Representation stood out as a thread throughout the readings for me, and particularly how scholars can reassess representation during the turn to digital archiving. One enabling opportunity of digitalizing archival material is reinvigorating the political meanings and representations of archival work as Matt Cohen addresses in “Design and Politics in Electronic American Literary Archives,” “we encode protocols of power in the systems by which our literary past is circulated and accessed” (231). Scholars working on archival projects are able to ask questions of who and what get represented within archival collections, or better yet, who is not represented in these collections and why. The positionality of researchers and scholars should come into question as archives are becoming, as Tara McPherson refers to it, “post-archives.” As material objects are transferred into data, this restructuring of access and approach to how scholars interact with their research materials creates the opportunity for scholars to address the archival absences of representation beyond predominantly white men. McPherson points out that “scholars might alternatively track the silences and absences of the archive” (497). And what better time for this than during the transference from material object to digital data to reassess the foundations of power and representations in archives themselves?
If scholars move in the direction of digital archiving, then there is a humbling opportunity to reassess the privileged platform of scholar through unknowing and loss. Taking the suggestion from Jerome McGann, digital archiving allows the opportunity to “imagine what you don’t know.” He describes digital archives as “fashioned to reveal its various (and reciprocal) processes of knowing and unknowing.” This self-awareness that McGann addresses could potentially be a way of deconstructing the epistemological formations of archives by embracing loss and unknowing. McPherson addresses loss in her formulation of the digital archive without objects, “the database depends on the loss of the thing itself” (487). McPherson’s description of the “post-archival moment” is a moment of “dialectical possibility” where “it is up to us as the theorists of the (post-)archive and practitioners of the digital to seize this possibility” (486-87). So what exactly is lost? Is it just the material objects themselves or the representations (or lack of representation) in archives? Cohen addresses the potentiality of digital archives by theorizing the possibilities of different linguistic protocols for generating data and research within archives by asking, “what would interfaces informed by indigenous information protocols look like, and might American literature read differently through them?” (238). This fear of loss signifies to me more of a political investment in structures of power and imperial logics, while the post-archival moment allows for the possibility of reimagining and even reconstructing representation in digital data.
