CHAIR: François Dansereau 

Elizabeth Anne Johnson

Rethinking digitization as a low-carbon panacea

While mass digitization is often proposed as a solution to the high carbon cost of in-person archival research, it is not without its own costs. The creation, dissemination, and preservation of made-digital archival material have their environmental repercussions, from mining rare-earth elements to the millions of gallons of water required to cool server farms. 3 In addition, the labour that goes into producing digitized archival material is often precarious, underfunded, dismissed as unskilled, or overlooked entirely. The experience of interacting with tangible archival material can be challenging to convey at a distance: digitization can reproduce some aspects of the physical object, but only some. Optical character recognition technology can impede research as well as enable it.
None of this is meant to dissuade institutions from using digitization entirely. Digitization is a valuable tool, but archives and archivists must expand our ideas around access and sustainability beyond scanners, cameras, and cloud storage. How can archivists work with researchers to share the information we steward in a way that honours the earth, each other, and the material itself? Drawing on the work of Eira Tansey and Keith Pendergrass, Walker Sampson, Tessa Walsh, and Laura Alagna, this presentation by a digital archivist will problematize the idea of digitization for access and discuss collaborative ways forward for archivists and researchers.

Jonathan Karpetz (co-authored with Kyle Devine), online: https://uqam.zoom.us/j/84658429475 

Decarbonizing Archival Research: From Speculation to Reality

Archives and archival research methods are aligned with the history of carbon norms as well as issues of class-based consumption under capitalism and within the academy. Archival processes and practices have typically been carried out at individual levels as legitimating procedures within social and scholarly fields of power. The current regime of
archival location and organization, along with the related process of travel and retrieval, are thus not neutral methods born only of the need to preserve and mediate historical documents or artifacts. Instead, they participate in webs of relations that are enabled and enacted through contemporary regimes of extraction. 
Archival carbon materializes socially in several ways. Research projects frequently require visits to numerous archives in numerous places. In this way, archives lead to other archives. Archival methods can also lead to interviews and fieldwork, historically conducted in person, to consolidate legitimacy. Yet archives have social carbon imprints given the buildings that must be constructed, maintained, heated, and cooled. Ongoingly and increasingly, archives have carbon emissions related to digitally scanning, sorting, and storing information. Depending on the size of the archive and the media in the archive, digital processes may make significant demands on energy resources and the societies that enable those resources.
To decarbonize archival research, we have the following suggestions that will be elaborated on during the presentation: change academic cultures surrounding archival work and related practices, increase certain forms of funding and change certain funding models to deemphasize carbon-intensive practices, modernize the notion of an archive and archival work, and change the labour configuration of these processes. At the same time, we also raise certain questions about what decarbonization means in this context—particularly when decarbonization is closely connected to calls for ongoing and increasing digitization.

Shirley Roburn

Caring for the planet, caring for people: transforming the extractivist archive

To ethically decarbonize archival practice requires confronting the North American archive’s extractivist foundations. Not only records but archival structures, systems and practices arose primarily within contexts of colonialism and resource extraction (Hodge et al, 2022; Jenkinson, 1912). Archives are sites of material intimacy: moving through an archive’s
real or virtual threshold, we enter into crosscurrents of relations between the present and the past, crystallized in physical objects and documents. When we consider objects as alive within a lattice of material relations, it becomes clear how the archive holds traumatic histories and memories. These can pulse outwards toward researchers, archivists, and community members.
In the archive, trauma is a lived resonance that echoes in policies, procedures, moments, and connections with archival staff, documentation, and artifacts. In our chapter, we propose that it is essential to approach archival relations through an ethic of care. Without confronting and dwelling with the trauma in the archive, it is impossible to embark on a path of deep reciprocity, something Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes as essential to decolonizing and remaking relations in a right way. What does it mean to encounter one’s historical trauma, or that of others, memorialized in an institution? Can an ethic of care or ‘care work’ (Piepzna- Samarasinha, 2018) suffuse initiatives to make archives more accessible and less extractive?
Can it guide how researchers, archivists, and community members come together to remake
archives? Can archives move from settler colonial infrastructure to lived relations that support the flourishing of Indigenous critical infrastructures (Spice, 2018), which include not only flora and fauna but Indigenous languages and lifeways? This presentation will draw on the panellists’ own stories and experiences to suggest pathways to develop careful, caring, people-centredapproaches to decarbonizing and decolonizing archives.