Workshops: Goods

Workshop 17: What Counts as an Archive:
Women & Gender & Archivology

Conveners:

• Pamela O. Long, History and History of Science, Independent Scholar
• Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park
• David Norbrook, English, University of Maryland, College Park
• William Sherman, English, University of Maryland, College Park

Electronic resources today have altered the shapes of specialization in Early Modern Studies. For example, archives announce themselves and their holdings online, through databases and web pages, making it easier for specialists and non-specialists to find out where they are and what they have; materials previously available for perusal only in archival locations are now posted on web sites, some freely, others with forms of controlled or commodified circulation; CD-ROM companies are investigating archival sources for publication in digital forms for commercial sale to scholars and schools; and individual scholars and enthusiasts of various intentions web-publish texts that have been long out of print, with varying sophistications in bibliographic and other scholarly and/or specialist knowledges. A scholarly textual division of labor that deliberately and inadvertently operated to create long periods of apprenticeship to the documents of a period, to separate textual reconstruction and interpretative activities, and to create boundaries between disciplines, specializations and subspecializations, all of this is now in flux. Will such changes be an advantage for the study of women and gender? Will they facilitate the production of interdisciplinary knowledge of women and their cultural contributions? Will they democratize knowledge and create new intellectual communities and public intellectual life that will challenge and/or contribute to scholarly values, especially permitting historical and cultural knowledge about women and gender to enliven civil society? Will they create new hierarchies of access, and function to disenfranchise all those not able to use new technologies or come up with the money for digital resources? Will they permit archives to distribute text more widely or will they create new forms of intellectual property and property values? Will what counts as an archive change, and will our assumptions about what kinds of information we can glean from archival objects have to alter?

Each of the workshop organizers offered a concrete example of dilemmas and delights that raise such issues within their individual scholarly projects. Organizers for this workshop represented three disciplines or interdisciplines: English, History of Science and Women's Studies. We were in varying stages in particular research projects, and were simultaneously expert in some ways and neophytes in others. Each organizer wrote up five pages of materials to be circulated: one page of questions and four of discussion points, or exposition on their project. Such materials were intended to inspire participants to offer their own experiences with projects that also intersect with these issues, perhaps even to bring with them similar written accounts to be circulated after the workshop.