad yogis seems like the most natural thing in the world.

A classmate of mine used to say that Superfudge was the greatest short story ever written. And there is a way that good children’s books are basically the same good sort fiction for adults. They do a lot in a small space. A protagonist learns a lesson. They begin in one place and end up in another. And if you, the reader, are lucky, it’s all constructed language with language that catches you up and tells you things you’ve always known, but from an angle you never really noticed before, or maybe you forgot.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is Jacqueline Woodson is my new favorite short story writer.

This weekend, when Brian and I went camping, I brought her novel for “independent readers,” Feathers with me. I’m taking a class on award-winning children’s literature, and it had a pretty blue cover and sounded interesting when I poked through the first few pages: it’s about Frannie, a sixth grade girl who wonders about hope, and has a best friend, and doesn’t really know what to do with the strange new boy in her classroom. Her mother is pregnant and sad, her brother is gorgeous and deaf, her father has an amazing laugh. It’s 1971, and there are songs on the radio and a lot of snow on the ground.

Feathers is a pretty simple story. It takes place on one side of the highway, inside one girl, in the space of — maybe? — a few weeks. But it takes us on a full journey, from one moment where things are one way to another, where things have subtly yet completely changed. You should read it. I really don’t want to tell you any more.

I picked up a secondhand paperback of Robert Frost’s poems just before Christmas, and I’ve been keeping it in my pocketbook for times when I need a little glimpse of muddy shoes or old stone walls. Anyway, I’d never read this one before, and am trying now to commit it to memory:

For Once, Then, Something
, by Robert Frost

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
My myself in the summer heaven, godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths-and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

Tonight, I got the urge to draw, so I pulled an old notebook out of a drawer. After I’d doodled for a bit (walruses and trees and frogs and bullrushes), I started flipping through its pages. On one, I’d written (and this is transcribed verbatim),

The bedroom window; the tree; rain & puddles; sinister underneath; woods; the hanged woman; night windows; the bend in the stairs; sing in a graveyard; robots; light-bulb ghost; empty classroom

today its a sandwich shop, yesterday it was the waiting room @ St. Mary’s and someday it will be a bedside.

From this I can conclude that.

1. I have a horrible memory,
2. I make no sense, and
3. At some point in the past, I was downright creepy.

1. Brian’s moved into a new studio space down in Bayview, what my friend Dustin calls the Last Lonely Place in San Francisco. This morning as I was riding the T-line out to visit, I kept seeing ghost children. A large blue sign was a small boy in a blue winter coat. A man walking his bicycle was temporarily accompanied by a dancing child that turned into a plastic bag tied to the bicycle’s handles as I watched. Either my eyes or the neighborhood is haunted.

2. I start a new job tomorrow. Even if I blogged more than once or twice a season, I probably wouldn’t tell you much about it. As much as it seems to have worked out for her, I’m taking Heather Armstrong’s lesson on this one.

3. I will say, though, that the idea of getting up before eight every weekday morning in perpetuity forever amen has me a bit freaked out right now.

I recently engaged in a deep cleaning of my childhood bedroom. This was, without a doubt, long overdue – I haven’t lived at home for more almost ten years, and I only squeak in under the decade mark due to an ill-advised semester off from college. But I come from a family of savers, and save we have, effectively sealing off one room of my parents’ house as a monument to my childhood and adolescence.

And so it was that I spent a long July weekend engaging in a sort of time travel, sorting through pile after pile of juvenile memorabilia. The collection was varied and evocative: Junior high school yearbooks full of cryptic notes, back issues of Sassy Magazine highlighting prom styles for 1994, pop quizzes from high school Latin, an unsent letter to a sixth-grade crush. After several hours, when I glimpsed my dust-streaked face in the mirror, I was shocked to discover I was still an adult; lost in memories, my self-image had reset itself to something circa 7th grade.

We’ve probably all experienced something similar. Cleaning house, we discover a shopping list in a desk drawer, and are suddenly catapulted back to the day it was written. Flipping through the pages of a book, we find a misfiled Polaroid of a long-ago summer day. Such discoveries face us with a series of choices. Should we keep the item? If so, where and how should it be kept? How will we know how to find it again? And if we don’t plan to keep it, should it be thrown away? Or might someone else want it?

In that moment, we are all archivists. Or at least we’re starting to think like one. Archivists call this process – assessing an item and determining what it is – appraisal. This involves such considerations as who made an item or where it came from, its condition, and whether or not it belongs in a particular archival collection.
Notice that this process does not extend to taking an editorial stand or expounding on an item’s significance. Archivists are not historians. While historians analyze, investigate, tell stories, and form and test hypotheses, an archivist’s duty is to the materials. An archivist prepares materials for others to use, assessing their historical value, discerning relationships and putting items and groups of materials into order, and describing both the whole and parts of a collection.

An archivist serves two masters: First, we attend to the materials housed within our archive. We engage in and encourage practices that work towards their physical preservation, and actively endeavor to preserve the relationships between an item and other materials within the collection. Secondly, we have a duty to the users of the collection. We have to make records available, accessible, and findable, and assist people – genealogists, historians, and others – as they utilize the materials we safeguard.

So, then, if an archivist is primarily concerned with documents on an administrative level, what distinguishes an archivist’s work from a librarian’s? One major difference is the nature of the materials that are being organized and cared for. Archivists deal with what archivist David B. Gracy II calls the “documentary residue of activity” (Gracy, 1981, p 1). The materials an archivist is concerned with are the ones we create as part of our everyday activities: papers, records, letters and photographs.

Looking back to my adolescent archive, my copy of my high school yearbook is not archivally significant because of the photograph of me in my marching band uniform – that picture is (unfortunately) in every yearbook that was issued by my school that year, and can be found in the copy on shelf in my hometown library. Rather, it is the modifications that make the book unique – the notes written by friends, the heart I drew around a crush’s photograph – that make this one individual copy an artifact of a very specific and personal significance.

Because archivists deal with unique materials, the ways that we approach and organize materials are distinct from the way materials are organized in a library. In a library, materials are organized according to a pre-determined order. If your local library is organized under the Dewey Decimal System, for example, a book that is classified under the subject heading of Greek and Roman Mythology will always be shelved under 292, the call number for that subject, even if its author writes another book – let’s say a memoir – and even if someone else writes a book of poetry that was inspired by Greek myth.

Archival materials, by contrast, “impose their preexisting order on the archivists” ( Gracy, p 1). Archivists are most often concerned with a body of records, a group of materials that was created by or around a person or organization during the course of their lives. Because these materials rarely concern a single subject, long-standing tradition dictates organization of materials by context – a concept first articulated in 19th century France as “Respect des fonds,” or respect for the materials as a group. As much as possible, archivists keep materials in their original order, and organize them with an eye towards preserving their identity in that group.

This sort of classification highlights one of the essential the differences between libraries and archives. In an archive, the internal relationships between materials are essential to their use. A user must have access to as full a picture as possible in order to understand the circumstances of an item’s creation, its significance, and its place in the context of its creator’s work and life. This context is necessary in order for the user to do the work of a historian that I mentioned earlier – telling the story that is contained in the material, developing and testing hypotheses, and interpreting historical events.

In a library, no single unifying thread needs to connect the various books in the collection to one another. This is because books are deliberate creations. The author, if she has done her job, has provided context for the information the book provides – it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, along with a story, an interpretation, or a conclusion. In an archive, however, no item exists independent of the collection. The archives’ organization, therefore reflects the interconnectedness of its materials.

So why is archival work important? Why is it necessary for us to preserve and protect this documentary evidence of people’s and organizations’ activities? Let’s widen our scope from the small archive contained in my old bedroom and look to the larger world.

For many people, the defining event of the early 21st century took place in New York on September 11, 2001. The attacks that took place on that morning had a tremendous effect on the lives of people across the United States and around the world. Soon after, the Department of Justice announced that it was soliciting comments and suggestions regarding its plans to distribute the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund established by Congress for the benefit of victims and their families.

The DOJ received more than 11,000 emails. These letters include personal stories of loved ones lost, stories from World Trade Center survivors and workers, political diatribes for and against the inclusion of victim’s domestic partners in the distribution of funds. And as a whole, these letters present a picture of people’s lives after September 11, 2001, of the issues that preoccupied our national consciousness and the stories that people felt moved to tell of their experiences in the year following the event.

So what should be done with these emails? In an article published on Salon.com in April 2002, writer Jennifer Liberto notes that,
It’s clear from the few people I spoke with during my visits to the reading room that employees there have reverence for the letters. But their fate has yet to be determined, and Justice spokesman Charles Miller concedes that they could end up being destroyed.

But the emails were not destroyed. They are preserved and archived online (with the authors’ and victims’ names removed), still available to be read and studied as both individual emails and as a group. The materials are archived as they were posted – that is, chronologically – and, as a unit, provide a compelling look at a moment online, compelling stories, angry screeds, spam and all.

What I want you to take away from this story is that archives give us access to something that might otherwise be lost: the unfiltered materials that comprise the history of our thoughts and actions are preserved, organized, and made available for all of us – both those of us alive today and the generations to come – to access, interpret, analyze, and enjoy.

References:

Gracy, D.B. (1981). An introduction to archives and manuscripts. New York: Special Libraries Association.

Liberto, J. (2002, April 23). Archive of grief. Salon. Retrieved from  http://www.salon.com/news/politics/feature/2002/04/23/fund

I am a card-carrying member of Facebook nation (or would be, if Facebook nation carried anything so solid-state as membership cards). I blog. I tweet. I have friends who I have never met – and never plan to meet – in person, and ones who I’ve come to know better online than I ever did when we interacted face to face. In short, I am a digital native.

And I’m not alone. There are more than 500 million active Facebook users, half of whom log in every day (Facebook , 2010). In their State of the Twittersphere report for July of 2009, marketing firm Hubspot observes that, while their 2008 report had documented that five to ten million new Twitter accounts were opened per day, “that rate has since accelerated and it has reached a point where it is futile to attempt to generate a flat growth rate number” (Hubspot, 2009, p. 3). Hubspot further notes that though nearly ten percent of all Twitter accounts are inactive (having fewer than ten followers, fewer than ten tweets, and following fewer than ten other users) (Ibid, p. 2), those who are using Twitter do so on a regular basis, tweeting an  average of .97 times per day (Ibid, p. 4). Overall, Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets daily (Doctorow, 2010).

Now that we live so much of our daily lives online, it is becoming increasingly important that historians and archivists pay attention to the ephemera we produce in the course of our digital lives.

When Twitter announced, in April 2010, that it would be donating its archives to the Library of Congress, it marked a sea change in how the artifacts of social media are perceived: The stuff of digital life officially became a part of our national record, as much a piece of the nation’s history as photographs, hand-written letters, and military records. As Librarian of Congress James H. Billington noted,

The Twitter digital archive has extraordinary potential for research into our contemporary way of life. This information provides detailed evidence about how technology based social networks form and evolve over time. The collection also documents a remarkable range of social trends. Anyone who wants to understand how an ever-broadening public is using social media to engage in an ongoing debate regarding social and cultural issues will have need of this material. (Library of Congress, 2010).

But with this change came a new set of challenges. How should tweets be archived so that user’s conversations are threaded? How should links (particularly ones that have been shortened in order to fit Twitter’s 140-character limit) be archived? And what if users don’t want their Twitter feed included in the archive – what right to privacy do they have?

Amanda French, a regional coordinator for a group that calls itself THATCamp (short for The Humanities and Technology Camp) recently noted that,

Social media archiving is the kind of thing that makes traditionally trained archivists (who are better at dealing with paper) tear their hair out: people are not at all sure how it’s going to work or how it should work, and so we’re going to need to do a lot of brainstorming. Historians want to make sure that the social media data is useful for them, for instance, so they need to have input into what archivists and electronic records managers and programmers are going to build together. (Watters, 2010).

As we go forward into the age of digital materials and lives that take place (at least in part) online, it is vital that this traditional archival concept – that materials are to be used – remain a paramount part of archival practice.

The preservation of the materials as a group is also important. Because Twitter is at least in part a social interaction, consisting of not only bite-sized diary entries about a user’s activity but their responses to other users’ activities and commentary as well, the integrity of the site as a whole should be preserved.

However, it is not always easy to tell where one person’s Twitter feed – or even the entire Twitter output – begins or ends. Because the Twitter archive is an online artifact, hyperlinks in various entries provide windows into a larger online world, one that may not be archived and preserved with the compilation of tweets. Further, many tweets take place between users, as individuals reply and re-tweet in response to others’ postings. If certain users can and do opt out, their portion of the conversation will be missing, compromising and diminishing the overall comprehensiveness of the collection.

Yet if users aren’t given the choice of opting out, the question of what Twitter is (is it a diary, or public discourse?) becomes even more troublesome. Can anyone have an expectation of privacy, in an online social sphere? If a user hides their Twitter account after the public feed has been transmitted to the Library of Congress, has their opportunity to ensure that their past Tweets are kept private already passed? At what point does a user no longer have the right to consent to becoming a part of the documentary record? And if they are a part of that record, who should be allowed to access it, and with what restrictions?

Ultimately, the issues that face archivists in the digital age are similar to those that faced their pre-digital counterparts. Archival materials are meant to be used. The information contained within them should be findable, accessible, and available to historians and others who wish to access it. At the same time, however, archivists must consider the privacy of the materials’ creator and any associated person for whom the publication of the materials may constitute an intrusion upon or violation of his or her private affairs. Finally, the materials should be preserved in a way that protects their integrity, both as physical or digital objects and as artifacts that exist within a specific context.

Obviously, some of these considerations will be in conflict with one another. Protecting a creator’s privacy may compromise the integrity of an online conversation. Archiving materials from a large creator such as Twitter may affect the privacy of individual Twitter users. Ultimately, it is up to archivists and historians to decide, as they have done since the dark ages BT (that’s Before Twitter) how best to navigate the issues inherent in archiving and preserving the products of our new lives online.

References:

Doctorow, C. (2010, April 14). Library of Congress to archive every public tweet ever      sent. BoingBoing. Retrieved from http://www.boingboing.net

Facebook .(2010). Statistics. Retrieved from

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

HubSpot.com. (June, 2009). State of the Twittersphere. Retrieved  from           http://blog.hubspot.com/Portals/249/sotwitter09.pdf.

Library of Congress (2010, April). Twitter donates entire tweet archive to Library of           Congress. [Press Release]. Retrieved from

http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2010/10-081.html

Watters, A. (2010, June). THATCamp: Scholars and archivists at the intersection of          computing and the humanities. Read Write Web. Retrieved from             http://www.readwriteweb.com