 Okay, let's get started. Good evening, everybody. My name is Mike Guinness. I'm a director of the Conflict Records Unit in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. By day I work for the UN, so I'm obligated to mention that I'm here in a personal capacity. This is the final event in the Conflict Records Unit's speaker series for this year, and the topic is activating archives, what community archives can teach us about autonomy and reparation. That's a slightly different title from what we're used to seeing over the course of the year. We are based in the Department of War Studies, but a recurring theme over the entire speaker series has been loosely, I suppose, this sort of democratization of archives or this democratization, the ability to create content and sufficient content that's actually worth preserving for one purpose or another, but because of where we're based and what we look at, usually in relation to conflict, violent conflict of some kind or another, which, given current circumstances, is pretty timely. So, unfortunately, but it is timely and it's worth paying attention to ideas coming out of the world of archival studies and information studies, hence the Conflict Records Unit and everything that we're looking at. So in that sense, I'm really interested to hear what Michelle Caswell, our speaker, has to say this evening, and I'm thinking of it as a really interesting sort of capstone that can sort of bring in some theoretical or critical views and tie together some of the threads, some of the really disparate kind of topics that we've been hearing about all year throughout through the speaker series. So I think it'll help give a lot of focus to what we've been hearing about and thinking through. Just a basic housekeeping point, if you've logged in, if you're listening in, we have a Q&A function and you can post your questions there. Michelle will speak for half an hour, maybe a little bit longer, and then we'll have Q&A after that and I'll moderate the questions. And we could end up to an hour and hour and a half, some of these go on quite long. We'll see how it goes. A brief introduction. So Michelle Caswell, welcome. Michelle is an associate professor of archival studies in the Department of Information Studies, where she's also a chair of the department at UCLA, where she also runs the community archives lab. She previously co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive, and she's the author of numerous articles and two books. The first one is that that was my introduction to Michelle, is archiving the unspeakable silence memory and the photographic record in Cambodia. And more recently, last year, congratulations, a new book, Urgent Archives, in Acting Libertory Memory Work. And I think some of what you're going to be talking about is bringing in some of those ideas from that more recent book. So with that, the floor is yours, Michelle. And I'm really looking forward to this. Thank you. Thank you so much for that introduction, Mike. Let me share my screen. One second. Here we are. I'm delighted to be here today. And I want to thank Mike for the invitation and a huge thanks to Ellie for the support in making this event happen. I join you today from the University of California Los Angeles, which is on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Gabrielino Tongva peoples. Today's talk is titled Activating Archives, What Community Archives Can Teach Us About Autonomy and Reparation. So the talk is based in part on my book, which Mike mentioned, Urgent Archives in Acting Libertory Memory Work, which came out last year from Rutledge Press. And I want you all to bear with me today because the talk is not about conflict records per se, as conflict records have traditionally been defined, but about community archives. But I think as you will see, there's a lot that we can learn from community archives when it comes to thinking about how to intervene on conflict records, namely notions of autonomy and reparation, which I'll get to at the end of my talk. So this presentation combines my three areas of interest in archival studies, community archives, human rights records, and archival theory. I'll begin by reviewing some key concepts related to community archives, critical archival studies and libertory memory work. And then based on three projects run by a community archive, the South Asian American Digital Archive, or SATA, I'll introduce the concept of corollary records to show how records from similar moments in history can be activated in the present. And then I'll address how community archives focused on autonomy and reparation for minoritized communities can help us center the needs of those who are most vulnerable in thinking about records documenting conflict. Then informed by what I've previously called a survivor centered approach to human rights records. I'll conclude by proposing a reparative approach to conflict records, one that re centers questions of power that places records in the hands of those who have been disenfranchised, and that places authority in the hands of communities rather than state actors. But first, I'll clarify a few key terms. So all of my work fits under this rubric of critical archival studies, which is a relatively new rubric. Critical archival studies describes those approaches that one, explain what is unjust with the current state of archival research and practice, to posit practical goals for how such research and practice can and should change, and or three provide the norms for such critique. And this is an adaptation of Horkheimer's definition of what critical theory is. So this new term critical archival studies describes the growing interest in combining archival theory and practice with critiques of power from cultural studies, including examinations of how records and archives engender both oppression and liberation. And this leads me to the next term here, which is libertarian memory work. So back in 2016, activist archivist Doria D. Johnson, Jared Drake, and myself, were chosen to represent the US in Nelson Mandela Foundation dialogue series called Memory for Justice that brought together memory workers from post conflict societies around the globe. After trips to memory sites and dialogues in South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Chicago, which happened to be the hometown of the three of us, we wrote this. The past was never singular, nor will the future be. In order to generate these futures, memory work should be dangerous. It should seek not only to acknowledge past trauma, but to repair it. It should aim to upend hierarchies of power to distribute resources more equitably, to enable complex forms of self representation, and to restore the humanity for those for whom it has been denied. So writing this in 2016 has led me down a path of where I am today, it really has formed sort of the blueprint and trajectory of my most recent book, where I look at the activation of archives for things like self recognition, material reparation, and temporal shifts in community archives run by minoritized communities in the US. So that leads me to my last definition, which is to clarify what I mean when I say community archives. So diverging from centuries of archival thinking about government and bureaucratic records, the past decade has seen the rapid expansion of inquiries within archival studies into what we now call community archives. The first attempts to describe the community archives phenomenon emerge from the UK. So writing in 2009, Andrew Flynn, whose work has really been at the forefront of this, he's at UCL, Mary Stevens and Elizabeth Shepard wrote, quote, a community is any group of people who come together and present themselves as such. And a community archive is the product of their attempts to document the history of their commonality. And then they further write the defining characteristic of community archives is the active participation of a community in documenting and making accessible the history of their particular group and or locality on their own terms. And on their own terms, as you notice, is bold and italicized because it is so important here. So I think this is a wonderful first shot of a definition. But I think based from my on my perspective from the US, it requires a little bit of further context, right? Because I think that we can't discuss the phenomenon of community archives, at least in the US, without addressing power and power inequities, right? And I think here I can see that we can broadly define community archives into two different categories. The first category, those that represent and serve dominant communities, such as historical societies that are often not always but often invested in white supremacist histories as a way to maintain or increase local property values. And secondly, by contrast, those community archives that represent and serve underrepresented, marginalized and or oppressed communities. So it's this latter group of community archives that my research addresses. And we might call them more specifically minoritized identity based community archives, in which the history held in question coalesces around a shared history of oppression, be that white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, ableism, and their complex intersections. So furthermore, I think it's important to distinguish independent community archives from community driven or community accountable collecting projects located within dominant institutions like universities, right? I think those are incredibly important projects. But the struggles are very different from an independent community based archive that really spends a lot of its time fundraising and securing its own space, right? So again, to be absolutely clear, when I say community archives, I really mean minoritized identity based community archives, which is clunky and doesn't easily translate into a nice acronym. And I want to show you just very quickly some examples of what I mean so that you get a sense of what this looks like here in Los Angeles. So here's an example. This is Los Doria Society and Museum. This is in El Monte in East Los Angeles. This is a small community organization in this two room cinderblock building. You can see the 10 expressway behind it that documents the history of Mexican American farm workers in this community. Again, it's an independent organization. Here is the June El Mazur Lesbian archives, or at least here is their logo and their slogan is where lesbians live forever. It too is an independent organization. It's located in West Hollywood. The city of West Hollywood provides its space, but it spends a lot of its time fundraising, right? And it is mostly volunteer driven. Here's the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, which is located in a storefront in downtown Los Angeles. And you can see they kept up their original store title of glamour and just put Skid Row History Museum and Archive showing this amazing layering happening here. It's a storefront space. Here's the a picture of the inside of it. So this is the archivist Henry Apodaca, who's a former student of mine, who's diligently you know, archiving materials. The site is run by an organization called sort of tongue in cheek, the LA Poverty Department. It's an arts organization who started this archive and museum, right? So these are examples of the kinds of organizations that I refer to when I'm talking about community archives, their identity based and the identities in question are minoritized. So some of the defining features of community archives are autonomy, participation, shared stewardship, relationality and activism. autonomy means that communities have the power to make decisions on their own terms about what is important enough to keep to preserve, in some cases to digitize, to provide access to and how. So I always think of the axiom from disability rights, the disability rights movement, nothing about us without us. And I think in their ideal state, the same community is running the organization, being represented by it and being served by it. And participation is really key here, right? Archival decisions are not necessarily being made by an academically trained, professionally degree holding archivists, although they too may be involved, but by community members, as volunteers, as advisors, as board members, and sometimes as employees. So stewardship is shared communally, sometimes involving the creator of the records, the subjects of the records, archivists, users, community members, unlike dominant archival institutions, where legal custody of records is transferred from one entity to the other, community archives are relational, rather than transactional, depending on ongoing relations of care that shift over time. So in some cases, this means a post custodial relationship, where community archives may steward digital copies of or metadata about materials that aren't physically in their custody. And some community archives, I think are very explicitly activist oriented, right? All archives are political, none are neutral, no archivists are objective, by large community archives embrace this kind of political potential. So community archives aren't bound by restrictions related to professionalism, or even by enlightenment thinking, the act of asserting existence for minoritized communities is inherently political, and one that most community archives embrace rather than shun, most relish in their positionality and identity rather than deny it as many dominant archives do. And so this is what I'm talking about when I talk about community archives, right, just to give you a really quick kind of view. It's an entirely different orientation to memory work than the view from state archives or even university archives. My previous work has addressed the ways in which minoritized identity based community archives counter the symbolic annihilation of oppressed communities. That is the ways that predominantly white university and government archives have underrepresented misrepresented or completely ignored communities of color and LGBTQ plus communities. I've posited that community archives counter this form of symbolic annihilation with what I term representational belonging, empowering people who have been marginalized by mainstream media outlets and memory institutions to have the autonomy and authority to establish and act and reflect on their presence in ways that are complex, meaningful, substantive and positive to them in a variety of symbolic contexts. So as Mike mentioned, I'm the co founder and volunteer for the South Asian American Digital Archive or SATA. So SATA is an independent post custodial digital only community driven archive that stewards the history of immigrants from South Asia to the US and their descendants. Sameet Malik who is SATA's executive director and I co founded SATA 13 years ago. It makes me feel really old to say that 13 years ago. And yet in the past few years, I focus more on research and teaching as an academic. So a caveat is an order in terms of introducing the projects I'm about to discuss. I've not directly worked on any of the projects I'm about to discuss other than digitizing some of the collections from which the projects draw and providing some very general feedback. And I make no assertions of being an outside researcher to the organization, although I am definitely a white outsider to the South Asian American community. But as someone who is involved in the founding of the organization and who still volunteers for the organization, I am an integral component of the phenomenon my work is describing. And I think this is consistent with participant observation as a research method. So having said all of that, I want to talk about some projects that SATA worked on over the past two years, that I think will give us some key insights into community based archives. So speaking at a July 2020 community wide open zoom meeting, SATA executive director Sameet Malik said quote as an organization, even though we're thinking about and engaging with the past, our work has really always been about the present, the now. So this meeting was called by Malik in the midst of three intertwining crises, a global pandemic that disproportionately devastated black Latinx and indigenous communities in the US, the ongoing state state sanctioned murder of black Americans brought to the fore by the murder of George Floyd. And at that point in time, inept malfeasant white supremacist national leadership in the White House. Sameet said quote, we have some good news to share in the midst of this challenging time. And believe me, we all needed that good news in July 2020. So this meeting was an opportunity to celebrate the organization's 12th birthday to announce a new grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that would help support the organization for the next few years, and to launch a fundraising campaign with supporters. But it wasn't also an opportunity to demonstrate the archives value by drawing on corollary moments from the community's past, to make sense of the seemingly sense that senseless, and increasingly overwhelming present. At that moment, it meant activating records in Santa's collections to inspire action around three major events, the COVID-19 epidemic, the movement for black lives. And at that point, what was then upcoming US 2020 presidential elections. So the first project, there's little doubt we are living through a historic moment reads the opening text of Sada's participatory initiative to document South Asian American experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Launched in April 2020, the project letters from six feet away, asked South Asian Americans to write a letter to their future selves about their experiences with the pandemic. With the creator's permission, the letters are included in the archives and mailed to the creator in the future in hopefully better days ahead. Participants responded to a series of prompts online, uploaded a photograph of themselves, designated degrees of privacy or publicity from a continuum of options provided, and submitted a mailing address in which they would like their letters to be sent back to themselves in the future. And this happened over the past few months where the letters were sent back to those who had submitted them in 2020. The submissions that are made public are deeply personal and self reflexive, yet collectively offer a window into a wider community ethos of grief, feelings of isolation and the search for solace. In these letters, historic trauma surface and resurface, as South Asian Americans learn to cope with the new reality. For example, in her public entry to the project, Samira gauche of Texas writes quote, I would remember the first news that we needed to store food food. My first instinct was to buy rice and salt at Gandhi Bazaar. It was a reaction to historic trauma that my community went through. Bengal had a big men man made famine post World War two and rice and salt were in scarcity. I had heard stories of what my family went through. I was surprised that the steep seated insecurity had surfaced end quote. So here the Bengal famine of 1943 emerges as a powerful intergenerational memory being relived even though the writer herself had not directly experienced it. She continued that getting groceries delivered in the early days of quarantine quote felt like Christmas morning. For some participants, the pandemic surface deeply ingrained traumas and enacted what I think are circular temporalities, as if history was repeating itself oceans and decades away in a vastly different context. The letters that were submitted to this project are created to be read at a non corollary moment in the near future. So the project builds community by providing a platform for letters to be shared with each other. But more importantly, it underscores underscores the emotional importance of the creation of records to participants. Those who write letters to themselves, I think feel validated, heard, documented in the historic record, even if they choose not to share their letters with others. And I'm working on a research project right now that actually interviews some of the participants of projects like this to see what it actually feels like to participate. What's the motivation to participate in a project like this? The project also transforms record creators into records users, as participants read their own letters from the not so distant past. And I think in so doing it inaugurates a cyclical sense of time that catalyzes movement back and forth along a pendulum, pendulum swinging between now and two years from now, now and two years ago. Right. So after inviting attendees of the July 2020 community meeting to participate in the letters from six feet away project, Malik then pivoted to the other crisis on everyone's minds, the proliferation of an impunity for state sponsored violence against black people. South Asian Americans have a complicated history with the American racial hierarchy, as many records in SADA attest. So some early immigrants from India align themselves with whiteness to varying degrees of success, while others passed as black. The 1965 Heart Seller Immigration and Nationality Act that enabled South Asians to immigrate to the US in larger numbers would not have been possible without the civil rights movement. Yet anti black racism remains an ongoing problem within the community, despite the efforts of many South Asian American activists. So for Malik, the July 2020 meeting was also an opportunity to further position SADA as an organization committed to justice for black people. Acknowledging complex histories, he drew connections between the ongoing movement for black lives, and corollary moments in history in which South Asian Americans were involved in activism for black liberation. Yet he also directly confronted anti black racism within the community, and did not gloss over its history of aspirational misalignment with white supremacy. Quote in response to the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmed Arbery and too many others, we are sharing stories from our communities past that help engage our community today in the struggle against anti black racism, Malik said at this meeting. He then recounted the story of H. G. mudgull, an Indian immigrant to Harlem in the 1920s, who became the editor of Marcus Garvey's newspaper, and an outspoken activist for black independence. Quote H. G. mudgull story is a reminder both of the historical possibilities and duties for South Asians to engage in solidarity with black communities. But moreover, the urgency now for us to engage in those solidarities and to address anti blackness within our own communities, he said, continuing quote, to be able to share these stories from the past, to be able to engage with contemporary discourse and dialogue and movements has been really rewarding and enriching for us as an organization. And I hope they help to move our community as well. So Malik's comments reflect, I think, a temporality of urgency in which records from the past are invoked to inspire contemporary political action now. In this way, the 1920s are set up as a corollary moment to the 2020s. And records documenting H. G. mudgull are set up as corollary records to those being created by South Asian American activists fighting anti black racism now. By catalyzing corollary records from corollary moments, Malik showed precedent for South Asian American solidarity with black Americans, evoking historical possibilities, as he put it, that align the community with the contemporary movement for black lives. These activations forge a cyclical temporality that dispense with the racial progress narratives of white time, right? Instead of insisting that it gets better for minoritized communities. These efforts show how oppressive histories repeat themselves, how historical possibilities can be invoked to forge affinities and solidarities in the present, and how a precedent of anti-racist activism can inspire action for black lives in the now. In this work, archives become urgently relevant and crucially contemporary. The current moment demands more from archives, I think, than simply documenting these stories of solidarity in hopes that some future users might find them, right? Instead, as Sada has shown, we need to catalyze the records into action to forge corollary moments across cycles of time and to create a temporality of urgency for communities. So in each of these cases, Sada is drawing on what I call corollary records from corollary moments to catalyze political consciousness and action in the now. Corollary records document reoccurring moments in time in which the same or similar oppressions get repeated, and a corollary moment is a point in time with historical precedence. At their most useful, records can be activated in corollary moments in the present so that community members can learn activist tactics and strategies and get inspiration to keep going. We've been here before, we've survived this before, we've resisted before. Corollary records assert, here's how. By activating corollary records, Sada's community members are interrupting reoccurring oppressions by learning from previous generations of community members facing corollary moments. And I think this is one way archives can help this mantle systemic oppression and engage in reparative memory work by catalyzing the activation of corollary records in the past from the past to inspire and strategize activism in the present. And I think these examples mark an important shift for us as an organization, a movement from collecting records for recuperative and representational purposes, what I would call a form of liberatory appraisal towards using and encouraging others to use those records against oppression now in what I would call liberatory activation. So in the initial years of working with Sada, Malik, other volunteers and I were stunned, frankly, with the amount of materials we found that dated back before 1965, when US immigration law changed to enable greater numbers of South Asians to the US. Back in 2008, when we founded Sada, we had read about California's early Punjabi Mexican communities. We had heard rumors about a few anti-colonial activists along the West Coast of the US and Canada from the turn of the 20th century. But we really had no idea the wealth of records we would find once we really started to look. We feverishly collected as many pre-1965 records as we could find, thrilled to fill in some of the gaps and silences we had found when we looked for South Asian American stories in mainstream repositories like the US National Archives and Records Administration and dozens of university archives. Our initial aims were recuperative in the sense that we are trying to recuperate lost histories, pulling them back from oblivion into the community's consciousness. Our work, I think, was also representational in the sense that we were trying to increase the amount and types of representations of South Asians in the US stories about the past. Recuperative and representational collecting kept us busy for nearly a decade and guided by a very broad appraisal policy we discovered and digitized more than we had ever anticipated about South Asian American history. Building on Duff and Harris's naming of liberatory description, I characterized these initial recuperative and representational collecting impulses as a form of liberatory appraisal. Appraisal is the process by which archivists assign evidentiary value to collections of materials, resulting in important decisions about what is archival, what falls within organizational scope, what gets collected and what gets excluded and ultimately what gets destroyed. So appraisal theory has preoccupied archival studies for a century, resulting in a host of theories, strategies and tactics archivists employ to make appraisal decisions, including assigning notions of primary and secondary value, functional analyses, documentation strategy. Recently, I've proposed feminist standpoint appraisal as a type of liberatory appraisal that acknowledges the positionality of the appraiser and seeks to center the needs of those most disempowered due to the interlocking oppressions of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. In placing value in materials created by minoritized communities and appraising them as worthy of retention and preservation and in thinking about the emotional, material and political consequences of such decisions on the communities represented in such records, archivists engaged in representational and recuperative collecting can be said to engage in liberatory appraisal. So our initial twin impulses of recuperation and representation were motivated by what I would come to describe as countering the symbolic annihilation of South Asian Americans with representational belonging. By finding digitizing and providing access to as many records documenting the early history of South Asian Americans as we could, we were countering the community symbolic annihilation in history with a powerful assertion of existence and belonging. Clearly, experiences of seeing yourself and your community in history after being excluded or misrepresented due to racism and our heteropatriarchy are emotionally powerful. Nearly every interview and focus group I've conducted with the volunteers, staff, users and donors to minoritized community based archives offered the over the past five years confirm the emotional impact of robust representation after repeated and extended experiences of symbolic annihilation in mainstream archives. This emotional impact archives provoking the feeling of self recognition in minoritized communities can be an important emotional element of liberatory memory work. It's joyous to see yourself robustly represented after feeling symbolically annihilated. And this joy is inherently political in a system designed to oppress. It's important to note that symbolic and actual annihilation are intimately related. So symbolic annihilation, both precedes and succeeds actual annihilation, such that individuals and communities are rendered expendable, invisible or non existent before they are subject to violence, particularly state sanctioned violence. And then after violence, such murderous acts are often rendered invisible or expunged from the record, magnifying and mimicking the violence itself. So every dehumanizing misrepresentation in archives and media that says you are not quite human and every archival absence that says you are not important enough to collect adds up to create the conditions that enable mass murder and or genocide to occur. And then after such violence happens, every dehumanizing misrepresentation of that violence in archives that says you deserved it anyway and every archival absence of that violence that says your death is not important enough to record also adds up to the conditions that justify mass murder and or genocide grant impunity for it and enable it to occur again. And so this leads us up to the two main themes. I'd like to you all to take away from community archives in the context of talking about conflict records, and that's autonomy and reparation, both of which require a power analysis. So I think we need to reframe debates over the custody of conflict records in light of these two principles from community archives. So first, archival autonomy, what does it mean? It means that communities who are made most vulnerable by records who have the most at stake, who are at the bottom end of our power analysis should be empowered to make autonomous decisions about the appraisal description, preservation, digitization and access to those records, even if they are not the creators of those records. And this is an expansion of the archival concept of provenance beyond the creator of the record, beyond a narrow definition of the successor state to include the subjects of the record and the community context in which they were created. And I think in acting this principle will look different in different contexts. The key unit of analysis here is community rather than the state and rather than the individual. So back in 2014, I published an article in the Journal of Archival Science that was called toward a survivor-centered approach to records documenting human rights abuse, lessons from community archives. And that article presented a survivor-centered approach to human rights records, arguing that survivors of human rights abuse and not necessarily successor states should maintain control over the decision-making processes related to records documenting their abuse. And I echo that same sentiment here. Who was most harmed by conflict? What mechanisms can be put into place to give those made most vulnerable autonomy over records documenting their own harm? Secondly and relatedly is the idea of reparation. How can conflict records be activated for reparation? That is to repair harm rather than exacerbate it. We must consider downstream use as the examples from SADA have shown us and contrary to centuries of dominant archival appraisal theory, we must consider the activation of records by whom and for what aims in the future and then encourage the activation of records, the forging of corollary moments through this notion of corollary records that encourage repair rather than furthering harm. So reparative archival strategies seek to center oppressed positionalities by assigning archival value based on the needs of harmed communities. And this may include valuing records for evidentiary purposes in the case of potential legal redress or for emotional purposes in the case of countering symbolic annihilation with feelings of validation and representational belonging, right? It matters if you can see yourself in history. It matters if you can see other sorry, if others can see you represented in history. But most importantly, if you're a survivor of violence, it matters if you can activate records as evidence in claims for material reparation. Repairative appraisal is the process of determining the value of records in regards to their potential activation for repair. So contrary to the past century, right? Of dominant Western thinking, I think this appraisal considers the potential uses of records in making decisions, right? And further asks whose uses and for what aims. And in this sense, reparative appraisal is intimately tied to reparative outreach as it's only in the activation of records that their full liberatory potential can be realized. Its undergirding assumption is that archives can catalyze particular kinds of use by the political, artistic, or activists by modeling that use in their own practices and by targeting outreach efforts to groups engaged in liberatory work. And here I'm concluding what we can learn from community archives in thinking about all kinds of records is how to leverage recuperative and representational imperatives to activate corollary records across corollary moments in time in the present for reparation. And we can learn to empower harmed communities to have autonomy over records about them. And we can encourage these records to be activated for repair work, the work of archives, the work of justice, the work of representation and the work of repair, the work of memory and the work of imagining and enacting possibilities for the present cannot occur on separate parallel tracks. I think they're they're wholly intertwined. And I'll leave it there and I look forward to further conversation. Thank you, Michelle, that was fascinating. I mean, I would say that because I think all our speakers are fascinating, but that there's some specific points here that I think are really interesting from where I'm coming from and where a lot of our you know, the people sort of naturally gravitate towards what the conflict record unit is doing. You know, there's I guess a subculture within all of that some historians, some political scientists, they talk about, you know, the use of analogies and metaphors in especially in foreign policymaking and the lessons of the past and you have Ernest Mayen, that whole crowded at Harvard. And there's a real sort of well, it's a corollary sort of strand of thinking. But what I what I always found interesting is that they talk about historical events and the lessons of those events, but they don't really talk about the records as being foundational to that. And of course, it is foundational with the work of historians. Political scientists kind of depends on which political scientists we're talking about and how political science they are with their with their work. And I guess that that's that's really sort of got my attention. I mean, there's a lot for us to learn from this, obviously. But but if I could sort of home in on a couple of terms. You started with one, you started with several terms with that there was one that you didn't emphasize. And I think you used it as kind of a term of art that's kind of a given. So we're probably behind the the curve. When you know, when it comes to this post custodial math, Matthew Ford is is is in the audience. I might pull him in as a panelist so you can actually speak face to face. But I wonder if you could elaborate on that, engage with that because it's really an intriguing kind of term. Yes. Yeah. Thank you for asking that question. And there there certainly could be and have been many, you know, our long talks just on this term post custodial, right? So in the traditional dominant way of doing archives, there is a transfer of custody, right? The records are one place. They are with the donor of the materials or the agency or the organization that created them. And then they are physically transferred. The custody is transferred from the creators of the records to the archives, be it state archives or university archives. Any kind of archives, right? So there's a physical transfer of custody. It's a legal agreement. It's a transaction. It is there's a deed of gift that assigned that well, hopefully assigned that designates that transfer of custody to archives. About 20, 25 years ago, archivists started thinking about what do we do about digital records, right? We're a little behind in thinking about it. And what does it mean to have custody of a digital record? Does that concept make sense anymore, right? Because there can be multiple copies of digital records. They can live in many different places. So this idea of a post custodial archive, right? That perhaps an archive is no longer dependent on physical custody of records sort of emerges in light of this conversation about what are we going to do about at that point they called it electronic records, but digital records. But this model of a way of questioning custody, transactions and archives was taken up by both community based archives and human rights archives. So the University of Texas at Austin for many years had a human rights documentation initiative that was brilliant because what they did is they went to human rights organizations around the world and said, what do you want us to do? How do you want us to help you support you? As an archive, in some cases, it meant, please take our records, right? They're not safe here, take them in a more traditional sense. The custody was transferred. But in other cases, it meant, well, we don't want to let go of our records. They're important to us, right? But at the same time, we want there to be digital copies that could be kept at your university for safekeeping in case something happens to the original physical materials. And so the University of Texas at Austin, Human Rights Documentation Initiative, the archivist who is now at UCLA, but was there, TK Sung Won has written a lot about post-custodial archives. And I recommend her work. I'll put her name in the chat so that everybody knows how to spell it. TK Sung Won has written about these arrangements, right? So that then the University of Texas at Austin has digital copies of the records, but they don't have physical custody of some of the materials. In other cases, organizations might say, well, we don't even want you to provide digital access to the materials, but will allow you to provide metadata about the material so that researchers know these materials still exist somewhere, right? But we still want to have autonomy and control over who gets to access them. So you can include metadata in your database. Researchers will know the records are there, but rather than providing access to the records, you will it will say something like see the organization or see this person, right, to actually track down physical custody of the records. In the community archives world, this has been taken up. So the South Asian American Digital Archive, SADA, is a post-custodial archive, meaning we don't have any physical stuff other than servers. We borrow collections from individuals, from families, from organizations, from archives, even. We digitize them. We provide access to the digital copy. We preserve high resolution digital copies of the records, and then we return them to the owners. So in some cases, if the owners are families or organizations, they might also be interested in physically transferring the custody of those records, in which case we make a recommendation, right? We might say like, oh, NYU or UCLA, they would be a good place for those physical materials, but we are focused on stewarding the digital copies. And for us, this made sense for a number of reasons. First, when we got started, we knew we wouldn't be in Chicago for very long. We were both in Chicago at that point in time, neither of us are there now. We knew that we didn't have money to rent a physical space and that even if we did rent a physical space, perhaps a storefront of the kind the Skid Row History Museum and Archive has that I showed you, that it wouldn't provide the kind of stability that people really think about when they think about giving custody to a museum or to an archive, they think of it as a long term relationship, right? That if you're accepting custody, you're going to be able to care for those materials over time. But also it made sense for the community we're working with because there isn't a singular South Asian American community, right? That's kind of like an essentialist term that encompasses so many different communities that are spread out around the country. So it wouldn't make sense for us to take records from Detroit and LA and San Francisco, remove them from their communities of origin and put them in Chicago or Philadelphia, which is where Sameet now lives. So this model just made sense for us practically, but also for the community that we serve. And so this model is also now there's lots of examples that are cropping up within the archives world of post-custodial models, particularly in partnerships between universities and community archives, right? So which in the past have been in competition often for collections, right, where a university archive usually is much better funded than a community based archive and would just come in and kind of swoop in and take all the records, bringing them to the university, leaving the community archive feeling left out of the equation. Now there's an impetus, I think, for more creative arrangements between the two kinds of organizations that often involve this post-custodial kind of approach. And it's interesting to see that it goes both ways. So in some cases, the community archive maintains the physical custody, but either digital copies or metadata are made available at a university repository, but also the reverse is sometimes true, where a community based archive might say, we have no space, no physical space for these materials. We'll put them on deposit at a university, but we will still provide either digital access or metadata, access to the metadata and we retain the ownership of the materials, right? So this leads to that idea of autonomy, right? So post-custodial partnerships are ways to maintain the autonomy of the community. So this has me thinking of a couple of other questions. I think I'm relating it to your point about a liberatory appraisal and reparative appraisal. I'm wondering about forensic appraisal, because the forensic value or the probative value in prosecutions and other kinds of legal cases, obviously comes to mind. And when you when you start looking at how the lawyers look at all this, the media is less, not less relevant and thinking specifically of definitions of documentary evidence, right? Which would be stock and trade of archives, right? And documentary evidence has been understood very traditionally and narrowly as a piece of paper, but now it's a unit in a process of documentation, which can be a VHS tape or it could be a tweet or it could be or a printed tweet or what have you. It can be a piece of software is a document. So definition of documents expanded over time to come up with technological advancement. I'm just wondering what you think of all that. I mean, there's not really kind of a well, I kind of have a question in mind, but I just wanted to throw some darts on the board and see what we have to say about this. Such a good question, right? Because if we're talking about liberatory memory work being in part about self-recognition, right? So minoritized communities being being able to see themselves in records like, OK, archivists, we're trained to do that. But the second component that's crucial is material reparation, right? So how are you going to get material reparation? It's often through legal adjudication, right? And yet archivists, I have to say, at least in the US, we are not trained to think about legal notions of evidence, right? And I think there needs to be a much bigger conversation and much more collaboration between archival studies programs and law schools so that students in information studies programs and archival studies programs are being trained with legal evidence in mind, right? Currently, we're not by and large, right? There are a couple of archivists who then become human rights archivists, who then have to get like a crash course in notions of legal evidence. But to for too long, we're only concerned about historical evidence, right? Like determining notions of value for historians who were perceived to be the most important, if not the only users of archives, right? When like we know that's not the case, right? Like lawyers use archives, community members use archives, activists use archives. But we just simply have fallen short, I think, in training our students to think about legal evidence in determining the value of records. That's really interesting. I mean, you know, Trudy Peterson has written a little bit on the probative value of archives and that's bang on for anybody who's dealing with these kind of cutting edge sorts of issues. I guess my default question in these talks, you know, coming at it as an historian who works in a legal setting, I guess I've been struggling or puzzling with the problem, whether a forensic approach, preservation of records, capturing records, taking documenting things as you go as a field researcher who is not doing that work for, strictly speaking, investigative legal purposes. Should you be doing it to that standard as a default? Just in case, because those if you were talking about conflict settings, war settings, you know, the core international crimes, human rights issues, crimes against humanity, that they come up and if you're doing your research oblivious to the potential implications of your research, should you be doing it or should you not because there are there are consequences of research or where you now become engaged in areas where maybe you want to not be engaging? I mean, you know, there's kind of those ethical lines to come into play. Yes, that happened in Cambodia, right? So the documentation center of Cambodia went out and took oral histories with perpetrators from the Kimber Rouge regime trying to collect enough evidence to prove like we could have a legal tribunal, but they didn't have legal probative statute like it uses in mind while they were doing it. So they didn't read people their rights. You know, there was like a whole series of things they were supposed to follow, right, in order to make the oral histories count as legal evidence and they didn't, right? So then they had to go back and redo those same interviews. Many of the people had passed away, right? They were no longer there as sources of evidence. But if you are then collecting evidence with legal evidence, notions of legal evidence in mind, as you said, that raises like a whole other can of worms opens up a can of worms about, you know, who are you and what are your aims and what are you doing and why, right? I'm just going to I'm going to see if I if I can call in Matthew because he's got a book that's coming out as well. I'm not going to plug it this one time. I'm not going to plug it because Michelle, this is this is yours this evening, but but he's got some really interesting ideas that I think can come out of this, that can be teased out of this. Sorry. I want to hear about the books. Tell me about the book. It's OK. I want to hear about it. I'm curious. Matthew, you're on. I'm Michelle. Well, this was done on the flight. I didn't scheme this ahead of time. This is done on the flight. Matt's kindly, kindly accepted to become another victim in this in this talk. So I think this is a really interesting one because Matthew is is very, very, you know, he's very strongly sorry, I'm going to put it in perfectly embedded within sort of a war studies frame and he's looking at these at these issues quite quite directly in a much more competent way than that I can. And I think he can draw draw some of the pull together some of these threads that I might not be seeing. I don't know. I don't know. I was just listening to your conversation there and I was actually thinking that you were you were pushing ahead really fast on a whole series of things that struck me as being really fascinating and, you know, going straight back at the implications for the researcher as part of the process of evidence, I mean, evidence collection. I mean, I just the thing that occurred to me just off the top of my head as you were talking, both of you were talking as, Mike, as you were bringing it to a head, which is that it surprises me that as researchers, we're not spending so much. I don't know whether you guys are, but I'm watching Ukraine the horror of you horror show of Ukraine online in front of me and I'm paying a lot of attention to what information is being presented in what order and what the sources are. And I'm kind of interested in the provenance of it. You know, is it is it smartphone footage? Is it drone footage? Is it is it from the Ukrainian perspective? Is it from the Russian perspective? Is it mainstream media? Is it journalists? And, of course, in a social media framing, it's all just tumbling asynchronously onto our timeline without any real sensors to the sequence of events and activities and the rest of it. And that produces an individualized set of narratives that then obscure as much as they open up engagement. And what it occurred to me was as I because as Mike was very generously saying, I've just finished this book with my co-author Andrew Roskins and what we do, so Andrew and I just finished this book. And, you know, one of the problems is there's a war on and we go, how wrong is our book? And so, you know, one of the first things I've been trying to do is just to understand how wrong we are. And I hesitate to say that I'm not as wrong as I thought I was or we were as wrong as we thought we were. But what's really fascinating is seeing and this is the point. Seeing the structures of knowledge as represented in the way it lands on my compadre, on my various screens that I'm looking at it from, right? So, you know, there are and this is what I think is fascinating about what you're saying. There's a we if we're not attentive to how the evident where the evidence is, how it's being presented, how it ends up in the archives, whose archives, whose participating and why we kind of miss the sociology of knowledge here. And if we're missing the sociology of knowledge right from the get go, then it can't be surprised that narratives that come out of it are spinning out in all sorts of odd ways that sort of reflect a perspective of people who of a particular powerful community who want to frame things in a particular way. And, you know, the narrative of the early part of the war for me has been all about the winter war. So that's been scripted, you know, it seems to me. And it seems to me that the archives that you're looking at, you know, that's the goal of what seemed to really leap out of me. The goal is to sort of recover a narrative or to allow narratives to emerge that otherwise are going to get buried if no one's actually storing any of this stuff or no one's actually thinking about how they collect or participate. I mean, that's I mean, I've got loads of other questions in my mind, but that struck me as being an opportunity to, you know, as you said, it was really nicely put right at the beginning. It's archives as a source of some sort of empowering people to think about their past and their situation, how they're situated and actually having some some ownership over that archive creates the conditions in which you can actually, you know, you're holding yourself, but also others to account around the decisions that have been made, which is, after all, it seems to me one of the purposes, at least of some of the institutional archives that, you know, where you are juxtaposing your own framing against it. I mean, have I got that? Am I am I think feel like I'm hitting in the right kind of direction? Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think your questions have provoked me to think about the creators of records and the relationship between the creators, creators of records and downstream use, whatever those downstream uses might be. Right. So many years ago, I took a visit to Columbia University, has a human rights archive, right? And so what does that mean that a few years ago, it seemed in the US, there was a growing number of archives who self identified as human rights archive, which is like, what archive is not a human rights archive, right? Like every archive has material documenting human rights abuse. But so they have a human rights archive, which meant that they have lots of records created by field workers for who are working for Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. It's large human rights organizations. So I was visiting this archive and looking at the records there. And I asked, like, who is using these records? And the answer was primarily, you know, other staff members of these big human rights organizations. And I thought, OK, what about the subjects of the records? Like you're in New York City, there are all these refugee communities here. There are quite possibly people walking around the streets of New York who are who's abuse is being documented in these records. Have you done anything to reach out to them? Right. And the answer was like, no, that's not really who we conceive of to be our users, right? I think this was about 10 years ago. Things have shifted quite a bit where now archivists who do work for universities and even government archives are really starting to think about users and communities beyond just, you know, narrow academics or staff members of the organizations that created the records, right? But it also can go either way, where you could have archivists or community members who are out in the field collecting evidence and then later on that evidence could potentially be used in, you know, in legal action. But you also have human rights activists and field workers who are out collecting evidence with the purpose of it being used, hopefully in legal action as legal evidence. And then those records wind up in archives where they could be used by community members, right? So it's like whoever is collecting the materials right now, you can't really say, you can't predict who might use them and how, right? In any of the the context. But this issue of social media archives is incredibly important, right? So there's some work being done by a group called Documenting the Now. Initially, that was formed in the US about how do you archive Black Lives Matter tweets? And at first the questions were really kind of technical, like technically, how do you do it? What format do you preserve them in? How do you scrape the site? And then the group run by Burgess Jules, who's a brilliant archivist who works for something called Shift Collective, quickly realized this is an ethical issue, right? It's not just a technical issue. Like all things in archives, the technical and ethical are completely bound up, which is, you know, how do you get consent, right? Because somebody's tweeting something, they have not consented that that record will be preserved forever, right? In an archive or indefinitely in an archive. A lot of the tweets had video footage of people engaged in protest. Certainly the subjects of the records didn't give consent for that material to be archived indefinitely, right? And so it's the ethical questions, more so than the technical questions that sort of prevent any kind of long term archiving of social media on a large scale. Yeah, I think it's I mean that the social media end of it is one aspect. I just going back to your talk about post-custodial stuff, I mean, it seemed. Well, from what I understood, you were talking about various institutions having physical libraries, physical archives where a professional community may or may not be associated with it. It may, you know, there's a department or group of scholars who are working on this archive. There's a study or some center of research. And then from what I could tell, what I could gather about. So I was on top of that, there was a sort of digital framing that sort of allowed these different disparate archives to come together through some cloud based or some web, web front end, which would then have behind it a digital archive, you know, database of some kind. If that's if I understood that correctly, I mean, so then it occurred to me that the next step on from that is to think about because that's you've got like separate communities, then you've got joined communities. And then I was thinking, well, the next step on from here is the digital communities, which goes back to your point about social media and then how digital communities operationalize and activate and then energize. And so one of the things that Andrew and I were thinking about and been thinking about was is that you've got this, you've got these multiple dialectics going on where community framed in terms of nation or city or, you know, particular social group or class or, you know, gender or sexual orientation or whatever it is, come together. But the transnational that's going on here, you know, it seems that you hit on the Black Lives Matter stuff. I mean, you know, he's done a strike as being a coincidence that we, you know, within a few days, we've got Black Lives Matter protests on Whitehall in London. And then the following week, we have the Colson statue coming down in Bristol and we've got, you know, then that genders and genders, another right wing backlash in Britain. And then, you know, you've got all of this stuff going on. And it's all amplified really, really quickly and through this digital prism that just suddenly makes you go, whoa, hold on a minute. There's just the sort of the building blocks of being what you've just been describing, I think. And I just wonder what are your thoughts about how that, you know, once it spins out into this kind of amplificatory environment, we've got all sorts of reinterpretations of what the archive is, even if it wasn't what, you know, the professions are saying it's like this. And they go, no, it's not like this. It's like, right, right. First, once something is online, it is out of your control, right? Downstream uses that you cannot predict, right? The first few years of operating SADA, when we would look at our analytics about who was using SADA, we were shocked. The countries that had the highest number of viewers to the SADA website were it was not the US, it was India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, right? It was countries, you know, in some ways, the source countries of the diaspora, because there was a lot of interest in the gutter party, right? So the gutter party was this international anti-colonial party that, you know, was very active on the West Coast of the United States and Canada at the turn of last century. And so we have a lot of records that which we knew nothing about this history when we first started, but it quickly became like a focal point. And the activists that were active in the gutter party movement are national heroes in Pakistan and India, right? And so there's there's a lot more knowledge of them and interest in them. We went and edited Wikipedia pages about the gutter party to add a bunch of links to the SADA website and the references, right? And so that was driving lots of traffic to the site, which again, there's nothing wrong with people in South Asia using SADA. It's just not who we had conceived of our intended audience to be, right? But again, once you put something online, you lose control. It sort of reached in. Sorry, sorry, I interrupt you. I don't mean to. You would say you keep this issue of putting things online and control is really important for community archives. So there are some community archives that have no web presence or that maybe have like an Instagram account and that's it. And in some cases, you might say like, oh, it's because they don't have the knowledge or the infrastructure to invest in digital archive, which is true. But in some cases, it's very consciously a choice in that they know once they put something online, they will not have control over that item anymore, right? And these are communities that are used to extraction and appropriation from their community. So they know like they put an image online. It might wind up on a mug or a t-shirt or who knows, right? In ways that they will no longer have autonomy and control over those materials. And so they just simply choose not to to have a digital component at all. There's something in there about analog as a as a means of retaining control, not exactly an original thought, but that I'm intrigued by that. I'm just taking note of it. I mean, I think what I what the bit that the bit that strikes me as being that leaps out in my mind as a result of what you just saying that. Is that it's how identity then gets reforged. Out of all of that, which strikes me as being, you know, the the generative possibilities and the place of national boundaries. Yeah, just suddenly completely completely gets blown away. You know, I mean, I. I don't want to pray. I don't want to move it all on to what Andrew and I have been talking about. But it sort of just feels. I mean, the reason I ask is because we're trying to understand we come up with this notion, this notion of a sort of a new war ecology. He's he and I are sort of going in order to understand this ecology, we've got multiple social media, mainstream media, newspaper, newspaper, broadcast media, radio, radio, archive or frame with framings, all sorts of things that construct some sense of what and you've got a traditional national identity. And then in there, you've got all of this stuff that's across population demographics, depending on language and diaspora and all these other bits and pieces that then become another way of creating dialectics that produce a huge amount of friction in, you know, so it's very anti-establishment, it seems. I mean, it's remarkably interesting in terms of how that sort of online space or the this, again, we just call it how this ecology. So, you know, there are multiple ecologies. Each each country or space has its own different way of framing things. We've got to try and, you know, there's a tendency to over overestimate the singularity of the web. It seems to be, you know, there's there's lots of different digital divides and structures in place, information, information infrastructures in place that sort of shape and push discussion and where there are gaps. And I think that's the other thing, you know, there are gaps. Those digital divides do get exploited and they cut out narratives or reshape politics and identity. And even that, when you're talking about your archive, you know, if you've not got the strong capacity to download or upload the rate, I mean, I think, I mean, I've done I've done some work on the the information infrastructure. I mean, everyone's online. I mean, everyone's online. Not everyone's got equal capacity to get online, but everyone is online. You know, there may only be three billion users, regular users online, but there's only seven and a half billion people, whatever it is in the world. Right. So, you know, it's it everyone knows someone who's online. I think that's but that all of that sort of joins up in terms of where you where you've been describing Sada, which just strikes me as being I'm not coming to a question. I'm sorry, Mike, but it is because I'm not helping. I'm just talking rather than I mean, I think with Sada, we've had to on the one hand, build an archive around a fictional identity while acknowledging like the identity is important, but it's also fictional, right? So how do we do both of those things at once? I think Steve has this notion of strategic essentialism, right? Which is what we're doing, right? Like we're not essential. We're not saying there's anything inherent, essential, biological about South Asian American identity. It's an invented category. It's a very important invented category, though. And here's why and we're strategically using it to collect evidence about particular histories. But I think after the first few years, Samip and I realized like, wait, we're still reinforcing dominant narratives because we're you know, who can create records? Who whose families thinks they're important enough to preserve? Right? It's men. It's wealthy men. It's uppercast men. Right. So and it's a lot of firsts, right? So the first Indian American congressmen or the first actor or the first. And so we realized that we were furthering these dominant narratives within the community. And so Samip has been really genius at getting outside funding. So he got funding from the Mellon Foundation to create what he's called the Archival Creators Fellowship, which is basically figuring out which communities within South Asian American communities have been marginalized, minoritized, and then hiring people within those communities to document their own community. So we have a project that is actively we're in the third or fourth year now of fellows who have been doing this and that has resulted in a totally different kind of material, right? So a lot of oral histories, because in some cases there aren't written records, a lot of creative projects. So we now have records documenting trans South Asian communities and, you know, women, Bangladeshi women who run their own businesses in Detroit and descendants of South Asians from Tanzania who were kicked out of Tanzania in the 60s, who now are in the US South, right? Like all kinds of communities that if we had just been looking at the preexisting documentation and sort of the low hanging fruit, we would have just been furthering these silences and gaps. You say what you were the fascinating thing there is you pointed at the tension between sort of essentializing and then having to recognize that that you're just reproducing an old structure of power in the process of essentializing. And it's that's that's very reflexive. It's very good. It's a tension, right? We'll live in the tension. We don't have to resolve it. Absolutely. We're not going to resolve that one. No, no. Can I can I prod you a little bit towards one of the two related concepts that you talked about, corollary moments and corollary records? And I was really intrigued by that because there's such a direct connection to the work that historians do. And especially those historians, political scientists who look at the lessons of the past and an analogical explanation coming out of one one book specifically to explain and understand how well or not well policy makers use history and how that can really sort of things can can really go awry when they when they use that the wrong way and how that sort of operational advice is when you're talking about foreign policymaking in relation to things like whether to go to war or not, use the wrong analogy. And all of a sudden you find yourself in a big heap of mess. And Matthew, you mentioned the Wither War analogy, which is which is kind of a current when that's been resuscitated, I suppose, and and bandied about a little bit and I'm just I'm just I guess I'm I like intuitively I like the idea of corollary moment and corollary records. I think it sharpens an element that's not done well in in that strand of of of work amongst historians and political scientists. Again, they they don't really talk about the sources. Sometimes they talk about the archival sources, what the sources say. They really focus on the events and and try to explain things. It's kind of a superficial. I've always thought that that sort of applied history side of things. They talk about applied history, but they don't talk about applied historical methods so much and they don't talk about the the archival base for the evidence base for those lessons. And I think one of the one of the aspects I'm sort of rambling a little bit, but I'm coming to a point, I think, you know, in my book, since we're all talking about our own books, I brought, I tried to I tried to pick apart at this by digging at ideas of precedent, how precedent, how we conceptualize precedent and how certain historical episodes or events can be used as precedent or identified analytically as precedent to understand how how these are invoked in practice. And I think, you know, intuitively, the idea of a corollary moment, it feels more neutral and more effective than what the literature on our side of the house, so to speak, does and corollary records pins that a little bit more effectively to an actual source of documentary evidence, so to speak, not necessarily in a legal sense, but in the historical sense. And I'm kind of rambling a little bit. And I guess my question is, well, what would you make of that? Yeah, no. And yeah, I mean, you as well, you too. You've got you've got a furrowed brow, so it tells me maybe I've got it completely wrong. No, no, I was intrigued. I'm waiting for you to be rambling like I am. So Michelle's going to put some order. Well, I think this is why tying it to a record is so important, right? Because there are certainly times where there are moments of correlation, right? But there are other times where to say something's a corollary moment or a corollary record would collapse important differences, right? And we need the nuance for sure. So archivists are all concerned about context, right? And so I think that's why tying it to a record is so important, because it's not just taking something out of context and saying, oh, look, we're in the same situation we were in a hundred years ago. We may or may not have been, right? But to really tie it to a record is also to emphasize the context, right? So in some cases it is very similar in other ways. Maybe it's totally different, right? And tying it to the record, I think, helps us see what those differences are. And when it's again this you strategic, right? When it's strategic to say it's a corollary moment and when if you were doing that, you're missing something really important, right? So again, tying it back to the record, I think, is important here. Matthew. Yeah, I mean, I think I was just, you know, I think Michelle's doing it sounds like she's I think nailing down how that point of divergence or convergence in interpretive frames come together, right? So and, you know, the hope, I guess, might be that you could actually say, well, this is the turning point at which the realities split or come back together again. And I was actually thinking how hard that is in contemporary circumstances because, for example, I know that social media is about 12 to 60 hours behind events in Ukraine. And in that space is a space for people working in the Ukraine, the I.T. Army of Ukraine to shape the narrative. And the result is that there is a particular set of stories that are going up online that have potentially some provenance to a particular media or a particular photograph or something. And yet that is all framed in a particular way. So and it's got it's actually just a diversion from actually what might really be more important. And so I mean, in current terms, you know, this limit column, I don't know how many times you've heard about the limit column of lorries outside Kiev. But, you know, that's not the basic kilometer long column. So 20, yeah, 27 kilometers long column out, sort of. And I would I would love to be able to give you an equivalent in a BLM context or, you know, where there's another sort of narrative that's emerged, that's sort of spun out and spiraled off and actually is is driving discussion and debate and anger. Actually, I can think of a couple, but not. But in terms of British politics, which may or may not be helpful here. But, you know, they they spiral off and drive a series of discussions that actually don't really relate to how events are and bringing them back, collapsing them back is actually, you know, the social media is just sort of it's a prism of creating more and more. And and unless we have the sort of forensic skills, I think this is your word, right? But unless you have the forensic skills to drive all of that back to some kind of actual method that series of method point, you know, loads of metadata to be able to trace those where those reality branching realities are and sometimes how they're being manipulated purposefully to in order to get us to stay in that particular reality. I think we're I think it speeds. At what point does it all collapse back together again? You know, because I think that the digital and the the the analog are so deeply intertwined. That I suppose my response to what Michelle was saying is that you look for that historical that that that one archival moment. And I just, you know, it seems like a needle in a haystack now. And I worry that I suppose that that means that we're locked into these multiple reality. I mean, maybe we always were, but they're just being reflected back at us so quickly. That actually on the one hand, you've got a sense that your work is about creating community, but at the same time that the online world is is fragmenting community and so and reconstructing community in so many different ways. And so quickly, that actually sustaining identity is much, much even more complex and requires even more computational skills to to model properly and to map. Then I can even, you know, I'm not particularly mathematical. But, you know, this is this is where it all becomes really, really disciplinary. Right. Right. And I think like critical media literacy skills are key here, too. So when I first started thinking about the idea of corollary records, it was based on an interview I did with a young woman who was a user at Lambda Archives, which is a community based archive in San Diego that represents LGBT LGBTQ plus community members. And she was a young woman and she was talking about how she was going through the records of the queer, queer gay liberation organization from the 1960s. Right. And how she was seeing in these records the context of police rating of bars of gay bars in San Diego. And she was like, I was going through these records and I was learning what worked and what didn't work in terms of strategies and tactics. I was going through these records and I realized like this was just a handful of people who were just like me who were trying to figure it out. Right. And so she had this context. Which was reading the entire archival collection, right, and the finding aid to understand what she was looking at. Right. And getting inspiration from that record, but interpreting that record in light of all of these other analog materials. That's very different than like seeing a tweet and not knowing who it came from, not having metadata, not being able to evaluate the context there. So, you know, in that case, like the analog records, they give you that context, assuming you're not just like randomly picking one, assuming you're looking at collections and context, you're getting much more information and much more ability to evaluate and to say like, this is how the moment is corollary. And here's how it's not. Whereas it's very difficult to do that in social media. And I think people are not aware of all of the interventions in that record. By the time it winds up on their screen, right? There's a content moderator who approved it or disapproved it. Right. If you're viewing it, they approved it. It's mediated through a for-profit corporation that exists to make a profit and will no longer preserve those materials if they no longer are profitable. Right. So it's a very different kind of contact. For sure. Or they have or they've lost control of their platform anyway. And there are loads of users and how, you know, they're going around after the event, trying to clean up or clear up and then they're randomly picking stuff rather than, you know, according to an algorithm, you know, some formulae rather than actually a contextual and well rounded understanding as to what it is that needs to be kept or not. I'm just going to jump in. Sorry, sorry, Matthew, I don't mean to cut you off, Michelle. I'm cognizant of your own cutoff time, which is in about four minutes. Yes. Final word goes to you. Oh, I just want to say that this has been a really fascinating conversation. That at first I was a bit nervous because I thought, you know, my work is so different from conflict studies, war studies. But I think this has been just a really productive conversation. And I think community archives are like where it's at. I think we need to be looking to community archives to see how they're theorizing their work, how they're building new practices. And I think it can inform how we deal with any kind of records across the board. Yeah, indeed, Michelle, thank you very much. I'm going to stop the recording.