Hidden in the Archives

However texts that survive are created, used, and preserved, it is invariably the case that archiving serves other interests than those of the creators. A whole host of people render judgments on a text’s purpose, meaning, and value: the historical actors who kept some papers and discarded others, who gave what they kept to a library or historical society (or didn’t); the professional archivists who catalog it in certain ways and make it accessible in certain contexts; the researchers and readers who encounter texts via certain kinds of information—key words, finding aids—and see them through lenses of their own. Archives get reinvented over and over again by different generations of librarians and scholars. Along the way, knowledge can be lost or forgotten. Hidden Literacies emerges from our sense of responsibility to find anew what might have been left aside by a different generation, or by those looking for different kinds of materials. On this episode, we hear from two archivists at institutions contributing items to Hidden Literacies, Ilene Frank, Chief Curator at the Connecticut Historical Society and Christina Bleyer, Assistant Vice President for Libraries and Distinctive Collections. They discuss the roles archives play in preservation, whose stories archives allow us to tell and what digitizing items like those in our anthology can mean for people invested in exploring our shared past.

Transcript link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xLg2QsU4MyTrPXV_wx92eVQ7PMQhpNrV/view?usp=sharing

Explore Hidden Literacies at https://www.hiddenliteracies.org

Hidden Literacies brings together leading scholars of historical literacy to investigate the surprising, often neglected roles reading and writing have played in the lives of marginalized Americans—from indigenous and enslaved people to prisoners and young children. By presenting high-resolution images of archival texts and pairing them with expert commentary, Hidden Literacies aims to make these writers and texts—which too often lie below the radar of American literature curricula—more available and accessible to teachers and researchers.

Hidden Literacies is edited by Christopher Hager and Hilary Wyss.

Christopher Hager is Professor of English at Trinity College, where he teaches courses in American literature and American Studies.

Hilary E. Wyss is the Allan K. Smith and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where she teaches courses in early American literature, American studies, and Native American studies.

Hidden Literacies was produced with the support of the following staff members of Trinity College Information Technology & Library Services:

Cait Kennedy, Research, Outreach, and Technology Librarian

Mary Mahoney, Digital Scholarship Coordinator

Joelle Thomas, Digital Learning & Discovery Librarian

Hidden Literacies: the Podcast was recorded, edited, and produced by Mary Mahoney.

Sound Credits:

“Crescents” by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)