Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

 

“A Report Has Come Here”

Lauren Klein brings up a very pertinent question on how scholars account for absences in the archival record. Interested in revealing the absence of information regarding Jefferson’s head Chef, James Hemings, she creates an arc diagram to visualize the people with whom Jefferson corresponded with about Hemings. Klein discovers through this diagram a little bit more about Hemings’ life such as his suicide but concludes that “we realise just how little about the life of James Hemings we will ever truly know.”

In some ways, the work we’ve been doing with the Lewiston workers interviews is rendering the silences of these workers visible. Whilst, these interviews exist in the world, there is a need to go through them and analyze them, to uncover more information. The data currently exists, but nothing is being made of it in trying to understand the secrets of these workers and the factories they worked at. Through our final project I hope to illuminate the past and inform the present; by understanding how the local residents treated and perceived the French immigrants back then, to inform the present in regards to the treatment of immigrant African communities in L/A. Having a better understanding of the past, and more public/visible information about it, will perhaps help avoid the mistakes that were made.

An article that reinforced this idea of the importance of data from the past and how they can inform the present is “Truth and Reconciliation: Archivists as Reparations Activisits”, by Anna Robinson-Sweet. She explores the relationships that requires archivists to take on the role of reparations activists in the campaign for black reparations in the U.S. An article published this year, a lot more momentum is driving this movement of challenging scholars and archivists in the way they collect, understand and analyze knowledge of the past.