Performing Archives: sensitive data, social

justice, and the performative frame

Jacqueline Wernimont, Ph.D.Arizona State University

Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics FellowLiterature and DH Faculty

@profwernimont | jwernimont.wordpress.comhttps://vibrantdata.wordpress.com/

#vibrantlives & #performingarchives

Authorized by eugenics laws more than 64,000 people underwent sterilization procedures in the U.S. between 1907-1963

Source: https://eugenicsarchive.org

California Eugenics Archive ProjectCollaborator: Alexandra Minna Stern and team (Michigan)

GoalCapture and illuminate demographic patterns and individual experiences of eugenic sterilization over four decades in California

Scope18,000 sterilization recommendations processed by the state of California from 1921 to 1953

patient records that includes 212 discrete variables culled from over 30,000 individual documents.

nearly 1/3 of all sterilizations performed in 32 states in the U.S. in the 20th century

“Individually identifiable health information”

– A person’s past, present or future physical or mental health or condition,

– provision of health care to the individual, or

– past, present, or future payment for the provision of health care to the individual,

– Individually identifiable health information includes many common identifiers (e.g., name, address, birth date, Social Security Number). 

Source: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/

To edit the missing…Morris Eaves (2011) ”The Editorial

Void: Notes toward a Study of Oblivion”

Given that “dispersal and disposal are the normal fate of information when it hits a generational border.”

“how might we edit the missing?”

HIPAA data as promise-crammed instantions

Wai Chee Dimock (2006) and Simon Palfry (2015) on “fractal” histories

Palfry: the archival record as “in one sense an insufficient shard of the true substance; in another sense, a promise-crammed instantiation of everything”

Performing ArchivesDiana Taylor via Rebecca Schneider :

“there is an advantage to thinking about a repertoire performed through dance, theater, song, ritual, witnessing, healing practices, memory paths, and the many other forms of repeatable behaviors as something that cannot be housed or contained in the archive”

Vibrant Lives and Data Shedcollaborators: Jessica Rajko (ASU) and Eileen Standley (ASU)

Sonifying the Archive

Visual Map of Sonified Sterilization Data(selection of 100 files from first two years of data)

M + consent =51F + consent = 75M w/o consent=250F w/o consent=300

“Haptifying” the ArchiveHaptics : tactile experience, knowing through touch/skin

Woojers (personal sub-woofers, essentially) playing the same sonified selection, currently attached to enameled wire to make group experience possible

Performance helps to orient away from thinking of data and archives as something

upon which we act toward the idea that data and archives are already acting.

It is also a way to imagine that to engage the archive/ data is pledge ourselves as

responsible for the kinds of knowledge and subject positions that our efforts engender.