It was my first conference for Archives-related research, and I had a wonderful time. I had some trepidation about meeting the other student groups, but found them to be friendly individuals engaged in interesting work. Here you can see the McGill ACA Chapter posing with members from the University of British Columbia and University of Toronto Chapters.
I went to many sessions, including two sessions that stand out in my mind:
On Becoming Witnesses to the Past: Selective Memory, Archives and Society, and
Funhouse Mirrors: Archivists & Archives through the lens of Popular Culture
The first session included two fascinating and provocative papers. The first paper dealt with holocaust testimonials in graphic novel format (Maus), and how they change the social meaning of archives. The second paper dealt with how male gay erotica and pornography have previously been a 'hidden' archival material - and how it is becoming more 'acceptable' to not only preserve it, but also to apply the appropriate metadata so that the material can be accessed by researchers. Iwas interested in whether there has been any effort to examine previously accessioned items that may have been identified less clearly - either to 'hide' it (when it wasn't destroyed outright), or identified using out-moded terms (the terminology used to refer to LGBT issues, or related individuals has changed throughout history to reflect social attitudes).
The second session included three papers - all of them on the image of archives or archivist. The first paper identified the use of gothic imagery to describe archives and archivists, to an almost Lovecraftian degree. Although she did not use the term, I think the experience of the sublime (fear and beauty combined) was part of what she was communicating. I spoke with this speaker afterwards and found that she didn't have a literary background - but I think she was at least interested in my comments. The second paper was presented by one of my peers at McGill, Tania Aldred, and it was based on a critical examination of archivists in film. Tania conducted an analysis of film representations to determine whether an older hypothesis, that archivists are represented as librarians, could be proven. She found that they were not, in fact, represented as librarians, but that they were sometimes not identified as archivists either. The last paper examined the role of archivists in Science Fiction Literature. This paper was not essentially academic in nature, but it was an interesting paper that referred to many of my favourite authors. Go Ursula Le Guin!
