In this post I wanted to reflect on a couple of my recent experiences of being led down the garden path by later additions or interventions into archival metadata. I don’t want to give the impression that I think curators and archivists are hopelessly ignorant and misguided. On the contrary, these examples illustrate the kinds of things that can go wrong when everyone is ostensibly doing the right thing. So I’m not sure if there will be any clear lessons except to emphasise the truism that interpretation is an ongoing, open-ended process fraught with danger as well as discovery.

To start with, both of these cases were affected by the fact that many collecting institutions make only a very thin layer of information available online for the public. There is no conspiracy here. The sheer person-power involved in digitising catalogues and card files is no doubt well outside of the budget range of most small- or middle-sized institutions. Even those larger museums that have managed to transfer all the hardcopy information onto spreadsheets may not have not taken the next step of turning those spreadsheets into searchable online databases.

This is why, wherever possible, it makes sense to visit museums in-person (global health crises permitting). Quite apart from being able to examine the objects themselves, it allows the researcher to compare the online information with the in-house spreadsheet, the paper card files and the catalogue volumes. Very often information is lost when it is transferred onto a spreadsheet, for example, we lose the hand-drawn diagrams, the queries in the margins and even the different handwriting styles that can tell you if more than one person added to the description.

Catalogue entries of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin

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There is too much that could be said about this front cover of Andrew Lang’s comparative description of Indigenous totem systems entitled…  The secret of the totem (1909):

(Later spin-offs no doubt included The Hardy Boys and the Secret of the Totem, and Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Totem.)

The horror-house lettering gives promise of grotesque and intoxicating savageness, while the central image draws an equivalence between European heraldry and indigenous totemism with the suggestion of an erotic rite about to be consummated between a naked Sea eagle (?) woman and her Eaglehawk man.

It puts me in mind of an observation by Philip Jones, in the multi-authored volume Politics of the secret (1995):

[…] the belief in a single [Aboriginal] element or artefact holding the key to a complex of challenging problems was not just the province of anthropology, or archaeology or psychology. It also found expression in the popular literature of the time, notably in the novels of Rider Haggard. The Rider Haggard ethos, thriving today in the cinema, in which brave European men journey through forbidding country to unearth treasures and unlock mysteries to which even the savage tribes who guard them have lost the key, is revealed again and again […]

Tim Sherrat has been trying to automate the process of finding redactions in ASIO files. You can read about it here.

Some of the censor’s redactions are appealingly whimsical. Here are a few of my favourites:

Recently, I enjoyed some pleasingly artistic East German ‘manuscripts’ at the Stasi Museum in Leipzig. These two are favourites:

Inquiry into the defacement of Comrad Honecker’s image

Complaint to the national broadcaster: ‘The Black Channel Sux’

For some time I’ve been collecting and organising links to digital sources on the Philippines on this page. It’s been ‘under construction’ for about two years and I’ve finally got around to finishing the damn thing after a conversation with a Philippine scholar at a recent workshop.

This is the kind of digital bibliography that I would have loved to have at my fingertips when I began my research and it’s very much skewed towards themes that are dear to my heart. But now that I’m setting Philippine studies to one side for a while, I can safely say that the page is in a form that is mostly final. Click here and enjoy!

P.S. Below are a few images that appear in one of the texts included on the resources page. They’re from the English edition of Paul de la Gironière’s 1853 memoire Vingt années aux Philippines: Souvenirs de Jala-Jala. 

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Yesterday I came upon Thomas Bowrey’s 17th century A geographical account of countries round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679 (Cambridge: Hakluyt), which you can find on the Internet Archive here. It’s one of those classic gross-out travelogues (“The natives did what?!”) and as a former caption-writer I love this particular image:

Thomas Bowrey. [1905]. A geographical account of countries round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679. Cambridge: Hakluyt.