INSTRUCTORS
M. Camara
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course aims to introduce participants to the essentials of archival research, namely in regards to: basic concepts behind archives; the questioning of archives lead by the social sciences; and archival literacy and information-seeking behavior.
The course will provide not only the instruments to improve archival research, but also a better understanding of its history and the problems it necessarily ensues. Far from simple and straightforward, archival research is seen today as a heavily encoded and problematic epistemological process which participants will be guided to recognize as such in order to successfully deconstruct the archival sources before using them in their respective fields of study.
CLASS SCHEDULE:
1. What are archives?
1.1 Explanation of basic concepts and their ongoing reformulation.
Assignment: Students are required to discuss about the changes that archival concepts underwent.
2. Social history of archives: an outline.
Assignment: By understanding its social history, students are required to discuss about future archives and the future of the archives.
3.What are Social Sciences saying about archives?
3.1. Archival Turn
3.2. “Tournant Documentaire”
Assignment: students are required to discuss about the authority of history and archives’ role in it.
4. Questioning archives in the 20th and 21st centuries
4.1 Archival science, postmodernism, history, anthropology.
Assignment: Students are required to read and comment an excerpt from: COOK, Terry – “The archive(s) Is a Foreign Coutry: Historians, Archivists, and the changing Archival Landscape” The Canadian Historical Review 90, 3, September 2009 6 University of Toronto Press Incorporated (doi: 10.3138/chr.90.3.497)
5. Archival literacy and information-seeking behavior
5.1. Principles of archival organization and the deep sea of “finding aids”.
5.2. Understand and do research in archives;
5.3. How to find the archival sources you need;
Assignment: Students are required to do practical research to build up the final assessment work.
6. A generic overview of historical different archive systems.
Assignment: Visit to a public Archive.