Project description
The target user group are students who have been on the NELP program. Like the three grassroots queer archives described in Wakimoto et al’s “Archivist as Activist” reading, the individuals who identify as past NELPers have expressed an almost subconscious urge to collect and preserve their own artifacts from this intense experience they have all shared, myself included (Wakimoto et al, 2013). There is a NELP alumni Facebook group where previous students intermittently share photos and ephemera, as well as multiple disjointed Flickr streams and Google folders full of developed film and scanned pages. While this project is less lightweight, I am pursuing it to satisfy this demonstrated intent to collect and preserve the vestiges of something that mattered greatly to my own community.
The number one use would be nostalgia. Other purposes could include curiosity about the program between different years (did older NELP classes go to on X trip, or engage in Y event? What clothes did they wear? Etc.) or an interest in the larger history of the program, and where one’s own program fits into that extended narrative — something you can only begin to fathom post-NELP.
A specific need for this population, I believe, would be an option or outlet somewhere embedded in the archive itself that presents them a channel through which they can contribute their own artifacts, if they so wish. NELPers often have troves of photographs and ephemera of their own, and readily contribute representations of their own experience to projects that depict the program. Another need would be, despite common advice, to be able to sift through materials by year, as NELPers surely will want to examine how their own year on the program is depicted in the archive (and, perhaps, this depiction could prompt them to send in their own materials). Maybe the archive itself doesn’t have to be organized by year, but each entry should be tagged and searchable as such. The vast bulk of NELP alumni are old, since each year creates a controlled addition of 40 new alumni, a wheel that has been turning since the 1970s. That coupled with the fact that an visit to the archive would likely motivated by past ephemera and nostalgia seems to lend the archive to a desktop format — I’m not sure if this is the sort of thing users would want to engage with on mobile (especially considering NELP’s own no-tech policy). That being said, these are all presumptions, and the best way to deduce user needs is to engage with actual archive users.
I aim to prioritize the desktop layout in my archive design and add a note or email address, either under the “about” page or at the bottom of the general webpage, that allows users to reach out and submit their own materials to the archive. I aim to be scrupulous about identifying and coding each artifact for its date and will figure out how to search or sift whatever organization schema I implement so that users can examine artifacts from their own NELP class.
Other user groups that might seek out or benefit from this archive include NELP instructors, education researchers, and prospective students. Instructors might find it a fruitful place to check and confirm how past NELP planned their schedules and trips, and might use that information to impact the planning for future years (this, however, would probably only be feasible if the archive became quite robust with time). Individuals conducting research in experimental education and outdoors programs might find this archive helpful for their research. And I’d imagine that prospective students would be curious about what NELP looks like before sending in their applications, although after speaking with the director of the program about this project I’ve come to realize that so much of NELP is special because it unfolds in the moment without any preconceived notions, so this archive likely would not be publicized to an extent that it may spoil the experience for such users.
Linda Iacovino’s paper “Rethinking Archival, Ethical and Legal Frameworks for Records of Indigenous Communities: A Participant Relationship Model of Rights and Responsibilities” as well as Kimberly Christen’s paper “Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation” illuminate the imperative to place a community’s access and control of their own public representation at the center of a public archive centered in that community (Iacovino, 2010 and Christen, 2011). In other words, part of building an archive for (or representative of) a community is reflecting community values, standards, and practice into the UI of the archive itself, whether by limiting sensitive content access to the community members who have cultural permission to access it or by, more broadly, involving the community in the construct of the archive itself.
This perspective has changed the way I view archival practice, including my own project. My decision to make the “Work at NELP” archive narrative-based and private (versus public facing) is largely drawn from a conversation I had with the current program director, who expressed concern that a large public-facing archive would perhaps spoil so much of the NELP experience for prospective or incoming students who haven’t had the wonder of discovering what to expect yet. Part of the reason I pursued this project was to fill a perceived gap in user need: a place to publicly store and access NELP memory; however, after talking to more NELP community members, I realize that the NELP culture, in part, rests upon preserving the unknown for each cohort of incoming students. My narrowing in scope, too, arose later in the project due to unfolding understanding about the community I’m working with. I realized that there weren’t enough materials at the Bentley or within my access given the time constraints of the project for me to assemble an archive representative of the entire NELP community throughout time. I was not confident that my finished product would be accurate. Consequently, I chose to zoom in on a theme that I could tangibly detect in the materials at hand, and to build a more subjective narrative out of that so that the archive reflected more interpretive work on my behalf rather than representative work that implies subconscious participation from every student, writing, or image included.
The great number of resources at our disposal at the University of Michigan has eased the amount of legal strain in this project, rendering many of the strategies used by archives to navigate copyright in Jean Dryden’s “The Role of Copyright in the Selection for Digitization” unnecessary (Dryden, 2014). In other words: it’s a low-risk project. Much of my entities and artifacts are coming from the NELP archives at the Bentley, where legal access has already been approved and applied to the materials at hand. The NELP archive isn’t frozen and doesn’t have an age limit and is available for public access. Furthermore, most of the materials in the NELP archive consist of already-anthologized journal entries that students choose to submit at the end of each NELP cycle, adding a sense of confidence and participation to the archive itself, as the writers already decided to bring their work out of their privacy in some respect. I will be asking previous NELPers to voluntarily send me photos of work at NELP — chopping wood, making food, etc. — and will be cognizant of how abundantly clear I need be about where the image is going and who will have additional access to it upon that exchange. I plan on drafting a statement to be approved by the teaching team so that participants understand where and in what context their donated work will be purposed.
In terms of ethical contexts, I am being careful about my subjectivity of the term “work” and the implications of what activities I depict as such. The risk about narrative-based archives, I feel, is the use of objective material toward a subjective story, and the rift of consensus between those two states. With this in mind, I intend to apply a rather rigid rubric of “work” to my selection of materials for this archive: physical labor and cleaning around the camp, cooking, wood chopping, and such chores. I do not intend to quantify or qualify intellectual or interpersonal efforts in this project, as that implies values to certain perspectives, languages, and positions over others. Additionally, I aim to be sensitive about the journal entries included in this archive. While the public may not be interested in the authors of my materials like they would be the celebrities in Sara S, Hodson’s “In Secret Kept, In Silence Sealed: Privacy in the Papers of Authors and Celebrities,” I intend to keep private material about NELPers more personal lives out of my archive, and to focus instead on this physical definition of work (Hodson, 2004). Furthermore, I want to be especially cautious about including photographs, in this respect. I anticipate that, even with permission of the donor and rights holder, the subjects of these photos will be too difficult if not impossible to track down and obtain persmission from, and I thus intend to be hypercognizant of who I’m representing this way and what they are doing. After the Daily Northwestern scandal in late 2019 regarding coverage of a student protest, Daily Editor-in-Chief Troy Closson committed to better centering empathy for the population represented (Northwestern students) in the paper’s reporting strategy (Fortin, 2019). I aim to center empathy in my representation of this community, too, especially since some of their participation will be anonymous.