Following up on James Cummings's item (50 lines):
In its narrowest sense, records research has traditionally meant
locating records, transcribing them in accordance with an accepted
protocol, and making the transcription public ("locate, transcribe, and
publish" in the REED Editors' Handbook). As long as it was perceived
that the reasons for wanting to do this were self-evident, there were
few calls for an explanation or justification of methodology. But now
there are new pressures from theorists, both poststructuralists and
postmodernists, who invite us to understand "records research" as being
far more inclusive than the old description had it. They tell us we
need to ask what the transcriptions are really for, how we know we've
picked the correct items to transcribe, how we can be sure we have the
context as well as the text (or even how we can be sure we know which is
which), what kinds of narratives our particular selectiveness will
likely support, and so on; their point being that we have to own up to
the entailment of our records research, which is simply this: by making
records available for scholars to use, we implicate ourselves in that
use; and if the end-users of our transcriptions misunderstand the import
or meaning of our transcriptions because we haven't presented them fully
or carefully enough, the burden is upon us, for such end-use is (so the
theorists have it) what we had in mind when we undertook the records
research and is therefore a legitimate part of "records research."
Needless to say, many people find this to be an overloading of the
wagon; in their view, the archivist or scholar who merely wishes to
bring hitherto unnoticed bits of data to light should not be burdened
with concerns about the use to which the data might be put (or, said
another way, concerned about the agenda of the scholar who is waiting to
use the data). And here, it seems to me, is one of the first places we
might have a useful conversation. James Cummings cites Richard
Rastall's dismay at the Lancashire volume's omission of so much good
stuff; "the excluded material is what we should use", Rastall says,
implying that the publisher of record material should anticipate and
satisfy the needs of the theatre historian.
James Cummings himself wonders whether information about the
private lives of players and musicians is germane; for his dissertation
it surely will be, as it is for many others of us, including me. But
does this oblige editors or publishers of record materials to supply
such information? The issue seems to arise only when records are edited
selectively; agencies that publish transcriptions of entire documents,
e.g. whole parish registers or whole volumes of wills, are usually not
troubled by such claims, perhaps because it's presumed to be clear to
any end-user what the intentions of such publication are. Agencies with
alternative agendas, like REED, that publish selectively for content
rather than aggregatively by document type, are more vulnerable. What
do other REEDers think? Is there room in our current construct for
multiple notions about what a series of published records should
comprise, for multiple notions about responsibility to end-users, or is
there a single scholarly standard we all should be aiming for?
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William Ingram, English Dept, Univ of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI 48109-1045
e-mail: [log in to unmask] fax (departmental): 313 763 3128
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