Reimagining Archival Spaces
More-than-human spatial archives?
Many of the archives discussed thus far in the course have been collections of documents or data. These are what some scholars would call the human archives. Yet the existence of a human archive implies the existence of a more-than- or other-than-human archive. These are generally referred to as “natural” archives (a term that requires further critical thought beyond this module), and tend to consist of natural specimens that have been collected and compiled in a way that maintains their context, often with a particular goal in mind. Natural archives are especially common in paleoclimatology, where proxies such as tree rings can be used to study past climatic conditions. However, other fields also use natural archives, even if they might not describe them in those terms; herbaria, for example, could be described as natural archives. As with documents stored in human archives, these specimens have to come from somewhere; often this locational context is extremely important to the goal of the archive, and thus natural archives can be particularly spatial. For example, it can be important to understand where a plant was collected to understand species distributions, or from a more humanistic context, what kind of practices might have been used in collecting it.
While at first glance natural and human archives are completely different, they do have some deep similarities. As Zachary Nowak put it in his discussion of natural archives, “both are material traces of the past” (2022). Also, it is important to realize that, like all archives, natural archives are not perfect representations of the real world; specimens must be assessed, organized, and then accessed and interpreted in ways that mirror the contents of human archives, and are thus subject to the same cultural forces. However, is it possible to have archives where this is not the case? Humanities scholars have begun to conceptualize the land and landscape itself as an archive, in that it contains traces of the past which you must have a certain amount of historical knowledge to interpret (Norquay, 2016). Certainly, if the archive is something that can exist outside of human intervention, then some of the exclusions introduced into archival space by the practices of assessing and cataloguing disappear! The question remains, however, if something like a landscape, a forest, or even a city (see Roberts, 2015) can be an archive before it has the context these practices assign to it. Despite describing the land as an archival document, for example, Norquay later describes the archive as a thing she is “creating” and “conjuring.” In the next section, we examine some examples that emerge from this broadened understanding of archive, using the examples of climate proxies.
Proxy data: Reconstructing past climates
Digital humanities scholars sometimes draw on proxy datato tell stories about the past. Proxies are variables that might not seem