ENG307D: Bringing the Archives to Life

Elaine Treharne and Benjamin Albritton

Tuesdays 1.30-4.20pm, Barchas Room, Green Library

This course will introduce students to the critical skills required for working in the archives
and manuscript repositories. Students will be taught the core methods for reading and
interpreting archival sources, and will be trained in the transcription, editing, analysis, and
publication of primary textual materials. Our textual materials will be generically varied
and chronologically diverse, and we shall move from medieval to contemporary holdings in
Stanford University Library’s Special Collections; we’ll experience the operation and
holdings of other archives at Stanford; and we’ll learn about the theory and practice of
Archival Administration.

Aims of the Course

 Students will begin to understand the nature of the cultural record.
 Participants will obtain an introduction to the theory and practice of archival
gathering, collection principles and methods, preservation, display, and access.
 Students will acquire the skills necessary for close and accurate description and
reading of textual artefacts from the medieval period to the present day.
 Students will learn how to transcribe and edit texts and prepare these texts for
publication. Skills acquired may be applied to literary texts, historical documents,
legal documents and any written medium requiring transliteration or editing.
 Students will acquire the basic skills necessary for the publishing of edited works,
including digital tools and platforms useful for textual dissemination
 Students will learn to work together collaboratively, and may have the opportunity
to publish their final projects.

Schedule
Week 1: January 9
Read (Canvas): Parts 1-4 of Arlette Farge The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-
Railton and foreword Natalie Zemon Davis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), pp.
1-52. Extrapolate the main concepts of, and responses to, the Archive.

Reading Manuscripts and Early Print

i) Codicology: How to describe a book; ii) Palaeography: How to read script; iii) Research
Tools: How to find primary sources online.

Week 2: January 16 Principles of interpretation

Read (Canvas): Farge, ‘Gathering and Handling the documents’, Allure of the Archives, pp.
53-78.
Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz, ‘Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern)
Theory to (Archival) Performance’, Archival Science 2: 3-4 (2002): 171–85.
i) Diplomatic transliteration; ii) Digital annotation tools; iii) Research Tools: How to find
primary sources online.

Week 3: January 23 Archive Visit

Read Farge, ‘Captured Speech’, ‘The Inventory Room is Sepulchral’, Allure of the Archive,
pp. 79-124.
Read (Canvas): Terry Cook, ‘Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting
archival paradigms’, Archival Science 13: 2-3 (2013): 95-120.

Week 4: January 30 Principles of Scholarly Editing I

Read (Canvas) Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and its Limits’
Read (Canvas) Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, Elizabeth Shepherd, ‘Whose Memories,
Whose Archives?’, Archival Science 9 (2009): 71-86.
i) The editing of the text; ii) Apparatus and Textual/Explanatory Notes

Week 5: February 6 Archive Visit

Week 6: February 13 Principles of Scholarly Editing II

i) Introductory material; ii) Bibliographical material

Week 7: February 20 Archive Visit Publication Preparation

i) Copy-Editing Methods and Conventions; ii) Proof-reading; iii) Publication Methods

Week 8: February 27 Tools and Techniques: Textual Presentation and Display I

Week 9: March 6 Principles and Practices: Textual Presentation and Display II

Week 10: March 13 Project Presentations

Materials that might be covered

This is the first time this course has run. As such, there will be changes to the weekly schedule and to
the readings, dependent on the interests of the class, and the exigencies of moving materials around.
We’ll always try to give a week’s notice.

Medieval literary and historical texts, including fragments; Early Modern printed books
and newspapers, including periodicals; Nineteeth-century novels, poetry, marginal
annotations, ephemera (autograph books, notebooks, letters, and postcards); Twentieth-
century and contemporary texts, including ephemera and non-literary works; Online
manuscript repositories

Assessment
i) Attendance and Participation: Students are expected to read all the assigned material and
to participate actively in class discussion each week.
ii) Reflections and presentations: Each week, by Monday 5pm, students will post a 300-
word reflection on the week’s readings to Canvas. From weeks 2-9, an individual student
will present a 2-page summary of our discussion and activities from the previous week at
the beginning of the Tuesday class.
iii) Final Paper: 15-20 page research paper, or the equivalent collaborative project, due on
the Monday of Week 11 by 5pm

Course project: a critical edition of a literary or historical text chosen by you from any
period; or the production of a mini-anthology of texts in collaboration with colleagues.
Brief reflection pieces on the process of working with archival or manuscript materials are
to be incorporated into these projects. If the projects are good enough, they may be
published in Stanford Text Technology’s series. Collaborative work is encouraged.

Other Reference Works:

Louise Craven, What Are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: a Reader (Ashgate,
2008)
Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: a South African Perspective (Society of American Archivists,
2007): https://saa.archivists.org/store/archives-and-justice-a-south-african-perspective-
pdf/3691/
Cook, Terry. "The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the
Changing Archival Landscape" The American Archivist. Volume 74, no 2 (Fall-Winter 2011):
600-632
Caroline Brown, ed., Archives and Recordkeeping: Theory into Practice (Facet, 2014)
Niamh Moore, Andrea Salter, Liz Stanley, Maria Tamboukou, The Archive Project: Archival
Research in the Social Sciences (Routledge, 2016)
Flinn, Andrew; Stevens, Mary; Shepherd, Elizabeth (2009). "Whose memories, whose
archives? Independent community archives, autonomy and the mainstream". Archival
Science. 9: 71–86. doi:10.1007/s10502-009-9105-2
Caroline Steedman, Dust