HIST 300-007: Archival Silences

Introduction

This week you have a two-part assignment, a single essay (800–1000 words) roughly divided into two distinct halves (for the mathematically disinclined, that’s 400–500 words each). This assignment should be posted AS A SEPARATE PAGE on your website, not just as a blog post that we use for reflections.

PART I: Reflecting on Hartman

  • Write about your experience reading Hartman. What did you take away from it? What did you like? What did you dislike? What quotes or ideas resonated with you (even if you didn’t fully understand them)? Did you think it was useful to encourage thinking about imagination and archival silence?

PART 2: Your photo archive silences

  • Analyze the archival silences of your own photo archive over the last six months, year, few years, life of your phone, whatever. Use at least a few months so you have a significant range of images.
  • What about you and your interests and your life are NOT represented? What DON’T you take pictures of that is important to you? If someone who didn’t know you were looking at your photo archive, what would they miss? How do these silences MISrepresent you, or in fact represent you quite well? 
  • Make sure you’re talking about SILENCES. It’s easy to slide in the habit of describing what IS in front of you (your favorite pet, kid, hike, food). Naturally, you’ll probably mention something about what you DO take pictures of, but the focus is to analyze SILENCES.
  • Write what you feel comfortable writing about. This is supposed to be fun, not to create anxiety about sharing personal information. Leave out what you want. Make stuff up. You can analyze a lot of mundane silences in a very productive way.

Why?

One point of this exercise is to take a break from the regular reflections! But, like those, it’s also to help you solidify in your mind (and describe in your essay) what you took away from our set of readings for the week. Usually in an archive you can’t know much about what’s not in front of you, but in this exercise, you DO. The hope is that this exercise will help us better appreciate the perspectives on silences from the Carter article and the way of writing about them from the Hartman article.

Basics

  • ~800-1000 words: Write more as needed but not too much (it’s a long semester!). If you’re writing less, your writing should be super efficient. Probably easier just to not try to lowball it, if you’re interested in getting all the points, anyway.
  • Creative thinking: You’ll probably find it interesting to read what other people write about their own archival silences and how it connects to their lives. Approach the assignment as trying to bring something new to the conversation rather than simply recycle what we read in the readings and banal descriptions of stuff like the fact you haven’t yet taken a photo of a three-legged cat you see around your neighborhood. We’re interested in the relationships between silences and identity.
  • Polished writing: Don’t try to sound like an academic, but neither part of your essay should read like stream-of-consciousness word vomit.

Scoring and how these factor in your grade

These assignments get scored as the weekly reflections. As always, I look for genuine engagement with and reflection on the readings for this week, as well as a serious effort to write something interesting about your own archival silences.

You can earn either 5, 10, or 15 points. You can also get up to 3 extra credit points if you put extra work into a post. Extra words do not automatically equate to extra points—they need to be substantive.

  • 15 points: Clearly demonstrates broad familiarity with the readings across the week, exhibits original thinking about archival silences and is clearly articulated.

  • 10 points: Shows familiarity with the some of the reading and offers some critical reflection on your photo archive silences, but does so unevenly and/or could use significant improvements in writing.

  • 5 points: Some effort, but doesn’t show much engagement with the assignment or is difficult to understand.

  • 0 points: Nothing posted, or otherwise so unintelligible that I can’t even guess at what you were trying to do.