Close Encounters of the Archival Kind: Affect and Transnational Solidarities in African Diaspora Archives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent explorations of affect in the archives have focused on the experiences of users and particularly the distress archival collections could possibly cause them. Perhaps because they have, until recently, been trained to think of themselves as engaged in objective and neutral work collecting and preserving memory, archivists rarely reflect on or talk about their work, how they engage with the materials they manage, and how they personally feel about what they encounter in the course of their professional lives. Using an autoethnographic conceptual framing, this article uses four archival encounters in the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to reflect on affect in the archives invoked by archival work. Through these encounters, the article seeks to demonstrate archives of the African diaspora as both a locus of transnational African diasporic identities and solidarities, as well as a critical site for the (re)building of the same. Finally, it also hints at how such affective experiences can, in fact, further the cultural and political work of Black archivists and archives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".