“Communist Miscellany” is a history of file-keeping and bureaucratic paperwork in Maoist China, examined through the institution of individual dossiers on Chinese subjects known as dang’an. Drawing upon an original sourcebase of deaccessioned archival dossiers, the project explores how the party-state bureaucracy fashioned an archive of Maoist society through scrupulous routines of investigative, clerical, and material labor. In Maoist China, one of the primary responsibilities of local bureaucratic units was to compile detailed individualized dossiers on party members, cadres, workers and students under their jurisdiction. The dossier constituted a master record of a subject's social identity, probing issues of class status, personal background, family relationships, political activities and attitudes. Broadly instituted in the 1950s on the basis of the Soviet model, the stated purpose of the dossier system was to inform staffing decisions for personnel management in the planned economy. However, in the Mao era, the dossier was widely deployed as a surveillance instrument, producing a living archive of “political and historical problems” among the people. For ordinary citizens, materials gathered through the dossier were the basis of crucial class labels and the grounds for political advancement. The paper-bound practices of the dossier informed the generic presentation of identity and evidence while supplying material for everyday political acts. This study of the dossier system engages current debates on bureaucratic culture, social surveillance, and archive in the PRC. A project of immense ambition, the dossier system straddled the imperatives of permanent revolution and socialist state-building to transcribe a record of Chinese society in the Maoist image. The continuous expansion of the dossier system over the Mao era gave rise to elaborate routines of file-keeping and paperwork as well as unexpected consequences of the bureaucratic will to knowledge. The bureaucratic tendency toward overaccumulation and excess in the production of dossier materials exposes the political and epistemic insecurities that drove social surveillance. The practical demands of the dossier system strained the ability of local bureaucrats to keep pace with requests for intelligence, shaping an approach to file-keeping that conceived its own distinctive forms of knowledge and incapacity.

Faced with the ephemeral nature of the art of performance, performing arts archivists must decide whether it is appropriate for them to intervene to ensure the creation of documents, what documents should be created, and how they should be created. In order to adequately answer these questions, archival theory, with its traditional focus on objectivity and non-interference, must meet with theories of documentation from performance and theatre studies, which question the possibility of adequately capturing or saving performance given the subjective and perspective nature of both the work and documents arising from it. This study addresses these questions both theoretically and practically through a survey of performing artists and a case study observing an archivist interacting with a performing arts community to facilitate the preservation of its work. The artists surveyed in this study demonstrated both an interest in improved documentation of their own work and an understanding of the limits of documentation. The archivist in the case study, after experimenting with various levels of involvement in the creation of documentation, concluded that the best approach would be a focus on building connections between the archival and performing arts communities, providing artists with the education and support they need to document themselves, and giving them secure homes for the documents they choose to create. / text

Magister Artium - MA

This thesis is about photographic archives. Specifically, it concerns the process of acquisition for family photograph albums as archival texts. It argues that the process of acquisition writes history, and not one sole author. Additionally it argues that the institutional policy of an archive governs this process. Further, it argues that there is a homology between a public and private archive. In this light, it pursues an autobiographical approach, and compares the author's family photograph album with a family photograph album in the McCord Museum of Canadian History.

Historians and other researchers regularly turn to news media as primary sources for studies on a wide range of topics. Generally, the materials used are the end products of the news-publishing process – newspaper clippings, radio and television broadcasts, and web programming. These published documents, beyond relating specific events, reflect the values and perspectives of the societies in which they have been created. As products of a creative and editorial process, these news media documents can provide a rich source of information about the media. Government records, personal papers, and published memoirs of those in the media industry, along with media trade publications, are also often studied for insights into the news publishing process. What is lacking in these studies is an examination of the varied records -- internal correspondence, memos, minutes, and forms, for example -- made and used to perform and manage the media's work itself, rather than to present it in final published form. These records are not usually archived by the media. This has handicapped historical understanding of the media and contributed to the underdevelopment of the literature on the history of the Canadian news media. There is irony in this. The media often claims the vital role of holding others to account for their actions, especially government and political institutions. It often does so by championing and using access to information legislation and criticizing lax recordkeeping on the part of these organizations. And yet, the records that would hold the media itself to account are rarely archived and made available. How the problem of the underdevelopment of media archives in Canada can be addressed needs to be explored. This thesis will do so. This is important given the powerful past and present role of the media in our society.

This thesis explores the significance of gender as an overlooked element of context in understanding the provenance of archival records. The relevance of gender to archival provenance is demonstrated through a case study analysis of the gendered contexts of record creation, use, and meaning. The analysis is grounded in an examination of the archival photographic and textual records of Mary Schäffer Warren, an amateur photographer, traveller, and explorer of the Canadian Rocky Mountains during the years 1888 and 1939. This thesis argues that gender is an important context in a record’s provenance providing nuanced understandings of socio-cultural relations and processes of record creation, use, and meaning. Gender as context further empowers the principle of provenance by more fully reflecting how and why records are created which accordingly allows archivists to appraise, acquire, and describe records in ways more sensitive to gender as a socio-cultural reality.

Historians and other researchers regularly turn to news media as primary sources for studies on a wide range of topics. Generally, the materials used are the end products of the news-publishing process – newspaper clippings, radio and television broadcasts, and web programming. These published documents, beyond relating specific events, reflect the values and perspectives of the societies in which they have been created. As products of a creative and editorial process, these news media documents can provide a rich source of information about the media. Government records, personal papers, and published memoirs of those in the media industry, along with media trade publications, are also often studied for insights into the news publishing process. What is lacking in these studies is an examination of the varied records -- internal correspondence, memos, minutes, and forms, for example -- made and used to perform and manage the media's work itself, rather than to present it in final published form. These records are not usually archived by the media. This has handicapped historical understanding of the media and contributed to the underdevelopment of the literature on the history of the Canadian news media. There is irony in this. The media often claims the vital role of holding others to account for their actions, especially government and political institutions. It often does so by championing and using access to information legislation and criticizing lax recordkeeping on the part of these organizations. And yet, the records that would hold the media itself to account are rarely archived and made available. How the problem of the underdevelopment of media archives in Canada can be addressed needs to be explored. This thesis will do so. This is important given the powerful past and present role of the media in our society.

This thesis explores the significance of gender as an overlooked element of context in understanding the provenance of archival records. The relevance of gender to archival provenance is demonstrated through a case study analysis of the gendered contexts of record creation, use, and meaning. The analysis is grounded in an examination of the archival photographic and textual records of Mary Schäffer Warren, an amateur photographer, traveller, and explorer of the Canadian Rocky Mountains during the years 1888 and 1939. This thesis argues that gender is an important context in a record’s provenance providing nuanced understandings of socio-cultural relations and processes of record creation, use, and meaning. Gender as context further empowers the principle of provenance by more fully reflecting how and why records are created which accordingly allows archivists to appraise, acquire, and describe records in ways more sensitive to gender as a socio-cultural reality.

Thesis (M.I. St.)--University of Toronto, 2007. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 46-06, page: 2913.

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala universitet, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-267).