When considering the power of the archive, the term ‘power’ can have numerous meanings: political power; the power to change or affect a situation; emotive or affective power; or even potential, unrealised power. On the latter, there may be a document (or documents) in an archive with the potential to bring down a government. If this hasn’t happened yet, does that record have power?
On Saturday, 10 June 2017, I was invited to give the keynote at Oral History Victoria’s symposium ‘Oral history in a digital age’. This post is an edited version of that talk.
A little over a hundred years ago, the ethnographer and anthropologist Frances Densmore sat down with the Blackfoot chief, Mountain Chief. She was capturing Native American music and culture using a phonograph, a device already around 40 years old when this photograph was taken.
Stories in Stone: an annotated history and guide to the collections and papers of Ernest Westlake (1855-1922) by Rebe, Mike and Gavan McCarthy of the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre, makes available the digitised papers of Ernest Westlake, including those created during his journey to Tasmania in 1908-1910, when he collected over 13,000 stone tools.
Here are Rebe and Mike to tell the story of the archive and explain how two publications and two journeys became entwined.
Our session on Ubiquitous Archives from the Australian Society of Archivists (ASA) Conference in Parramatta, Sydney, Australia, 20 October 2016.
After an interesting week in Los Angeles I am now in Washington, D.C. It’s colder here in the mornings and evenings, but the last two days have cleared in the afternoon, showing off the Spring blooms and blossoms to full… Continue Reading →
This is a continuation of Museums, collections and history – Part 1 of 2 The first cross-institutional exhibition mounted by Museum of Victoria was the ‘Story of Victoria’ which opened in 1984, the sesquicentenary of permanent European settlement in Victoria. Displays… Continue Reading →
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