When I started working here at the Community-Driven Archives Initiative (CDA) at ASU Library, I knew next to nothing about what archives were or what kind of work I was getting into. I imagined some sort of dusty basement shelf job, where we asked community members to donate their old political documents for us to scan and then put back on the shelves with minimal human interaction. What I experienced, as you might have learnt by keeping up with our projects, was quite to the contrary.
It’s been a little over a year and a half since I began working at CDA and I’ve since grown immensely proud of the work we do. As a result, I’ve started noticing how archives are portrayed in the movies and video games I play. What I’ve come to realize is that there is a significant disconnect between the popular culture's idea of an archivist and what truly qualifies as one, something which explains much of the misconceptions I had prior to working with the CDA team.
Dorian’s role in the game is, ultimately, to fight for a better world by empowering himself and his friends. He finds this empowerment through not just the ancient written texts, but also through the strong religious oral traditions of another group, the elves. Through his own efforts to record this history and pass on the stories of the main character’s triumphs and failures, he eventually returns to his homeland and enters politics to continue the social change he began abroad. Dorian’s work is, in its purest form, synthesis of the past, present, and future.
I somehow doubt that the game writers had intended for all of this to be connected to his profession, but to me, it speaks to the inherent abstractness and fluidity of the archival profession. In popular media, the term “archives” implies a level of formality, of concreteness while an “archivist” is very specifically seen as someone who collects physical documents and works within an institution, though we know both to be fallacious assumptions. As we can see with Dorian, the more subtle roles of a community archivist are often the far more powerful ones. As the archival field continues to move more and more towards deinstitutionalized, community work, it is vital in my eyes that media representations mirror these trends since, after all, representation (or lack thereof) in media greatly colors our perceptions of reality.
I’ll be exploring archives and pop culture media further in an upcoming workshop the CDA team will be hosting and the details will be coming out soon so please stay tuned to our social media pages to learn more.
Contact me, Jessica Salow, with feedback at Jessica.Salow@asu.edu, as I would love to hear from you your thoughts regarding the work we here at ASU are doing in community archiving around Arizona. We also want your feedback on what you would like to see from us in future blog posts. And if you would like regular updates from the CDA team please follow our CDA Facebook page or the CDA Instagram page to keep abreast of the virtual events we are doing monthly. We have also made some changes to our website to better describe the community-driven archives initiative at ASU Library so please visit that page to learn more about our work or to connect with the rest of our team.
See you soon!