{"id":3038,"date":"2021-11-02T10:53:02","date_gmt":"2021-11-02T10:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/?p=3038"},"modified":"2021-11-02T10:53:02","modified_gmt":"2021-11-02T10:53:02","slug":"on-an-ecstatic-return-to-the-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/2021\/11\/02\/on-an-ecstatic-return-to-the-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"On an Ecstatic Return to the Archives"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Beth Potter<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I write this, by hand at first to keep things loose and free, I sit before a document on my laptop screen, a dense 39 pages of notes. Its title is \u2018BBC Written Archives visit\u2019, and I compiled it in early September during three intense \u2013 enriching, nourishing, project-broadening, but intense \u2013 days in Caversham a few weeks ago, during which my neck cracked a thousand times and no amount of shoulder rolls saved my back from the archive ache.<\/p>\n

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The visit was long-awaited, and came almost exactly a year after I first requested material from the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC). It felt, to be sure, ecstatic, as my supervisor had hinted it might, to be back sifting through old letters and carbon-copied memo papers, my clean hands gaining a film of tacky archive dust as I leafed my way through stacks of cardboard files.<\/p>\n

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File held in the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC). A cover note reads: “THIS FILE HAS BEEN VETTED AND DECLARED OPEN FOR RESEARCH” (photo and caption credit: Beth Potter)<\/em><\/p>\n

But now I\u2019m back, at a desk, frontloaded with all the photographs (3,186 in the folder, I just checked) and notes I could accumulate in those three short days, I don\u2019t feel very ecstatic at all; I feel daunted. What was a (paradoxically?) stiff-bodied but lively few days soaking up the experience of the archive \u2013 noting who came and went, what conversations I had with the archivists or other researchers, what things smelt like (horribly, beautifully, almost-mouldy) \u2013 has become a list of pixels on a screen again. I\u2019ll have to read it all back through again, remember it all again, make myself experience it all again, all 39 pages and 3,186 photographs of it, I think, but this time in pixel form. And I\u2019ve had enough of pixels this year.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m grateful, though, to my archive self who, true to her name, archived the archive as she went\u2026<\/p>\n

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This is an extract from a piece published at the Performance@King\u2019s research network website, which can be found at https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/performance\/2021\/10\/22\/on-an-ecstatic-return-to-the-archives\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Beth Potter<\/a>\u00a0is a PhD student working between the English and History departments at King\u2019s. Her research focuses on popular performance, especially circus, music hall, and early film. She also has keen interests in the theory of cultural institutions, the politics of the archive, and histories of British imperialism.<\/p>\n

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Blog posts on King\u2019s English represent the views of the individual authors and neither those of the English Department, nor of King\u2019s College London.<\/em><\/p>\n

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