Ephemera and Scavenger History, or the Struggles of Feeding Cultural Memory from History’s Waste Baskets

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Ephemera requires very different methods and approaches than do research sources published and distributed through more established channels — works that envision longer lives and broader impact for themselves. Ephemera is born of immediate purpose and produced to communicate messages to localized audiences. These documents and artifacts are not addressed to posterity or really to any audience beyond the very narrow milieu of their creation, and their messages tend to be intensely visually and/or verbally encoded and to rely on a multiplicity of shared frames of reference for full and accurate interpretation. When they survive beyond the moments they were created in and for, they represent occasions for scholarly intercept of elaborately encoded messages between inhabitants of evanescent historical realities. But the realization of their enormous informative and reconstructive potential requires the arduous work of deciphering visual and verbal codes by reconstituting that multiplicity of shared frames of reference. Unlike books, periodicals, and films, these throwaway documents and artifacts often tell us very little about themselves: who created them, in what quantities, how the copies were disseminated, who was or wasn’t likely to have seen them. This panel will discuss the daunting challenges and rich opportunities these materials present for the researchers who work with them, and for collectors — librarians and curators who work to capture and preserve extant copies of these disposable materials, and to construct from them corpora that can be productively explored by the full range of researchers whose work can be informed or enriched by them.

Sub Unit

• Library/Information Sciences

Chair

• Bogdan Horbal, New York Public Library

Papers

• Capturing the Political Moment: Collecting and Researching Ukrainian Ephemera - Olha Aleksic, Harvard U

• Decoding Satirical Posters from the Second Half of the Soviet Era - Thomas Francis Keenan, Princeton U

• Material Culture from the Soviet Union, Russia and Belarus in Harvard Library: Issues in Acquisition, Curation, and Access - Anna Rakityanskaya, Harvard U

Discussant

• Robert Harding Davis, Columbia U / Cornell U