‘Along the Archival Grain’ by Ann Laura Stoler

Ann Laura Stoler Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton & Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2009, 278 p & notes.

It was only when I googled the title of this book that I realized that I’d been thinking of it under the wrong name: it was not, as I thought “against” the archival grain, as “along” the archival grain.  It’s an important difference, as the author points out.  While previous historians concentrated on compiling records from the archives in an accessible form- and this is particularly true of 19th century Australian historians like Frederick Watson and the Historical Records of Australia- now we are exhorted to read against the archive and to resist its hard-won accessibility. Stoler writes:

Some would argue that the grand narratives of colonialism have been amply and excessively told.  On this argument, students of colonialism often turn quickly and confidently to read “against the grain” of colonial conventions.  One fundamental premise of this book is a commitment to a less assured and perhaps more humble stance- to explore the grain with care and read along it first. (p. 50) …Reading along the archival grain draws our sensibilities to the archive’s granular rather than seamless texture, to the rough surface that mottles its hue and shapes its form.  Working along the grain is not to follow  a frictionless course but to enter a field of force and will to power, to attend to both the sound and sense therein and their rival and reciprocal energies.  It calls on us to understand how unintelligibilities are sustained and why empires remain so uneasily invested in them. (p. 53)

When I first returned to postgrad study in history after an absence of some thirty years, I was perplexed by other students’ references to “the archive”.  Where was “THE archive), I wondered?  Was it some huge Borgesian labyrinth that had somehow escaped my notice, like Platform 9 3/4 in Harry Potter?  I’ve since realized that “the archive” is not so much a place, as a mental construct of the primary material that we draw on as historians.  Approaching “the archive-as-subject” worthy of scrutiny in its own right, rather than “the archive-as-source” that needs to be mined and extracted, reflects the “archival turn” captured  by Derrida’s book Archive Fever.  The link with Derrida and cultural theory might suggest to you that, in many ways, the writing in this book is rather dense and self-conscious, and it certainly is.  But it is also very careful, poetic writing.  The author weighs her words carefully, revelling in alliteration and paradox, and I found that I had to slow down and subvocalize while I was reading  to let the pleasure of the language wash over me.

The title hints at the theoretical emphasis of the book, but it makes no mention at all of the Dutch East Indies context in which it is applied.  I think that’s probably intentional.  Stoler has been writing about the Dutch Indies for decades- the earliest of her works that she cites was written in 1985- but this is a book borne of long years of immersion in a historical context and it moves far beyond that region.  It is a tribute to the accessibility of the book that I could read and enjoy it with minimal knowledge of the Dutch Indies, and come away feeling that I had learned a great deal (although I really would have appreciated a good map!)

The book itself is divided into three parts.  She starts with a two-chapter reflection on the archive itself and methodological and epistemological responses to it.  Part I which follows is headed “Colonial Archives and Their Affective States” where she examines three small, or even non-existent events in Dutch colonial historiography.  The first was a protest meeting held in 1848 against an edict that the upper echelons of the civil service would be restricted to young men who had been educated in the Netherlands; the second was a series of blueprints of state fantasies for solving the ‘problem’ of the Inlandesche Kindern, a shifting category that included Indies-born Europeans, and mixed bloods; and the third examined two commissions that were held into poverty amongst poor Europeans in the Dutch Indies.  Part II entitled “Watermarks in Colonial History” focusses on Frans Carl Valck, a lowly ranked assistent-resident whose unwelcome report on the murder of a plantation-owner’s family led to his hasty removal to another colony and eventual dismissal and subsequent complete disappearance from the official record. In this section she juxtaposes and interrogates two different archives- the official and the family- against each other.

Interestingly, she suggests in the prologue that

some readers may want to turn directly to these last two chapters that trace the biographies of empire, and may find it more compelling to read them first. (p. 51)

Ah- there’s a problem: when the author herself is not secure in the structure that she has,like all authors, eventually have to settle for.  Which to go for? Compelling reading or the structure that won out? I stayed with the chapters as laid down, but I wonder if it would have been a different book if I had read the last chapters first.  As it was, each chapter was quite self-contained, but it’s an interesting question.

I very much enjoyed this book.  It is a dense read, and at times I found the references to Derrida, Foucault, Rorty etc. rather overwhelming.  Check out the Amazon look-inside feature first, and you’ll quickly sense whether it’s a book that will appeal to you or appall you.  But it came at the right time for me, and it has stretched my thinking about my own work and even spurred me to WRITE a paragraph or two!

Uplifting Quotes for the Uninspired Historian #12: Hazel Rowley

I was saddened to read that Hazel Rowley died in March this year. It’s timely that I should write this post aware that the French department of the University of Adelaide is hosting a day-long tribute to her this coming Saturday 19th November. One of the  conundrums of the internet is the status of a website of a person who has died. Should it be left as it was? Does updating it somehow detract from its integrity, or does it honour the person’s ongoing relevance? Hazel Rowley’s website has been taken down this route by her sister.

I enjoyed reading Rowley’s 2007 LaTrobe University/Australian Book Review lecture “The Ups The Downs: My Life as a Biographer”, which is available on the ABR archives page (you’ll need to scroll down almost to the bottom of the page).  Once again, I haven’t actually read any of the biographies she has written, but this comment about the art of writing biography struck a chord with me:

Biographers carry a big responsibility.  They have someone’s life in their hands.  What’s unjust is that, if you read a dull biography, you come away thinking that person’s life was dull.  In reality it’s almost never the life that’s the problem; it’s the narration.  No wonder people are wary of biographers.  It’s hard enough to die; we don’t want some dullard turning our lives into insipid gruel.

Uplifting Quotes for the Uninspired Historian #11: Ged Martin again

p. 31 It is difficult to imagine that any historian would claim total survival of evidence for any episode of the past.  Indeed some might wearily conclude that far too much evidence has survived, especially if it consists of archival mounds that they must quarry to ensure that their own research is comprehensive, even though the documents were never designed to help their enquiries in the first place.  Some are tempted to defend their own specialized research by insisting that enough of the materials needed to form an explanation have survived.  This assertion, which is often the only basis on which the scholar can go to work, ultimately rests on the internally contradictory premise that we can identify the materials needed for an explanation even though we cannot be sure that we know everything about the problem we seek to explain.

Ged Martin Past Futures: The Impossible Necessity of History, 2004 p. 31

I was flipping through my notes looking for something this morning, and I noticed this quote from Ged Martin- a historian whom I keep encountering because of his work in Canadian, Australian and empire contexts.  I’ve already cited some of his wisdom previously, but I am particularly aware of him at the moment because I recently read an article of his that was exactly on the topic I needed at exactly the right time.  It was about empire federalism -surely a topic to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, yes? It was a fairly old article from the 1970s, located through Google Scholar, but it was exactly the sort of article that you would have fallen upon as if it were a gold nugget in the pre-computer days because it has exhaustive footnotes.  In particular, he had located evidence (by his own admission, sometimes small and oblique) of the stance of various politicians between 1820 and 1870 on the issue of the colonies being represented in the British Parliament.  As I gazed at these long footnotes, ranging across letters, speeches to Parliament and newspaper articles, I shook my head in awe at how long it must have taken and how much reading must have gone into that one footnote.

Then I thought about the opening line of Donna Merwick’s Death of a Notary. This is an unusual book, with a lyrical narrative in the first half, supported by ‘Notes and Reflections’, heavy-duty historical footnotes and nuts-and-bolts in the second half. And I do mean ‘half’- in terms of length and rigour, the two parts are equally balanced.  The opening line of the first half of the book is:

He was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town’s seventeenth-century history.

Donna Merwick came out to speak to us during my honours year, and she talked about that first line, and the sheer amount of research that went into making such a definitive statement.  Would I ever feel confident enough to make such a statement?, I wonder.  So often I am paralysed by the fear that there is another source, another archive, that sits just on the other side of the line in the sand that I have drawn when I tell myself “Stop. You have enough. Just write.”

Sometimes I wonder if the sheer availability of texts now through the internet is drowning us, but then I look at Martin’s footnote,  and the Notes and Reflections in Merwick’s book. I consider the paper-based  research tools available in the 1970s, and try to imagine researching with a typewriter and a pile of catalogue cards and my complaint about the deluge of material seems rather lily-livered. I am humbled by the hard work and sheer doggedness such research reveals.

A-writing I will go

I’m off to Fish Creek for a couple of days with some of my postgrad colleagues for a writing retreat.  The Gods are smiling on us by sending lots of rain our way, hopefully enforcing an inside long-weekend.  Several of us attended a retreat conducted by Ron Adams from La Trobe last year, and we decided we’d like to do it again.

As one of the activities we’ve planned, we were asked to bring a couple of pages from a historian whose writing we admired.  So who to choose?  There is of course my beloved Richard Holmes, but then I realized that even though I gobbled up his Footsteps and Sidetracks, I haven’t actually read any of the biographies that he used as the basis for his meditations on biography and history.

What about Inga Clendinnen then? Certainly right up there in my constellation of historian stars, but Ron’s  workshop made much of the Clendinnen-Isaacs-Dening triumvirate, and I’d like to choose someone different.

Tom Griffiths I considered, and Lisa Ford too.  But in the end, I went for Kirsten McKenzie.  I haven’t reviewed her work in this blog because I read it before I started writing here.  Her book ‘Scandal in the Colonies’ was the book that made me start thinking about how I could deal with Judge Willis.  She combines incisive observations about colonial life, status and behaviour with real-life, sympathetically drawn examples.  The book is replete with beautifully crafted, pithy sentences, but the overall effect is light and readable.  You feel as if you’d like to meet the author, that there’s a sense of humour there.  She deals, as I want to do, with the nuances of behaviour as perceived by others at the time, that rumble underneath the official correspondence and are magnified and parodied  through the rumour mills and the  hysteria of the press.

So, off to Fish Creek I go- laptop in hand, no internet access (I hope) and Kirsten McKenzie tucked under my arm.

‘The Future of History’ by John Lukacs

2011, 177 p

There’s a new John Lukacs book out, I see.  I like books about history, written by historians. As a reader, they make me feel like an eavesdropper and novice rolled into one. This small book felt as if it were perhaps compiled from a series of lectures, similar to Margaret Macmillan’s The Uses and Abuses of History or Inga Clendinnen’s True Stories. But no- these are chapter-length reflections on historianship as a way of viewing the world and as a profession, and its relationship with literature.  They are written for their own sake.

I don’t really know all that much about John Lukacs.  I have only read one of his books- Five Days in London: May 1940- and I was very impressed by its close attention to just five days spent before and after Dunkirk, when Churchill decided that Britain would continue the war against Hitler after the fall of France.  It was a closely-focussed history that looked at just a few days (although VERY important days to be sure) while addressing big questions and issues.  After reading this latest book, I realize that it exemplified two of the big themes that Lukacs has explored over his long publishing history. First,  Five Days in London was an analysis of the personalities who were involved in the choice to stand up to Hitler, and the aspect of choice is important to Lukacs.

“Choice” is the operative word: because people, as well as their individual components, do not “have” ideas; they choose them. (p.30)

There is an emergent quality in events and decision-making as well: that perhaps the question is not “why” something happened, but “how” and “when” something became to be as it was:

Notice the emphasis on process in the syntax: not how “was” but how did it “become” (p. 39)

His second theme, again exemplified in Five Days in London is that of public sentiment. In the case of Churchill’s decision in 1940, it was set against the perceptions of the British people that were being monitored through the Mass Observation project.  He draws a distinction between Public Opinion which ostensibly can be measured and quantified and Popular Sentiment which is a more subtle and less graspable thing. I guess, in an Australian context, this would be the difference between  a Newspoll with its stark black and white choices, and a Hugh McKay survey .  He notes the dangers to democracy of government driven entirely by public opinion- and don’t we all know about that in Australia at the moment.

Lukacs is dismissive of statistical-based history, psycho-history and counterfactuals, and even more scathing of recent gender,  subaltern and other “faddish” histories.  However, it’s rather a cheap shot to mock journal papers from their titles alone, which are often framed to attract interest through their quirkiness.  There’s an element of grumpy-old-mannishness over the use of computers in research as well. He notes that there has always been more of a problem with spurious papers being inserted into an archive than papers being removed and that technology makes falsification even easier. He warns against the “insidious” practice of

“the presentation of a scholarly apparatus, listing or citing microfilm numbers or other archival “sources” that are not easily ascertainable- or, even if so require careful reading by a professional historian to eventually reveal that they do not prove the  “fact” or statement that they are supposed to confirm”. (p. 58)

To my mind, false claims can be made for both digital/technological and paper-based sources, and digital data-banks of journals and digitization have brought otherwise obscure journals and sources into a brighter light.  A microfilm is more accessible to many more sets of eyes than an individual archive will ever be, especially on the other side of the globe.

He notes that history is not science, and that it is much closer to literature.  Fact and fiction are related to each other, but not identical, and he champions not so much the fictional nature of history, as the historicity of fiction- that “every novel is a historical novel in one way or another” (p. 120)  He is open to the work of amateur historians and aspects of what-if histories that acknowledge the potentialities that lie in any situation.

“…the historian’s recognition that reality encompasses actuality and potentiality reflects his propensity to see with the eye of the novelist rather than with the eye of the lawyer” (p 124).

He closes the book with an Apologia and a greeting to his ‘good, serious’ historians.  He is, indeed, an “old” historian- eighty six years old, and by his own admission he spent much of his career working in small universities.  Although his list of publications is exhaustive, many were published by ‘trade’ presses with an eye to a wider audience and  he senses the ambiguity in the term “prolific” that his academic peers use to describe him. There is, as he admits, an element of  vanity in his chagrin at his marginalization.

Lukacs has elsewhere described himself as a reactionary and certainly elements of this come through here.  He is dismissive of the shortsightedness of American liberal historians, and there is an implicit assumption that the historians and the profession are male.  But I sense that he does not fit easily into any one political box.

He describes his book The Thread of Years as his “most extraordinary book”. It has 69 chapters, each consisting of two parts- the first a vignette about episodes in the lives of various imaginary people existing because of the historical realities of their places and their times.  The second part of each chapter is Lukacs’ own dialogue with an imaginary conversant who challenges either the historicity or the accuracy of the vignette.  He says that it is not a new kind of history, because almost all the men and women within it are imagined, but the times and places are not. He sees it as neither a history nor a novel.  And it’s sitting over there on the shelf, third row down, eight from the left.  I think he would want me to read it.

Uplifting Quotes for the Uninspired Historian #10

It is hard to think away out of our heads a history which has long lain in a remote past but which once lay in the future.

F.W. Maitland ‘Memoranda de Parliamento (1893) in Selected Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1936) p. 66

F. W. Maitland- now where have I heard that name before? I’m only too well aware of how limited my knowledge is of ‘older’ historians, but the name seemed familiar. I have been reading about Sir Peregrine Maitland in Upper Canada and I thought that perhaps I had the two mixed up.  But then I realized that a picture of F. W. Maitland was on the cover of the conference program at the legal history conference I attended at Cambridge a few weeks ago- in fact, he was the Downing Professor of the Laws of England at Cambridge between 1888-1906.  That surprised me: the quote above seems somehow more reflective and almost postmodern than I would have expected from a 19th century legal historian.

F.W. Maitland was a philosopher at heart, who went into the law for largely pragmatic reasons  and came to history rather late in his prolific, but rather short, academic career.  At the age of 25, and as part of his quest to earn a Trinity Fellowship  he wrote and self-published a treatise called ‘A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality as Ideals of English Political Philosophy from the Time of Hobbes to the Time of Coleridge’.   Much of his academic work elaborated on this foundation, whereby he unearthed, transcribed and commented on the broad sweep of English law, right back to Roman and Anglo-Saxon law.  From this he developed a sweeping vision of social relations and modernity both in Britain and the Anglo-world, and on the Continent.   While solidly a records-based historian, grappling with legal, highly technical documents, his works revolve around the larger philosophy of ideas exemplified by de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, Montesquieu and Marx. Although a prolific writer- over 5000 pages- much of his work was conducted in spite of ill-health through tuberculosis, and he died in 1906 at the age of fifty-six.

On the 4th January 2011  a memorial to him was placed in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, the only professional historian to be honoured in this way.   Quite apart from his interest in history and law,  and his clear, evocative writing, his approach to history itself speaks to me.  He was deeply conscious of the dangers of anachronism:

The history of law must be a history of ideas. It must represent, not merely what men have done and said, but what men have thought in bygone ages. The task of reconstructing ancient ideas is hazardous and can only be accomplished little by little.  If we are in a hurry to get to the beginning we shall miss the path. [... ]Against many kinds of anachronism we now guard ourselves. We are careful of costume, of armour and architecture, of words and forms of speech. But it is far easier to be careful of these things than to prevent the intrusion of untimely ideas. [...]  ‘The most efficient
method of protecting ourselves against such errors is that of reading our history backwards as well as forwards, of making sure of our middle ages before we talk about the “archaic”, of accustoming our eyes to the twilight before we go out into the night.[...] Above all, by slow degrees the thoughts of our forefathers, their common thoughts about common things, will have become thinkable once more. F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book,  p. 356, p. 520

He knew the importance of starting in the right place to find the essence of the structure.

Too often we allow ourselves to suppose that, could we get back to the beginning, we should find that all was intelligible and should then be able to watch the process whereby simple ideas were smothered under subtleties and technicalities. But it is not so. Simplicity is the outcome of technical subtlety; it is the goal, not the starting point. As we go backwards the familiar outlines become blurred; the ideas become fluid, and instead of the simple we find the indefinite. F.W. Maitland, Domesday Book p. 9

References:

Alan Macfarlane (a renowned social anthropologist in his own right) F. W. Maitland and the Making of the Modern World. It’s downloadable as a PDF here and it displayed brilliantly on my e-reader- being able to read long PDFs in a book-like form without having to print off- now this is what an e-reader does really well.

A You-Tube video Alan Macfarlane lecturing on F.W. Maitland in 2001 in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University.  There’s no bells and whistles here- it’s just a straight out, softly-spoken, chalk and talk lecture that assumes familiarity with Maine, Montesquieu etc (an unfounded assumption in my case!) but it convey’s Macfarlane’s deep admiration of Maitland and the significance of Maitland’s work.

How many historians does it take to write a history book?

I see here that fifty historians  assembled at the recent AHA conference in Launceston to commence work on the new Cambridge History of Australia, scheduled for publication in 2013.  Fifty historians??!!!  Ye Gods!

Who are they, I wonder?  Will they divide into teams for specific chapters or sections? Are there lead writers with the rest as advisors?  Will they write collaboratively? Fifty!

‘Teaching Scholarship’ by Caroline Walker Bynum

The Facebook page of the Australian Historical Association had a link recently to ‘Art of History’, a column in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History publication.  The column contains essays by established American historians writing on the art and craft of historical writing.  Such copious advice is probably best taken in small doses, so I’ve been enjoying reading slowly, one article at a time.  The first link is to an article from 2009 called ‘Teaching Scholarship’, and a thought-provoking little article it is, not just for a clapped-out and inactive educational designer (as I am) but for historians more generally.

Caroline Walker Bynum, a professor of European medieval history,  starts by pondering what ‘scholarship’ is and comes up with a checklist for what it means for a historian in particular,:

Hard work in archives and libraries without taking shortcuts through the research of others; integrity of citation from primary sources and secondary authorities; thorough grounding in earlier work (and not just that of the 1990s or later); situating of specific conclusions in complex historical contexts; genuine discoveries and original questions, not just a rehash of current theories; and always, always the struggle to ensure that the issues raised are appropriate to the material at hand, that it is not pulled out of shape by contemporary concerns or anxieties…

These values, she suggests, are not part of the baggage that the young undergraduate, or even graduate, brings to history.  The American education system (and I suspect that much of this is true of the Australian system as well) encourages students to “do research” by cutting and pasting primary sources, predominantly from the internet.  By pushing students to move beyond this approach, she claims that college instructors have (albeit unintentionally) encouraged what she calls

a sort of hypercriticality that may undercut—even while it in some ways enhances—what they need in order to be scholars. We have taught them to be critical of where they find material; we have taught them to expect bias and to study authors for it; we have taught them to ask questions of their material, not just “accumulate facts.” All to the good. But in the process we have perhaps led them to think that when they have “critiqued” someone else’s position, they have found one of their own; that the work of the historian is to find the flaws in how others put things; that the task is finished when they have contextualized—as part of a “school” or a “trend,” a political commitment or an “identity position”—someone else’s conclusions. And such contextualizing or “critiquing” often means demolishing. We reward the cheekily worded rejoinder, the clever diagnosis of bias in their supposed elders and betters. It is hard to teach any other way when one needs to engender skepticism about the vast wash of material available out there in cyberspace.

But, she argues, beyond these so-called “critical skills”, there are those values of scholarship that she started her article with, and they often run counter to the quick demolition-job of hypercriticality

We value patience and the ability to postpone gratification until we get something right. We value the silences in our sources more than the speed with which we obtain results; and we are willing to slow down, to read again, to listen to what is not being said, in order that we may spot unlikely possibilities. We assume we are in continuity with the work of other scholars and that the best work is not necessarily the most recent. An archivist in France in 1900, for example, or an archaeologist in Mongolia in the 1950s may have gone further than a recent theorist who knows the basic material less well. We understand that the purpose of a footnote is not so much to disagree with someone else’s argument or call attention to our own interdisciplinary reading as to express gratitude to those earlier scholars without whose work we could not make progress ourselves.

She talks about techniques she uses to encourage this mind-set in her students. One involves getting students to review a review as a genre, to appreciate its demands and to break the reliance on oneupmanship and paraphrase.  A second activity involves getting students to critique a lengthy footnote by following up every source that it references, and to assess- positively or negatively- the relevance and strength that such sources bestow on the argument.   It is only at this point, after students have been alerted to the demands of reviewing and imbued (hopefully) with some sense of  humility, that she asks them to write a book review.

All of this touches on some of the insecurities I feel myself in writing reviews on this blog.  I sometimes come into contact with the authors of books that I’ve reviewed, and while I expect that they’re largely oblivious to the fact that I’ve written about them, I wonder if I’d be quite as confident making my comments to their face.  Sometimes I wonder at my own presumption in commenting on someone else’s achievement in something that I could only dream of: at other times, I wonder at my own presumption in even thinking that what I’m doing even matters at all!

How I work with my material- Access

Big disclaimer upfront: my knowledge of Access is minuscule.  I bumble around and am fully aware that there are probably a million things that I could do with it, but can’t be bothered learning.   They speak of “just-in-time” learning- well, as far as Access is concerned, I have “just enough” knowledge for it to do what I need.

The British Empire, bless its cotton socks, was very good at one thing (at least) and that is information control.  Let’s imagine a letter written in Port Phillip about some little brouhaha that Willis might be involved in.  It would  go to Superintendant La Trobe as inward correspondence; he would make some comments on it in a covering letter and send it to Gipps in Sydney as outward correspondence; it would arrive there as Gipps’ inward correspondence and then he would make further comments in another covering letter and send it all to the Colonial Office as a Governor’s outward despatch.  It would arrive in London some 5-8 months later, be minuted by various public servants as it moved from desk to desk in the Colonial Office, making its way to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, then the reply would move back in the following direction.  All of this would be numbered, and entered in inward- and outward- correspondence letter books.

Beautiful though this system might be, it does mean that a single letter might appear multiple times in LaTrobe’s, Gipps’ or the Secretary of State’s archives, and may appear yet again in collections of correspondence bundled up for a special report.  Likewise for my Canadian material,  I’m working from a single archive divided up into separate files in my computer, and thus of no use to anyone else but me in finding where it is in my own records.  But each document also has its own numbering used in other archives and microfilms- and this is the information that is important for footnotes.  What I needed was a way of identifying an item and noting all the different numberings it might have in the major archives that I am working in.

So I have developed a very basic database that shows the date of the correspondence, the names of sender and recipients, enough identifying information for me to know what it’s about, where it is in my own computer files and then the number it has in the major collections used by researchers generally that I would record in a footnote.

I stop at three locations- there are no doubt more, but this is probably enough.  The majority of entries relate to correspondence, but I also put newspaper articles in as well.   When I view it as a table, it runs chronologically.

I feel a little sheepish admitting to such a paltry database.  It is an idiosyncratic little thing, of minimal use to anyone else, but invaluable for me- and that’s probably the most important thing. No doubt others would say “But why don’t you use ——- instead?” and they’d probably be right.  I think, though, at some stage you need to stop shopping around for the perfect program, and just sit down and start putting some data into it and using the damned thing.  When I reach its limitations and become frustrated, then I’ll either learn the extra functions I need within the program, or  look for something else.  In the meantime, this works okay for me and I’m just getting on with it.

How I work with my material- NVivo

What’s NVivo? you may ask.  It’s a qualitative data analysis software program that I use to keep control of the data that I’m gathering as part of my research.  You can read more about NVivo here. 

I first came across NVivo in its earlier incarnation as NUD*IST, which was a much more playful and memorable name.  I am still using NVivo 7 because my clapped-out old laptop here wouldn’t download NVivo 8, and now I see that there is an NVivo 9.  Fortunately I use mine under my university’s site licence (I think that it’s very expensive) and for now the older versions are still available.

NVivo (or NUD*IST in its earlier life) was developed originally by Lyn Richards, a sociologist at La Trobe University, and it reflects many of the time-honoured ways that academics work with data anyway-  identifying major themes and points (which often found their way onto index cards); highlighting themes in a particular document with different coloured pens, cutting up documents to group all the themes together etc.  NVivo does much the same thing, digitally.  And because every project is different, and because people work differently, no two NVivo outcomes would be the same.

First you need to put a document into NVivo.   This isn’t a problem for me as I type up notes on the computer as I go.  Here’s a shot of all the documents or ‘sources’ that I have about Judge Willis in Melbourne.  Some of them are full transcribed documents, others are my notes.  If I have the document in hard copy or saved as a PDF elsewhere, I might save it as a ‘proxy document’ with a very stripped down content skeleton, with the expectation that I can go back and look at the full document easily.

When you have a document you identify the themes in it.  You call these themes ‘nodes’, and it’s just like tagging, or using a different coloured highlighter pen for each theme.  You develop the themes as you go along.

So, in the picture about, I might be reading Paul de Serville’s ‘Port Phillip Gentlemen’, and I might notice that a paragraph is about ‘authority’ or ‘class’ or ‘gentlemanly expectations’.  I would highlight the paragraph and select the node on the left hand side, or create a new node if it was something that I hadn’t come across before.

This means that you develop a long list of nodes that you’ve identified across all your documents.  You can group related concepts into ‘tree nodes’ or just leave them alphabetical as shown below.  Because you have developed the nodes yourself, you get to know what is there and move around it quite quickly.  When you’re working with a particular document it  also collects the nodes that you’re working on as you go along into a drop-down menu, and as they tend to recur, it means that you’re working with a smaller set. But here is my master list as of today of the Port Phillip nodes I’d developed. If I worked on a new document tomorrow and identified new nodes, they would be added to the list.

So if you want to find, for example, all the documents that you had tagged as being ‘beliefs about convicts’, then you can bring them all up onto the one page.

If you click on the underlined hyperlink, it takes you to the source document where you coded it in NVivo.  It’s better not to code great slabs of material; just enough for you to get the gist and then go back to the source document for the surrounding material.  The real advantage of this is that it means that you don’t forget about material that you read years earlier, especially once it mounts up.  It also brings together the primary and secondary material again when the tendency is to develop the tunnel vision of “now I’m working on letters”, forgetting about the insights you’d discovered in secondary sources. You can write ‘memos’, which are your own reflections on a particular point, which can also be coded and thrown into the pot as well.

You can also go back to a particular document (or ‘source’) and at a glance see the themes that you’d identified in it. For example, here’s my screen for Paul de Serville’s ‘Port Phillip Gentlemen’. At p.128 I’d found information about ‘the nature of Port Phillip society’, ‘party split’ ‘Kerr’ and ‘Fawkner’ and coded that paragraph accordingly.

It is intended that you develop the nodes as you go along which means that at some stage they become big, baggy unwieldy monsters.  At this stage you need to think- do I need to split this concept into smaller nodes? Or alternatively, you find that you’ve made several nodes that are really talking about the same thing-  are they really separate concepts? would I lose some particular quality of the concept if I combined two similar nodes?

It does also mean that sometimes documents you read earlier in your research have concepts that were not apparent to you at the time, but that’s true of research generally.  At least with a digitized program like this, you’re likely to come across the documents again under a different code and can go back and add extra codes as you go.  It’s intended that it keeps growing and changing.  For me, it’s certainly more dynamic than having notes filed in hard copy in folders where you forget you’d ever even seen the document at all.  It also means that my own fleeting reflections in ‘memos’ are brought back to life again.

As I said, I’m using an old version and I note that NVivo 9 has fixed up one of the real bug-bears – being able to see the codes while you’re actually coding- which for some reason you could no longer do, even though very early versions of the program did have this feature.  It would be worth getting NVivo 9 for this feature alone- in fact, it may even prompt me into splashing out for a new computer.  It also claims that you can use PDFs but I’m not sure- earlier versions claimed this too but it only worked for OCR’d or text-based PDFs – not image based PDFs which it inevitably seemed mine were.  I usually just save the PDF on the computer and make a proxy document (i.e. a dot point summary)- it’s too time consuming mucking around with it.

The drawbacks?  The major one is the fear that the whole system is going to crash and that you’ll lose everything.  Also, there is the limitation that you can only get out of it what you put into it-  it takes discipline and routine.  I type up my notes, save them,  print it off  (yes, I do keep hard copy- 2 sheets to a page), put it into Endnote, put it into NVivo, code it,  tick on the top of the hard copy that it has been endnoted and N-Vivo’d and then file it  in a ring folder alphabetically by author. The folders on my bookshelves are multiplying alarmingly.   It also has to be an ongoing process-  I have to be prepared to go back and fix up the deficiencies in the coding when I happen upon a document that I’d read early on, and sometimes this is a bit distracting. But this is the price of keeping it current.  I do have parallel systems: I also tag in Endnote and, to a lesser extent Zotero, which I use for  internet-based material and somewhat less methodically.

And the advantages?  Particularly with my family history of Alzheimer’s, I’m frightened of losing track of all this!  I think that any researcher has this fear, Alzheimers or not.  I’m relatively confident that I can put my hands on the main documents fairly easily.  When I’m working at a conceptual level, it’s easy to grab together all the examples of a phenomenon e.g. ‘loyalty’, and tease it out further because it’s all in one place.  Because primary and secondary sources are intermingled, then I  can find concrete examples relatively easily.  I’m very well aware that I only use it in a rudimentary fashion and that I could probably do other things with it, but I haven’t got time to learn them, and it works just fine for me.

Of course, it doesn’t always work, as this sad experience shows.  I still haven’t found the damned document that I was looking for, and I still don’t know whether it ever existed or whether I read into the document something that really wasn’t there.  In the end, I wrote around it and found other evidence that was good enough-  but I still live in hope that one day I’ll stumble across it again.