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Archives and History

Moderator: Peter Walsh
John Miles Foley Lisa Gitelman Rick Prelinger Ann Wolpert: April 24, 2009; Running Time: 1:55:12

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Scholars of “dead tree technologies” feel increasingly uneasy in a culture overwhelmingly consumed with innovation. Although we may “live in a condition of perpetual flux,” David Thorburn hopes that “we won’t allow utopians and futurists to intimidate us.” Moderator Peter Walsh poses a series of questions to the archivists and historians on this panel, who reflect the anxiety and exhilaration of a digital age that is constantly transforming their disciplines.

After a thousand years and the extinction of many written literatures, John Miles Foley views the oral tradition (OT) as “alive and well in highly literate societies, even in the wired West, and multifunctional: it does many more things for societies than literature is able to do.” It has survived through its “ability to morph in support of morphing societies,” such as in South Africa as it dissolved apartheid. And OT and IT (Internet technology) are quite alike: both performer driven, involved in emergent activities, partaking in distributed authorship. Indeed, OT may find robust expression on the Internet, with new journals and multimedia e-companions encouraging wider audiences and interactive users for performances and events.

A switch from physical to digital archives “will change historical knowledge,” Lisa Gitelman says, because it means a change in the systems governing those archives. Whenever you open a Gmail account, says Gitelman, you’re urged not to delete: “new media have always prompted new archival sensibilities.” But, she warns, the emerging archive system “depends almost wholly on the alphanumeric character of objects and the metadata that describe them.” A historian searching through archives is like a miner whose helmet light can only illuminate narrowly defined areas.

Rick Prelinger views archives as “culturally emergent. …They’re going retail.” Once used mainly by specialists to produce books, TV shows, and exhibits, archives now attract ordinary users with home-based projects. YouTube -- which only resembles an archive -- has created unrealistic expectations of 24/7 archival access. But if archives rebuff users, “the social-cultural consensus that supports us and keeps archives open may fail.” Prelinger sees possibilities for changing the perception of archives “as the place where documents go to molder and die.” Archives could be “a point of departure … for historical intervention,” generating “opportunities for mainstreaming history and re-anchoring in the public sphere.”

“Stewardship responsibility in a digital environment is essential,” says Ann Wolpert, who believes “the odds that bits will survive in a shoebox in the attic are pretty small.” She also points to a “yawning gap emerging between institutional archives and records … and those archives (that are) a byproduct of normal human activities.” She shows an MIT photo of a 1935 drama club performance, where the “winsome damsel” would one day become the president’s wife. It’s the “incidental archives that create the flavor, richness and texture of life at a point in time.” What scrapbook items will people hold onto for future generations, as we record more and more “in media so ephemeral that we run the serious risk of losing …these experiences”?

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

“Persistence in the digital world does not happen by luck but through intentional action and explicit investment. The odds that bits will survive in a shoe box in the attic are pretty small. ”

Ann Wolpert

About the Speakers

Moderator: Peter Walsh

Webmaster, Andover Newton Theological School

Peter Walsh has lectured widely in the United States and Europe and is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and book contributions on the visual arts, culture, and media history. He has served on the staff, written for, or consulted to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the Harvard University Art Museums, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Public Radio, Wellesley College, Dartmouth College, and Andover Newton Theological School.

John Miles Foley

Curators' Professor and William H. Byler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, University of Missouri

John Miles Foley is also director of The Center for eResearch and The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, as well as editor of the journal Oral Tradition. His specialty is comparative oral traditions, in particular ancient Greek, medieval English, and South Slavic. Foley recently completed essays for the Cambridge Companion to Homer, a Festschrift in Germany, a collection of essays in South Africa, and Unlocking the Wordhoard, a volume to be published by the University of Toronto Press.

Lisa Gitelman

Professor, Department of Media Studies, Catholic University
Visiting Professor, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University

Lisa Gitelman is the author of Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture and Thomas Edison and Modern America: A Brief History with Documents (with Theresa M. Collins) and editor (with Geoffrey Pingree ) of the anthology New Media, 1740-1915, a volume of the Media in Transition series published by MIT Press.

Rick Prelinger

Archivist, filmmaker and writer

Rick Prelinger is founder of Prelinger Archives, whose collection of 51,000 advertising, educational, industrial and amateur films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years operation. Prelinger has partnered with the Internet Archive to make 2,000 films from Prelinger Archives available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. He sits on the National Film Preservation Board as representative of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and is board president of the Internet Archive. He is co-founder of the Prelinger Library.

Ann Wolpert

Director, MIT Libraries

As Director of Libraries, Ann J. Wolpert is responsible for the MIT Libraries and MIT Press. The MIT Libraries consist of five major collections, a number of smaller branch libraries in specialized subject areas, a fee-for-services group, and the Institute Archives.

The Institute Archives and Special Collections preserve the historical records of MIT and the personal papers of many faculty members.

The MIT Press publishes about 200 new books and more than 40 journals each year in fields related to or reliant upon science and technology. The Press is widely recognized for its innovative graphic design and electronic publishing initiatives.

The Director's Institute responsibilities include membership on the Committee on Copyright and Patents, the Council on Educational Technology, the Deans' Committee, and the Academic Council. She chairs the Management Board of the MIT Press and the Board of Directors of Technology Review, Inc.

Prior to joining MIT, Wolpert was Executive Director of Library and Information Services at the Harvard Business School. Before working at Harvard, Wolpert was involved in management of the Information Center of Arthur D. Little, Inc.

Wolpert received a B.A. from Boston University and the M.L.S. from Simmons College. In 1998 she was nominated for and accepted into the National Network for Women Leaders in Higher Education of the American Council on Education.