You have taken the introduction to archives, so now is the time to get your hands dirty and figure out what archivists really do. In this course, we will build upon the theoretical underpinnings of archival praxis (and hopefully extend them) with an eye toward understanding the complex relationships between abstract theory and the mundane realities of our workaday lives.
Today, I will honk on (and on) about archival field theory, an heuristic device for thinking about the organization of information organizations. The joke is this: while most archivists have a tendency to resolve our professional activities into discrete sets of binary pairs, we should begin conceptualizing our professional as a field of interdependent, interacting forces.
NB: finding aid comparison due next week.
