How to Position Archives to Different Student Groups

By Laura Blomvall (Engagement Manager, AM)

In an interview with AM’s Engagement Team, Professor Claire Battershill (University of Toronto) spoke of teaching archives in the digital age, material history and modernist movements to students in English Literature and Information Studies.

It’s a rare course where Claire Battershill doesn’t take her students to special collections. “I use archives in my teaching a lot, I think! I try to whenever possible,” she says.

The student could be from the English Department or the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto — she has a foot in both worlds, and seems to seamlessly move between different disciplinary settings in her teaching and in her own creative and scholarly work. (In addition to her research, she also writes short stories.)

Battershill is, in fact, on the move the morning we speak. There are rows of empty shelves behind her; she has borrowed a colleague’s office, she explains, and snuck in temporarily. Her own office is on the other side of campus, and she’s about to run a research session for students.

“We have this undergraduate research opportunities programme called the Jackman Scholars in Residence programme. Students come in for the month, and they work with a faculty member on their research.” The students helping Battershill will be thinking about access to special collections and creativity in the library.

Battershill has written extensively on archives. Her most recent book publications include Women and Letterpress Printing 1920-2020: Gendered Impressions — a feminist historiography of printing, from the letterpress to the digital age — and a new, updated version, together with Shawna Ross, on digital humanities pedagogy. Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students examines in-depth, among other topics, how to find, evaluate, and use digital resources with students. She uses a digital resource review task with her masters students in the information school; called “The Future of Things: Digitization and Remediation,” the course explores how and why material objects, cultural artifacts, and artistic works relate to and are transformed through technological mediation.

“Most of the students hope to be professionals in libraries, museums, galleries, archives (the GLAM sector),” Battershill explains. In many entry-level roles, they will have to field questions about digitisation early.

“A lot of what I try to emphasise here is just a certain literacy around the practice of digitisation across different kinds of organisations; what is possible, and what is ethical,” she says. “Because sometimes our graduates are called upon to make those decisions really early in their professional lives.”

Over a video call, Battershill discussed how she incorporates digital resources in student assignments and why archives are so important to her teaching practice in both her departmental homes.

In your information school course on digitisation and remediation, you ask your students to evaluate a digital resource. How do you set up this assignment?

I would show the students at the beginning of the course a digital archive of some description. Anything from the Smithsonian’s Digital Collections — something big like that run by a cultural institution — all the way to a small project started by an academic about something very specific. So when they come to the AM resources partway through the course, they have some kind of framework for assessing what they’re seeing.

Then, the students have an assignment to find an AM resource, specifically an AM resource that aligns with their research interests: to go into it and have a look around it and do an assessment of what’s available; what the materials are, how those are presented. So they’ll look at OCR, transcripts, what the metadata looks like.

The idea there was to allow them to choose content that related to their own interests, because there’s a wide range of AM resources that U of T is lucky to have access to.

Your information school students visit physical archives as well as examining a wide range of online collections. How do you talk about the difference between the material and the digital with them, the gains and losses?

It’s something we talk about together, and usually the students in discussion generate what they think those are. So it shifts a little bit depending on what the group’s interests are. But, generally, they tend to identify searching as an advantage of the digital. That really makes a difference to their research process. Also, the contextual metadata and any kind of apparatus around the documents — historical introductions, essays, materials that allow them to understand what they are seeing. Of course, the convenience of being able to access the digital, wherever they are, and not having to go to a special collections reading room, put away their coat, take their pencil … [Laughs].

And I think the loss is partly that aura, the feeling of seeing an original document. I also think that for those interested in materiality, or the nature of the paper, sometimes feeling a document between your fingers shows you a material knowledge that is hard to translate on a flat screen.

And some of them point out smell. [Laughs.] They always say something about smell.

Are there any challenges your students face in working with primary sources?

Increasingly, reading basic cursive is a challenge for students in a way that I didn’t use to experience as much, even if it’s not a particularly ornate hand. Obviously, transcriptions help with that. So the digitised object is in some way more legible to them than the material object would be...

Sometimes, when you come to correcting those transcripts, it can be an illuminating process in itself.

It really is. I did a digital editions project with my undergraduate modernism class a number of years ago and I had them clean OCR — it wasn’t a handwritten text, it was a printed text, so the transcript would start cleaner, but there was still cleaning to do, even on modernist little magazine-style typeface.

My contention at the time was that transcription encourages you to close read the poem, because if you’re cleaning the transcription, you’re spending some time thinking about the text at that literary, letter-by-letter, word-by-word level. And there’s a benefit to that deep attention, for reading poetry in particular.

So you use archival documents in your teaching in the English department, as well?

I do! We’re really lucky here at Toronto, we have really amazing library resources. I do tend to try and design my courses around what we have here, so that the students can have some primary document experience at the library. The Virginia Woolf collection at the E.J. Pratt Library is one of the best ones in the world, so I have an assignment for students to go for a field trip there and do some analysis of the primary materials within that collection.

I also teach an undergraduate chapbook class. At the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, we do a session looking at chapbooks from way back in history all the way to contemporary. They start to think of archives and special collections in a slightly different way in that context, as inspirations for their own creative practices and works.

What differences do you notice between students in Information Studies and in the English department, when they engage in primary source work from within those different fields?

In the Information Studies context, there’s a critical approach to digital resources as objects in themselves. And I try to really open it to a wider range of primary materials (so not just literature but any kind of cultural heritage artifact). Part of the reason I designed this assignment around AM’s resources was the range of available primary historical materials. This allowed the students could choose which one appealed to them.

With English students, they have research questions related to literary matters or contextual issues. If we’re doing a transcription exercise, it’s almost always with the goal of eventually producing a close reading of the poem. So they’re led a little bit more by the research question and the content, as opposed to the framing and the apparatus.

That’s more or less how I would think of them differently — although I try and make space for a little bit of both in both places, because I think there’s a lot the two disciplines can learn from each other.

How do English students benefit from being introduced to archives early?

Most of what I work on and teach is early twentieth century. Modernism is an interdisciplinary artistic movement: it isn’t only a literary movement, it’s also a movement in the arts, and in living, in domestic decoration. Because it was this holistic thing at the time, it really makes a lot of sense to me to see the visual aesthetics of the object of the book as well as the text. They weren’t made separately; they were made together.

I have also always felt that especially with historical materials, it enriches your experience of the text, to think of its relationship to the book especially if it’s been thoughtfully made, or handmade. And this is again my research area: DIY publications and small presses. There was a consciousness and care with which those objects were produced that relates the text to the material object.

For a lot of the stuff that I look at and work on with students, it is a holistic process that connects the text with the book itself, or with the embodiment of the text. So for me they’re just always really connected.

This is a bit of a big question, but to end, I wanted to ask what you think the value of primary sources is?

It is a big question! [Laughs] I think a lot of work we’re doing when we’re trying to think about cultural heritage and materials from the past is trying to situate those materials and to understand what their original context was. It’s much easier to understand a lot of things at once from a primary document. Whether that’s visual aesthetics, whether that’s practices of handwriting, whether it’s everyday living — as in the Mass Observation Archive [digitised by AM in Mass Observation Online and Mass Observation Project; the original archive is held at The Keep in University of Sussex]

In order to understand historical materials, you have to understand both your own contemporary situation and also the situation of the past. There’s something direct about engaging with primary sources that allows you to say, “I can feel what it felt like to be a person in the past, who might have been writing this.” And that imaginative exercise is really facilitated by access to primary documents.

And then of course, sometimes in accessing the primary sources you might see a different story in them than the one that has already been told by other historians or literary critics. Both of those things are made possible through access to primary sources.