#NCPH2015 Day One: Selfies, Archives, and History Communicators, Oh my! Part One
On the first day of NCPH 2015 in Nashville, I attended three sessions:
- Session 6: "Selfies, Tweets, and Likes"
- Session 9: "Beyond the Shelves: Community History and the Responsible Community Archivist"
- Session 12: "History Communicators"
The first session combatted the idea that historians can or should ignore social media as a legitimate historical document. People use social media to express themselves in many ways, some old and some new. Historians would never doubt the importance of correspondence or other forms of social communication; how can they possibly doubt the importance of social media?
The panel, composed of three coauthors of an upcoming book on Holocaust memory and social media, led a discussion of social media in historical memory-making. Katy Perry's Instagram made an appearance. Discussions of selfie sticks and hashtag activism illustrate the point that while the academic establishment may be afraid of new ideas and technologies at times, public historians say, "Why not?"
The upcoming book focuses on the role that social media posts and responses play in Holocaust memory. What impact does Katy Perry's Instagram post from Auschwitz have on the social memory of Auschwitz? When people post selfies in gas chambers, how do friends react? What are people saying along with the pictures they post.
"Hashtag activism" calls to mind social media-based movements such as "KONY2012," "#BringBackOurGirls" and "#BlackLivesMatter." As one panelist said, social media hashtags are to modern social movements what the telegraph was to the Russian Revolution. Studying how, when, and why people use hashtags, selfies, and likes to advocate for a certain stance is historical.
The second session I attended dealt with engaging communities in archival work. The first speaker discussed finding the "hidden" collections within the African American community. The emphasis in archives is typically to gain physical control over records to ensure that they exist for long periods of time. However, gaining physical control can be problematic for a number of reasons: first, collections held within a community are often "hidden" or unknown to archivists. How do we find the collection in the first place? Second, and most importantly, communities may not want to relinquish control over their records (and for good reason, too!)
The historical record, which we archivists have claimed to protect, has been unkind to diverse and marginalized groups. History, for well...most of history, has been a very whitewashed, masculine enterprise. African Americans, women, LGBTQ, Native American--you name a "community," you have probably named a group that has reason to be concerned about an archivist coming in to "preserve your history."
What is an archivist to do, then?
First, get to know people. Offer to listen to their stories, offer to hear history as they tell it. Don't go into a community as a "knower," but as a "learner." Give up your conception of being a "keeper" of records. Building trust in communities takes time, but it is doable. The speaker shared personal success stories of gaining access to and eventually preserving photographs of an African American community in North Carolina. If she had gone into the community saying, "Give me your records, I want to preserve them!" people would have (and did) told her they didn't have any records. With persistence and genuinely letting go of her perceived authority, she made successful inroads with the community.
In part two tomorrow, I will write about two things: 1) "Distributed Archives" and 2) History Communicators!
