ARCHIVAL SCIENCE最新文献

Linked Data is increasingly discussed for use in archival description to enhance interoperability and discovery across systems. However, for Indigenous peoples, such interoperability often involves settler-colonial epistemological and ontological assumptions that can distort, flatten, or misrepresent community-defined meanings. This article critically examines how Two-Spirit peoples are portrayed through the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), its connections to Wikidata, and the Homosaurus. Using network analysis of RDF triples, the study traces how meanings evolve as the term Two-Spirit moves through interconnected semantic infrastructures. The analysis shows how LCSH may isolate and remove context from Two-Spirit identity. LCSH’s links to Wikidata offer broad but universalising connections that favour Western categorical frameworks, while the Homosaurus maintains richer, experience-based relational structures grounded in lived community contexts. Drawing on Indigenous Data Sovereignty frameworks, including OCAP®, the CARE Principles, and Land-based ontologies, the article argues that interoperability must be reframed not as open linkage but as predictable, protocol-aware access governed by Indigenous jurisdiction. Instead of outright rejecting Linked Data, this article suggests viewing it as one component within a diverse access ecosystem, where semantic mappings are negotiated, scoped, or refused to uphold relational, place-based meaning. The article ends with design principles for community-governed, protocol-supported infrastructures that ensure archival descriptions remain rooted in Land, kinship, and Indigenous authority.

This article examines the state of transition at which Sindhi-language libraries in India are located. These have become archives without being recognised as such within state or institutional frameworks. These libraries run by cultural organisations or academic institutions, house rare books and magazines, most of which no longer exist in print circulation. With a decline in readership and physical deterioration of print and other materials and the disappearance of language from contexts of governance/administration, education, and private space such as the family, these spaces deserve to be seen as housing archival material of rare value and immense importance to history and heritage, and as sites of cultural memory and language preservation. Their current condition of in-betweenness, or rather, nowhereness, has been conceptualised in this article as archiving frictions. These frictions are tensions that arise when these institutions encounter bureaucratic labyrinths, infrastructural isolation, and uncertain digital futures. The article draws on publicly circulated oral testimonies recorded with custodians of these libraries to identify three interrelated frictions: belonging, isolation, and anticipation. The concept of “archiving frictions” extends archival theory while thinking with the spectrum of archival theory that includes Derrida’s idea of archive as law/origin and Steedman’s idea of archive as dust, by bringing in a minority language context of a stateless community in India. It is offered here as an example of hope that can be extended to elsewhere in the Global South, especially in the context of preservation of minority, multiscriptal, cultural, and linguistic preservation.

This article analyses the role of the photographic collection of the Section of Memory and Archives (SEMEAR) of the National Museum as an active instrument in the reconstruction of institutional memory after the 2018 fire. In a context of irreparable loss of textual collections, the remaining images come to function as visual monuments and devices of historical resignification. Drawing on the contributions of Barthes, Mauad, Pollak, Rancière, Bastian, and Buenrostro-Cabbab, the discussion approaches photography as an affective, political, and relational artifact capable of articulating absence and presence, silence and narrative. The cases of the Bertha Lutz fonds and the remaining photographic plates from the Ibermuseus project illustrate the application of concepts such as punctum, studium, collective provenance, co-authorship, and contact zones. Photographs do not merely document the past but also create new possibilities of belonging, identity, and symbolic reconstruction. The research reaffirms the archival value of the photographic image in disaster situations, highlighting its preservation challenges and its potential as a critical tool for institutional continuity and resistance against oblivion.

This paper examines an alternative, sensory source of historical knowledge held by the Bedouin Tawarah tribe in South Sinai. Such inherited knowledge of the land can be a way of decolonizing history beyond state archives, which many scholars still rely on as a higher form of historical evidence. This paper posits a mode of sensory, embodied, and communal knowledge that has the capacity to open alternative discourses of past and future. It benefits from a turn in geology and anthropology that centers indigenous knowledge of earth science, as opposed to archival science informed by the epistemological development of geological sciences in the nineteenth century. Through the exploration of Bedouin modes of “tasting” and “walking with,” it is possible to see the desert as an archive that has the potential to open new possibilities, to unearth stories of buried histories, and to unlock traces and possibilities for the future.

This article, based on empirical data, especially interviews conducted in August 2024, examines an independent community archive that currently operates in south-western Poland, in the region of Silesia. The German Minority Research Center’s main goal is to preserve German identity and language among Germans in Poland, to study and document the community history and popularize their input in the history of the region. The article focuses on social, affective, and personal impacts of the German Minority Research Center’s archive. Analysis indicates that the archive preserves endangered heritage, supports cultural initiatives, empowers women, and addresses minority issues like German identity. It builds trust within the minority community and helps create counter-narratives. Data also indicate the lack of trust of the German minority in Polish state (public) archives. Archival contributors experience both stress and satisfaction, gaining skills and career opportunities. However, sustainability and the emotional demands of archival work remain challenges. The article argues that independent archives like GMRC provide scholarly and community value, offering alternatives to mainstream institutions and fostering personal and collective reflection.

The Lost Alaskans Morningside Hospital History Project (MHHP) is a grassroots community archival project documenting the nearly 3500 Alaskans who were institutionalized at a private psychiatric hospital in Oregon from 1904 to 1960. Through semi-structured interviews with volunteers and researchers, this article analyzes the MHHP’s online patient database as an experiment in guerrilla virtual reunification—digitally reuniting scattered archival records outside of institutional partnerships. The study highlights two pairs of competing archival virtues: privacy and access, and independence and sustainability. The research underscores how community archives navigate ethical, legal, logistical, and affective challenges in their goal of documenting marginalized histories. In particular, the article discusses the fragility of grassroots digital preservation and the special challenges in documenting and identifying institutionalized people.

Archives have traditionally been viewed as repositories of historical records, but scholars across various disciplines have started to challenge this conventional understanding. The art of archiving the animal is a series of references with various archival records dealing with animals to differ from the concept that animals are “inarticulate”; they do not leave documents. This paper explores different archival records ranging from government records like revenue, public, public health, and education department reports, correspondences, and proceedings related to the veterinary departments holding cases in the hybrid construction of meanings in colonial India, focusing on the Madras Presidency. Archives are not just passive repositories but active knowledge production and engagement sites. This shift in perspective has opened up opportunities to explore how archives can serve as spaces for reimagining human–animal relationships and understanding the animal presence beyond traditional frameworks. Colonial archival records offer diverse government documents encompassing reports, correspondence, and proceedings. Here, I argue that the military was the beginning of the consolidation of the animal administration in colonial India. In the larger lens, the idea of colonialism was legitimised through humanitarian and instrumental animal care, resulting in the colony’s unification of veterinary medicine and subjugation of animals.

This paper describes and reports on applications of the counter-surveying methodology that reads together geomatics (surveying and mapping) and archival social justice (activation of archives to serve social justice outcomes and counter injustice) in relation to two sites of forced removal: one in District Six in Cape Town and the other in Die Vlakte in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Archives from multiple sources are activated to supplement the recording of the stories of ex-residents who experienced forced removal. Ex-residents further engage through a process of annotating maps from their neighbourhood. In combination this documentation enriches and deepens knowledge about these forced removals. Counter-surveying works to ensure that these demolitions and their ongoing impacts on lives are documented so that their histories and existence are not rendered invisible for future generations. Ex-residents, most of whom are facing their final decades, hold the last remnants of living memory connected to these sites. Counter-surveying provides the opportunity for ex-residents to revisit and recall in the wake of community demolition. This work is motivated by an activist approach and memory for justice ethic that focuses explicitly on land and memory. We close this paper with key findings and invitation to others to take counter-surveying as a praxis and methodology that can be meaningfully applied to other sites of forced removal, working with both the original inhabitants or their descendants who were likewise impacted.