What is the main argument, narrative, or e/affect
The authors argue that the making of an archive is an act of power, which influences the structure and content of the archive—data—itself. According to Mauthner & Gardos (2015), “Data curation and archival practices… can be understood as historically—and culturally—specific and contingent ‘metaphysical practices that necessarily enact specific metaphysical commitments to the exclusion of others’” (p. 156). By this they mean that archives consist of both the processes of memory-making and forgetting. Citing Derrida (1995), the authors claim that aside from the positionality of the archivist, the normalized processes of data curation within a given society, “privilege” certain perspectives (concepts and categories) within an archive and naturalize the forgetting of how archives are situated according to these specific “ontological and political commitments” (p. 158). In particular, Mauthner & Gardos (2015) focus on three data curation practices 1) data cleaning 2) data anonymization 3) metadata preparation and demonstrate how these processes perpetuate subjectivities that ultimately affect and situate the archival data they create.
What concepts, ideas and examples from this text contribute to the theory and practice of archive ethnography?
The idea that data curation practices are “performative” (p. 156) is an important consideration for the data collection and curation practices for both archive ethnography and social science research in general. As Mauthner & Gardos (2015) write, “Data curation practices are ‘performative’ in that they help bring into being the data they ostensibly preserve” (p. 156). It is not only the positionality of the archivist or structure of the archive that can influence an archive, but data curation practices themselves. In this sense, routine data curation practices that we may take for granted such as data cleaning or metadata, may themselves shape the archive and the knowledge it provides. Thus, it is essential that scholars not only critically reflect on how their positionality affects their knowledge production, but how the most routine and mundane tasks of data management during the research process can ultimately privilege a certain narrative while excluding others.