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Archiving workflow post-COVID

As COVID-19 continues to unfold, museums and archives are putting out calls for people to share their “stories” of what life is like during the pandemic. I suspect the majority of contributions will be either written reflections, digital photographs, or video clips. At the end of this arc, it’s likely that many of these stories will have at least an undercurrent of trauma.

Which means, a lot of archivists are going to be thrown into processing large volumes of traumatic material for the first time in their careers. What kind of plans are institutions implementing to handle the appraisal and description of these collections?

In my early career, I struggled to understand why certain days left me feeling burned out and overwhelmed because the impact of vicarious trauma was less known outside counseling settings. Over time, I developed a range of practices and I thought I’d take a moment to share one of them. It doesn’t negate the impact of vicarious trauma but it does reduce it to a more manageable level.

Like a lot of archivists, we work on long-range projects mixed with daily information requests in a continuous cycle. We used to rely on an Excel spreadsheet to track projects but we’re now using Airtable so we can link tables with different types of data; the benefit is it allows us to visualize our workload through groupings and filters.

As you can see from this screenshot, this filter of my week looks like a typical project tracker. The unique feature here is the “Trauma” column on the right.

The “Trauma” column refers to the amount of potential trauma I expect from any given project. The core idea is to limit your exposure. The structure that works best for me is:

  • No more than two hours a day with high trauma items
  • No more than four hours a day with moderate trauma items

I don’t blend those either so it’s frequently either working on a project with high or moderate levels and switching to low level work for the balance of the day. After using this method for a while, it becomes fairly intuitive, with the tracker merely helping me check that I’m not soaking down too much trauma.

The perceived level comes from experience and is specific to me. The benefit of a shared tracker for a department like mine is that everyone can set their own risk level. Which brings me to an important point: vicarious trauma does not impact people in the same way or from the same source; so being able to identify the type of material that could be problematic for you is an important part of this process.

If you currently use a project tracker this is an easy way to structure your day in a way that could help to minimize the impact. I know it sounds like a common sense trick, and it is, but I’m often surprised by colleagues who spend an entire day working with traumatic records and then don’t understand why they feel so crappy at the end of the day.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t say: if you’re new to working with this kind of material and feeling overwhelmed you should seek the help of a professional counselor. I saw one during my early oral history work and his advice on decompressing from those intense, emotionally heavy interviews continues to be indispensable.

If you think this might be helpful please use it. If you adopt this method into something different that you think works better let me know, I’m always trying to improve the way we manage our workload.

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Parsing the #whitegenocide hashtag

Last night, after watching Tucker Carlson, the President tweeted about farm seizures and the “large scale killing of farmers” in South Africa.

“I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews”

The plight of white South African farmers is a recurring talking point on Carlson’s show. As a common recruiting tool for white nationalists, the “white genocide” myth – regardless of location — elicits a surge of responses on social media.

This morning I scrapped out 2627 tweets from an eleven hour period for the #whitegenocide hashtag.

Graphic representation of #whitegenocide
#whitegenocide

The left cluster is comprised of an interconnected group of tweets and retweets sparked by a white nationalist. The original post compares a lack of interest in intervening for the Yazidi  with the current plight of white South Africans. In this instance, the hashtag further promotes the myth of white genocide.

The middle cluster is a collection of replies and quoted retweets of Trump’s original tweet. They include a wide variety of comments all including the #whitegenocide hashtag.

The right cluster represents a tweet thread from Pieter Howes breaking down the analysis done by Africa Check  on the murder rate in South Africa. The hashtag in this cluster applies to deconstructing the myth of white genocide.

As a first look, I find it interesting to note some commonality between the left and the center groupings even though they remain distinct clusters based on interactions. I’m curious to see if any specific patterns emerge regarding how the hashtag is used and what similarities may exist among those users.

Further reading on South African farm murders:

International outrage about a “genocide” against white farmers in South Africa ignores the data

Murders of farmers in South Africa at 20-year low, research shows

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Curating Silences

I started participating in conversations about archival silences during the second phase of digitizing our oral history collection. While creating a quality report spreadsheet, I started to take a closer look at the way the previous staff coded interviews. I noticed a homogony within an otherwise silenced group —  the lack of Righteous and resistance members was particularly disheartening.

But this is a fairly conventional view of archival silences. As we began reprocessing our Record Group collection a few years ago, I started to take notice of how much silence existed throughout. For example, the “persons” listing in the index of the Brodecki Family Record Group:

Piekarska, Joseph (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Piekarska, Marysha (nèe Zylberstein) (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Piekarska, Lolek (b. August 1, 1930, d. Unknown)
Zilberstein, Monich (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Zilberstein, Jacob (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Zilberstein, Lola (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Zilberstein, Sissman (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Zilberstein, Issac (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Zilberstein, Sara (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Zilberstein, Ellush (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Zilberstein, Reuven (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Zilberstein, Moshe (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Zilberstein, Kubis (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Zilberstein, Zosia (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)
Zilberstein, Miriam (b. Unknown, d. Unknown)

This represents the bulk of what we know about Zosia Piekarska’s immediate family. We have no photographs of them. We have no documents from them. We know the bare minimum of what happened to them after the Nazi’s invaded Poland.

We often discuss the cultural destruction taking place within a genocidal event but what is seen in the later archival collection is the physical manifestation of this process. In a real sense, we have collected silences. [1]

As we’ve been reprocessing, I’ve started collecting data from each of the updated finding aids. We will eventually use this information for a spatial representation when we update our Survivor’s Room and Tower of Remembrance exhibits; however, it’s left me with a number of questions about the nature of archival silences in our work (in no particular order):

  • How does curating large groups of “record silences” help inform the larger conversation of archival silences?
  • How might examining the tactics of genocidaires record keeping inform our view on archival silences?
  • What would a comparison of genocidal regimes’ record keeping methods tell us about the creation of archival silences?
  • How can the methods we use in curating genocide records be applied to other archival silences?

There are certainly articles dealing with these questions in varying degrees. However, as we’ve been doing the work, I find I’m attempting to address the rather specific interplay between appraisal, processing, silence, discovery, and remembrance in a way that I suspect is unique to human rights work but may be useful in addressing other silences.

[1] At present, the number of people indexed with minimal information is 66%.

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Kony 2012

Invisible Children launched a new initiative this week called Kony 2012. The idea is to not only draw attention to the crimes being perpetrated by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) but to create a movement designed to bring Kony to justice by the end of the year.

KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

The movement is particularly timely as the Voice of America is reporting that thousands have fled their homes recently to escape LRA attacks in the Congo.

UNHCR spokeswoman Fatoumata Lejeune-Kaba said the most recent attacks took place in the village of Bagulupa, 55 kilometers east of Dungu. “There have been 20 attacks since the beginning of this year. One person was killed and 17 abducted during these incidents,” Lejeune-Kaba said.

“Abducted civilians are often used as porters, while the LRA has forced young women into sexual slavery…According to information gathered by our staff, most newly displaced were already displaced by previous LRA attacks,” Lejeune-Kaba added. “Other civilians could be displaced in areas that humanitarian agencies cannot reach due to insecurity and poor road access.”

Not unlike similar movements by other grassroots organizations of its kind, Invisible Children are attempting to leverage social media and local activists to drive the project.

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French denial bill

For months, the media has been stirring with reports and editorials about the French government’s proposed genocide denial bill. There are a few things that have been relatively under-reported about this bill, primarily because the focus has centered on the Turkish and Armenian communities.

If you have read any of the articles you would likely assume that the new legislation is designed to criminalize the denial of the Armenian genocide and nothing else. The truth is the legislation does not mention any specific genocide. The Sénat posted the commentary for the proposed law which reads:

La présente proposition de loi a pour objet de punir d’un an d’emprisonnement et de 45 000 euros d’amende, ou de l’une de ces deux peines seulement, ceux qui auront publiquement fait l’apologie, contesté ou banalisé des crimes de génocide, les crimes contre l’humanité et crimes de guerre, tels que définis aux articles 6, 7 et 8 du Statut de la Cour pénale internationale, à l’article 6 de la charte du Tribunal militaire international annexée à l’accord de Londres du 8 août 1945, ou reconnus par la France.

Translation (my own):

This bill aims to penalize with one year imprisonment and a fine of €45,000, or one of these two penalties, those who have publicly made an apology, trivialized or denied the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined in Articles 6, 7 and 8 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal annexed to the agreement in London on August 8, 1945, or recognized by France.

The bill itself (Assemblée Nationale and Sénat) would add a line to Article 24 of the Law of 29 July 1881 on Press Freedom, which would make it an offense to “downplay…one or more crimes of genocide as defined in Article 211-1 of the Penal Code and recognized as such by French Law.”

The second addition would be a line in Article 48.2 of the same law that applies to criminal procedure. The phrase would read “…or any other victim of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity or crimes of collaboration with the enemy.” The interesting thing about this section is that genocide is the only “category” that was not already present in this Article; the reason being that the bill is expanding on the previous Holocaust denial language that used the terms war crimes, crimes against humanity, and collaboration, based off the original Nuremberg court rulings.

Would this criminalize Armenian genocide denial? Yes, as France has previously passed a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide as such.

The bigger question, and the one that I am actually addressing here, comes from the January 31 decision to send the bill to the Constitutional Council who will determine if the law would be constitutionally sound. If they do rule for this it will likely leave the Holocaust denial portion (war crimes, crimes against humanity, and collaboration) intact.

How then does this impact the survivor communities living in France? Even excluding the Armenian communities, the French government would still be feeding into a schism, which already exists in public perception, whereby the victims of the Third Reich are set apart from those of other genocides.

How do you reconcile these two issues? It becomes even further problematic when you begin to examine the issue from the perspective of Rwandan survivors, who have been attempting to deal with the pains of reconciliation with a country that has been less than forthcoming in their handling of events in 1994 and beyond.