Radio Preservation
What role does knowledge of the different (in)tangible materialities of the sound objects play in the quest to learn more about the technical and epistemic processes of reproducing and preserving sound? How do practices of listening to actual shellac records (with the negligent or naïve expectation of experiencing some form of the archive’s or object’s aura) or to digital files (a series of zeros and ones) shape my approach to and perception— my breathing in—of the sonic objects? (Hilden, 104)
An imperative consideration in any exploration of radio is the scientific nature of radio’s existence. French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon writes of radio as a “bundle of directed waves that propagate[s] from one tower to another, through the clouds and fog.” (1958, p. 197) Radio is at once abstract and concrete, a natural phenomenon harnessed by matrices of technical objects in a relationship of transmitter —> receiver. This construction speaks of its social influence, as well. With the advent of mass tele-media, the dynamic between one’s self as subject and object is blurred via temporal compression. “Television immediatizes the mediacy.” (Stiegler, 2014, p. 82) What I mean to say is that the medium itself calls for a reconsideration of the role of archival practice. A technology of “immediacy,” radio challenges traditional notions of history, inscribing information at the moment of its broadcast, with much of it going unrecorded. It seems that with the advent of this technology, there was neither the recognition of its need to be preserved, nor its potential role in the historical record. We are faced with daunting questions of responsibility: what is allowed to be forgotten? And what moral considerations are brought to bear by this forgetting?
With the accelerating mission to preserve radio broadcasts and historical radio collections, the archival community must confront this question of absence. Still the most utilized form of information transmission in the world, radio’s ubiquity challenges the borders of an archive, pointing at the types of power dynamics at play in our memory institutions. The development of radio archives is inseparable from a de-centered and critical perspective of archivism as a process; archives being “less about the static recorded product than they are about the dynamic process of recording.” (Nesmith, 2002, 35) A compelling new work studying the Berlin lautarchiv by cultural historian Irene Hilden, provides a history of this postmodern understanding of archivism, as well as the language for its application to sound archives. Hilden writes that working in sound archives requires an “intersectional perspective” and “transdisciplinary methodology,” in order to “illuminate[s] the sound archive’s epistemic status as well as its physical, and by now digital, shape.” (2022, p. 96) Another important lens Hilden introduces as foundational to critical archival praxis is that of Michel Foucault’s theory of the archive. Foucault wrote keenly on the idea of “transmission” as the fundamental element of communication and history – with every instance of a repeated statement, with every iteration of a repeatable statement, all of the various dynamics of writing are present (transcription, reinscription, transformation), and therefore, all of the mechanisms of historical writing. This tracing of power through the mechanisms of discourse, enabled by and crystallized in technical objects and their corresponding social formations, means that we can see “archives as a workplace for researchers and [as] the site where hegemonic power structures evolve.” (Hilden, 100)
Two different organizations taking on the mission of radio and modern media preservation today are the Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF) and the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL). The former is focused on the creation of a national strategy for radio preservation, as well as gathering of both independent and institutional radio archives that are at risk considering their age and medium. The latter is concerned with the physical carriers of modern media – the preservation of obsolete machines – and providing a space for them to be experimented with in the name of what Siegfried Zielinski called “an-archivism.” (Emerson & striegl, 60) Both of these projects are driven by the concerns of critical archival studies, which seeks to give the archivist a more active role in the construction of collections. It is also a field of study influenced by postcolonial theory, critical race theory, queer studies, and critical pedagogy, with the intention being to create media archives that reach out and into marginalized communities. As these projects develop, they are inevitably called to confront historical silences and make institutional critiques.
Radio Preservation Task Force
The Radio Preservation Task Force was founded in 2014 as a subcommittee of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board. Consisting mostly of media historians and theorists, the RPTF’s mission is “to develop a national strategy for documenting and preserving nearly a century’s worth of recorded radio materials held by archiving institutions throughout the country.” (Goodmann et al., 2019, p. 1) By coordinating community outreach, forging relationships with institutions committed to similar missions, and assisting with the procurement of grants for radio preservation projects, they have made great strides in the development of a national strategy for radio preservation through an ethos of collaboration and volunteerism. Amanda Keeler and Josh Shepperd write in their piece “Radio Research as Critical Archive Studies,”
The RPTF is organized as a horizontalized quorum structure, in which experts in major areas of media studies and information science work together to identify consensus on areas of deficiency in research. Its large repository of scholars helps archives to write, apply for, and obtain grants, while increasing demand for archival preservation by developing new curricular materials from recently digitized materials, which are deposited into a big data interface that also contains results from an ongoing national survey of collection-level radio collection descriptions. (2019, p. 5)
Their initial project was to find the independent archives throughout the country, and begin to collect them into a database. Research teams were organized throughout the country, and reported back to the central organization regarding their findings. In their summary of their data processes, the team describes their initial work:
While each region was charged with collecting the same basic information, the exact survey methods and questions remained the responsibility of the respective research teams and often adapted within a single region to suit the needs of individual collecting institutions. Some respondents filled out online Google Forms that fed data into spreadsheets, others returned paper sheets, while still others participated in phone interviews, relayed relevant collections information via email communications, or sent in entire finding aids. (Goodmann et al., 2019, p. 3081)
A known unknown was quickly realized: the level of description from collection to collection was incredibly varied. “Within the United States, radio archives are geographically dispersed, with no centralized national repository, and have varying levels of collection information, competing metadata standards, and divergent levels of data literacy among archival caretakers.” (Goodmann et. al, 2019, 3081) Historically, radio is an enthusiast’s project, and many important collections are held by independent and community collectors in various states of completion (my personal favorite example is the work documenting natural radio by Stephen P. McGreevy, which is only available via his personal Internet Archive page). Digitization and diligent record-keeping have often not been a consideration. Large broadcast networks are more easily accounted for and often have their accompanying records, but the RPTF’s commitment to lesser-known and more precarious collections means that they are often dealing with the need to generate new metadata based on engaging with the material. These orphan, or forgotten, collections have posed a challenge for the task force. Unlike collections that are only paper, some metadata for historical radio broadcasts can only be gleaned by playing the material, which can do a good deal of damage to fragile formats such as shellac and tape. New methods of digitization that do not touch old media (most radio broadcasts preserved between 1920-40 are held on lacquer transcription discs) are being developed that have the ability to essentially “image” the old disc. Yuri Shimoda, a member of the RPTF, writes in a piece regarding “optical scanning” technologies, “Optical technologies not only provide institutions with a no-contact method of retrieving sound recordings from broken or deteriorating lacquer discs without the risk of causing more damage to the items. They can also provide a means of capturing a disc frozen in time.” (2020, p. 20) This is a vital new procedure to be utilized in the preservation of precarious materials that does not require the playing of the disc, but allows the archivist to glean information that can make the content accessible, either as a digitized file or solely a record.
One of the associated challenges facing the RPTF is the need to expand their paper collections to provide greater context, a mission that was left out of the initial LOC mandate. Paper records are an essential part of radio collections, for “objects without contextualizing documents are…meaningless, and archivists have too often underestimated the importance of paper records that circulate around media objects.” (Vancour, 2016, p. 399) Another potential future contribution to the work being done to support the radio archive is in the realm of topology. Eric Silberberg’s TopoRadio project, designed under the purview of the RPTF, created an online map by which radio stations were mapped according to their mention in scholarly publications, thereby linking these publications to their geospatial references. This work provided “conceptual proof that maps can serve as an interface for discovering scholarly publications and [bring] to light trends within a body of research.” (Silberberg, 2023, p. 8) These are examples demonstrating once again the need for critical, intersectional, and transdisciplinary practices in radio archives – something almost inherent to the material, for radio does not exist except for between multiple points of contact.
Paradoxically, the drive to centralize a radio preservation system has led to the recognition of the need for greater decentralization. Infamous film archivist Rick Prelinger proposes “a suite of preservation functions that simultaneously support centralized and decentralized storage schemes.” Collaboration & interdisciplinarity are key, as well as cultivating a sphere of advocacy foregrounding the margins. Methods of decentralization, or to phrase it another way, making connections between disparate archives and a centralized repository, can only serve to make the work of radio preservation more efficient, as well as preserving an element of discovery that Prelinger calls “inconvenience.” (2020, p. 1) Drawing from a critical archive studies framework, the susceptibility of a collection is not solely premised upon its physical condition, but also its social value. By concentrating on finding collections that challenge hegemonic narratives, the RPTF is ensuring that historians will have access to necessary materials for writing history against the grain.
Centering these marginal collections for emergency preservation has to do with the activist concerns of the organization, namely, “what Francis Blouin and William Rosenberg call ‘bridging the archival divide’' between historians and archivists (Shepperd & Vancour, 2020, p. 29) The mission of composing new histories of radio, predicated upon new archival practices that focus the preservation of materials formerly considered marginal, such as experimental radio works by marginalized groups, means that radio preservation will serve a new era of scholarship whose central concerns will be the writing of these margins. The interdisciplinary approach of the RPTF and its coordination of a national database provide a foundation for “securing their [radio archives] place within transformative histories that can help us reimagine the past and articulate other possible futures.” (Shepperd & Vancour, 2020, p. 35)
Shawn Vancour, the former head of the RPTF and a professor of archival studies at UCLA, provides a detailed description of the framework for historical composition that inspires the interdisciplinary drive of the project. He writes that instead of simply understanding an organization’s history, we must analyze “the network as an object of historical analysis and dominant culture-producing mechanism within the national system of American broadcasting,” (Hilmes & Vancour, 2007, p. 318) in a gesture to critical theorists such as Theodore Adorno, as well as early cyberneticians. Carolyn Birdsall writes similarly that “the emerging field of critical archival studies has been formative in shifting analytical attention to the social forces and power relations underpinning archival institutions and their policies, archivist practices, and the collections themselves.” (2022, p. 3)
Though it may be the case with all archives that to use them critically is to access them immanently – to put materials together and let the truth emerge when the contemporary historical conditions call it forth – it appears that this tension is heightened with broadcast/sound/moving image materials, by nature of its immediacy. Writing of the differences between text and sound archives Irene Hilden states, “while the former consists of written documents and textual sources, the latter contains silent sound objects and acoustic files that ‘do not sound until they are activated by the user.’” (Hilden, 2022, p. 118) There is a constant question of who is recorded and who is recording, and what power relations are present in the social formations, as well as in the technical milieu.
Media Archaeology Lab
In a piece describing their experience in the Media Archaeology Lab, student Christopher Loughnane writes:
In the MAL you hear the hum and buzz and whirr of the machines. You feel the heat of their circuits, of their expended energy. But it is not the drone of a uni-type, dullard office, of a monotone Windows-pack. It is a diverse grouping of animals, collected in an artificial biome, wanting to play. They are non-networked, which enforces fidelity to their presence, and to your own. You are here, now. (2021, p. 5)
The description of a visit to the lab is compelling, and provides a possible lens into the lab’s activation. Rather than the mission of providing researchers with hands-on experience with obsolete technical objects, we are instead asked to consider ‘the archive’ in its entirety, an engaged bodily experience, full of dust. Summoning Merleau-Ponty and arguing for a “tactile” media studies, Loughnane writes, “What does it mean to touch and be touched by a technology, a technology that is distorting of our Umwelt [worldview]?” (2021, p. 11)
Founded in 2009 by media theorist Dr. Lori Emerson, the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) is “a place for hands-on, experimental teaching, research, artistic practice, and training” (Emerson, 2020, p. 180) Composed of technical objects spanning about 130 years (the radios in their collection are a Select-a-Tenna and a Vector Research Stereo Receiver), the mission is to keep obsolete technical objects in working condition, with the contention that technologies can be remade and reused. This is the challenge the organizers pose to their archive – let it not fall sedentary, or become solely a bureaucratic apparatus. To these ends, it functions as an “anarchive,” a term Emerson draws from preeminent media archaeologist Siegfried Zielinski that implies a more hands-on approach to archival research. (Emerson & striegl, p. 60) This means that the intention of the archive is always already dynamic, based upon who is utilizing which tools at any given time. This stems too from an expanded concept of the “lab” as a site. It is described as an “orderly and unruly place,” one which is becoming more and more communal, as people realize that we need to understand the technologies that influence our everyday life, and that while we are certainly molded by them, “technological determinisms are historical, and therefore changeable, according to the values and concerns we develop.” (Emerson and striegl, p. 60-62) The MAL is an ultimately flexible “anti-museum,” a digital humanities project that looks to engage its visitors with its technologies, but also with archival practices. The MAL is essentially a place where “best practices for archiving, cataloging, metadata, preservation, and documentation” become an integral aspect of research. (Wershler et al., 2020)
Emerson and striegl provide two descriptions for their conception of anarchivism: it is a “repertory of traces of collaborative research-creation events. The traces are not inert, but are carriers of potential. They are reactivatable, and their reactivation helps trigger a new event which continues the creative process from which they came, but in a new iteration.” It is also “a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation.” (2019, p. 65) The archive is as much a process as it is a storage space. By bringing still-functioning obsolete technical objects together, visitors are given permission to imagine new matrixes of relation. The lab is a “collection[s] of things that fabricate particular methodologies and collective, social habits.” (Wershler, 2022)
The term “ anarchive” has its roots – so common with postmodern understandings of archival practice – in Jacques Derrida’s seminal Archival Fever. Obsessively concerned with recording everything so as not to forget anything, we project violence of exclusion onto the other instead of letting our own memories decay. Carolin Huang writes, “the insertion of the death drive into archival theory challenges the common conception that archiving is necessarily about preservation and life affirmation.” (Huang, 2020, p. 265) Though this is not an explicit determination in the MAL, it warrants mentioning, for this is the foundation of the deconstructionist archivism I would argue is at play in the Lab. If archives take on meanings as the use of their materials is deferred, and if the lab hopes to challenge notions of stasis or obsolescence, then that means that new histories arise not simply from the use of the materials, but rather from the tactile renegotiation of their value, and possible repurposing in modern society.
A case study that will provide further insight into the potentials of the Lab is their 2017 project of experimenting with XO laptops originally made for the One Laptop Per Child initiative. Originally designed as laptops that could be produced cheaply and used without internet access, they never achieved their price point and “negative responses came from the tech industry and from diplomats and leaders from countries in the target market.” (Emerson & streigl, 2019, p. 62) However, under the umbrella of the MAL in which technologies receive immanent and historical criticism, researchers underwent “an investigation of their affordances,” (Emerson & streigl, 2019, p. 63) Grounded in their anarchival commitments, Emerson and streigl write, “the aim of this project is to construct a range of situations and interactions with the OLPC XO’s which take advantage of the particular innate qualities of the OLPC XO hardware in order to imagine alternative potential uses.” Their major discoveries were that the computer was designed to be very useable, as it does not have an interface that distorts the meaning of computer use (like Apple or Microsoft), and that the computers were ideal for “mesh networking.” Mesh networking is essentially a “node-to-node network connection” (Emerson & streigl, 2019, p. 68) that does not require one central signal source. This is ideal for areas with poor internet signal. At the time of the report, this research was being activated throughout the University of Colorado campus.
Though this project is essentially founded upon radio frequency, it is not radio broadcast in the sense that has been explored thus far by the Radio Preservation Task Force. However, I believe that elements of media archaeology can serve to inform the mission of preservation as it is stated by the RPTF. The integration of the historical technical objects by which radio has been transmitted can only serve to enhance their mission of being at the foundation of new critical media histories.
Conclusion
We might describe this process of anarchival historical determination as “forgetting through inscription…” (Huang, 2020, p. 265) This is a different concept of the anarchive than that fleshed out in the Media Archaeology Lab, but it is the concept I think is at the root of the stated missions of both MAL and the RPTF. There is a threat inherent to our methods of record-keeping and media preservation. How do we simultaneously uphold the science of archivism while transforming its social role? For Jacques Derrida, this means understanding the psychological drives for desiring to preserve something. For Foucault, this means analyzing the epistemological roots of historical knowledge. Some, such as Rick Prelinger, propose a further commitment to the debate over open resources. “In place of the core archival function of access as we now conceive it, I propose a right that embodies two values that are often considered contradictory: first, the right to see, hear, reuse, and make derivative works from the archival record and, second, respect for cultural sovereignty, autonomy, and tradition.” (Prelinger, 2021, p. 151)
There is a reframing that must be undergone – and what I argue is a turn away from history as such, and towards epistemology. Returning to Irene Hilden’s book, in the midst of her reading of Ann Laura Stoler’s archival theory, she writes, “As long as attention lays only on marginalised traces, the archive’s power and its formation [will] remain unsolicited.” (Hilden, 2022, p. 114) This is a response to the Benjaminian challenge to read history against the grain, instead challenging historians to read “along the archival grain,” meaning that as opposed to simply reactively reading archives by violently dismissing dominant narratives (which may of course be necessary), we would do better to approach materials with a curiosity in regard to how they speak their silences, in order to criticize “dominant epistemic frameworks” and contribute a more robust criticism to repressive mechanisms of memory. (Hilden, 2022, p. 114) Stoler would prefer that we not merely question the written histories, but question the “politics of knowledge” under which such colonial logics develop. (Hilden, 2022, p. 114)
And what of radio? This inter-atmospheric phenomenon, constituted in relationships of transmitter/receiver, has been the major mode of cultural expression for the last 100 years. The commitment of a new generation of media scholars to the sowing of these expressions asks for the archive to speak. And what does it say? It speaks immediately of its inherent state, its method of communication. The radio archive must draw lessons from both critical archive studies as well as media archaeology in order to speak to the need for the composition of media histories that run along the grain, thus eeking out the contradictions of the theory/praxis divide. With the formation of the RPTF Sound Collection Database, it is my belief that there must be an engaged element, something akin to the work being done by Digital Humanities departments, that will provide researchers with the necessary tools, both critical and tactile, to utilize radio archives in a way that writes the margins, and asks for play.
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