Though Jarrett M. Drake’s Article “RadTech Meets RadArch” has only been assigned reading twice during my MLIS coursework (surprising!), I have returned to it often since my first exposure in the Fall of 2020 (through May Hong HaDuong’s Media Description and Access syllabus). I think the pull of Drake’s article, for me at least, resides in its optimism about the potentials of digital affordances. What keeps Drake’s optimism from the trap of techno-solutionism is his clear assertion that “the descriptive challenges facing born-digital archival records is not technical or social, but both technical and social.” [1]. Indeed, while these platforms open exciting potentials, they also raise worrying social-technical challenges, such as platform influence (the way that platform design and infrastructure shape users, their actions, and the cultural and material impact of those actions). Considering the origins and influence of provenance, I worry about the ways its cultural values can persist just as perniciously in digital tools, but see further cause for optimism in scholars and projects that interrogate the continuities between past and future principles and systems of information and knowledge organization.
A key thread of Drake’s argument in “RadTech” is that the affordances of digital platforms (e.g., shared custody of a folder in GoogleDrive) introduce descriptive challenges (e.g., lack of clarity on a file’s originator) that unsettle traditional notions of provenance (i.e., “that records of different origins be kept separate to preserve their context” per SAA). These unique challenges present an opportunity for a radical new approach to description–a new approach better suited to born digital records, perhaps so much better that archivists might find description structured by provenance (with its white, western, male, and colonial assumptions about ownership and hierarchy) to be of little to no use if not outright obsolete.
Of course, by the time Drake is making this point in 2016, the concept of provenance had already undergone considerable augmentation, expansion, and critique. One might be tempted to consider provenance a principle that is always already obsolete, always already re-invented. Shelley Sweeny explains “history tells us that so many concepts and nuances have been associated with the term through the past three-plus centuries that to argue on behalf of one privileged meaning is fruitless if not counterproductive.” [2]. It would seem as though provenance has continued to reproduce itself through active reappraisals of its values, enduring through archivists who’d rather expand the principle to accommodate their practice than leave it behind. When archivists reform provenance to suit their needs, they blur the line between critique and endorsement.
Concluding her updated chapter for the second edition of Currents of Archival Thinking, Jennifer Douglas reflects on provenance’s continuing evolution, stating “should I be asked again at some future date to revise this chapter, I am certain I will be able to report on more change, as archivists continue to react to and anticipate what they discover ‘in the air,’ on the ground, and through our collective conscience.” [3]. The air she mentions here is a metonym standing for the broader community of professional practice; it is also a play on the well-written-about quote attributed to Dutch archivist Samuel Muller, who claimed that when Provenienz Prinzip (german for provenance principle) appeared in the 1898 Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, he and his co-authors had certainly not invented the concept, but rather put to paper something that was already “in the air.” [4]. It would seem that the provenance of provenance itself is fundamentally unascertainable.
Sweeny explains that while the concept is certainly western European in origin and rises to prominence in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because it “was honored in practice generally before it was named, the claims of several separate origins all have airs of legitimacy.” [5]. In these historical accounts the “air” in which provenance circulates is both a social network or professional practice and a technology of legitimization. More specifically it is a nineteenth-century European socio-technical network–that is to say, a white, western, colonial one. The air from which provenance came surrounds us still. To this point, when white practitioners in an overwhelmingly white field advocate for the conceptual expansion of provenance they risk sounding an awful lot like sharks asking for more water. [6]. Suffice to say, reconfigurations of provenance–even if they de-prioritize origin, ownership, or hierarchy within the description process–do little to address how historic and contemporary forms of oppression underwrite the principle itself.
Outlining a decolonial archival praxis, Michelle Caswell and J.J. Ghaddar describe how “western colonialism, empire and race” as “defining features of modernity everywhere, including the neoliberal form today,” exert far more influence on archival practice than the field acknowledges. [7] In other words, even a non-essentialist view of provenance can leave forms of symbolic and material violence unaddressed. This is not to say that provenance cannot be useful to acknowledge or plumb for accountability, but that analysis of provenance must be both social and technical, considering historical dynamics of power from the concepts outset, and the conditions in which such dynamics persist today whether we name them or not. Further, I believe, as I understand from Drake, that in certain contexts there can be important gains in the abandonment of provenance altogether, but such abandonment must be coupled with continued critical attention to power that surrounds and constructs the systems which take its place.
Often digital platforms can hold a staggering influence over which users, functions, and outcomes are possible. Consider Bergis Jules’ observation that “for digital collections, who gets represented is closely tied to who writes the software, who builds the tools, who produces the technical standards, and who provides the funding or other resources for that work.” [8]. As Carbajal and Caswell affirm: “whenever we access a digital record,” we must remember “that people are behind it.” [9]. Whether it takes place in a commercial or archival context (or both, as is often the case today), the design and infrastructure of digital platforms exert influence over the cultural and material dimensions of its digital objects and records. Therefore, archivists and information professionals would do well to consider the modes of critique and design that can provide guidance in leveraging these platforms while reducing the potential harms of platform influence.
As such, I’ll conclude with an affirmation of Drake’s call for collaboration. A better form of description is possible. Better platform design and infrastructure are possible too. So, which modes of critique and design might scaffold the way forward? First, perhaps a reckoning with how the interests of empire manifest in what political economist Nick Srniceck calls platform capitalism and the logics that structure digital platform design. Another productive framework might be the distinction research physicist Ursula Franklin makes between prescriptive and holistic technologies. (Listen to her lectures here). Critical digital scholars like Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Tara McPhereson, Mark Sample and Legacy Russell also provide essential theorization, historical context, and intervention. In terms of design practice, several examples light the way such as the Design Justice Network, the Consentful Tech Project, the Algorithmic Justice League, and the Archiving the Black Web Project to name a few. These scholars, projects, and working groups produce a different social-professional context, one out of which socio-technical strategies and principles can emerge to challenge platform influence. The pull of their radical digital optimism is quite strong too. To me, that optimism brings closer the abandonment of both provenance and its ‘air’ in the digital age. I hope this post has also made a convincing case for understanding how digital platforms might carry assumptions plucked from the ‘air’ in a manner similar to provenance, and in doing so, has made a point to extend the same critiques we take up against archival principles to digital interfaces and infrastructures as they continue to emerge.
[1] Drake, Jarrett M. “RadTech Meets RadArch: Towards A New Principle for Archives and Archival Description.” On Archivy (blog), April 7, 2016. https://medium.com/on-archivy/radtech-meets-radarch-towards-a-new-principle-for-archives-and-archival-description-568f133e4325.
[2] Sweeney, Shelley. “The Ambiguous Origins of the Archival Principle of ‘Provenance.’” Libraries & the Cultural Record 43, no. 2 (2008): 193–213. 207. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25549475.
[3] Jennifer Douglas, “Origins: Evolving Ideas about the Principle of Provenance,” In Terry Eastwood and Heather MacNeil (eds.), Currents in Archival Thinking (Santa Barbara, California, Libraries Unlimited, 2010), pp. 23-43. 46.
[4] Douglas quoting Peter Horsman quoting Muller. Douglas, 30, 46.
See also: Horsman, Peter. 1994. “Taming the Elephant: An Orthodox Approach to the Principle of Provenance.” In The Principle of Provenance: Report from the First Stockholm Conference on the Archival Principle of Provenance, 2–3 September 1993, edited by Kerstin Abukhanfusa and Jan Sydbeck, 51–63. Stockholm: Swedish National Archives
[5] Sweeney, 207.
[6] Chiu, Anastasia, Fobazi M. Ettarh, and Jennifer A. Ferretti. “Not the Shark, but the Water: How Neutrality and Vocational Awe Intertwine to Uphold White Supremacy.” In Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, 0. The MIT Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11969.003.0005.
[7] J.J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell, “’To Go Beyond’: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis,” Introduction to the Special Issue on Decolonization, Archival Science 19 (Spring 2019): 71-85. 78.
[8] Jules, Bergis. “Confronting Our Failure of Care Around the Legacies of Marginalized People in the Archives.” On Archivy (blog), November 12, 2016. https://medium.com/on-archivy/confronting-our-failure-of-care-around-the-legacies-of-marginalized-people-in-the-archives-dc4180397280.
[9] Carbajal, Itza A., and Michelle Caswell. “Critical Digital Archives: A Review from Archival Studies.” The American Historical Review 126, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 1102–20. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab359.
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