Not that I'm Self-obsessed or anything -
But the other day I came across a Twitter thread about dealing with born-digital archives, and the case study they were talking about was, Will Self's emails.
Will. Self's. emails.
Apparently his papers have been acquired by the British Library and being processed, and he's not even dead yet. Self is a particularly interesting writer from the point of view of his working processes*: earlier in his career, he wrote directly onto the computer; later on, he switched to writing long had and uses a vintage typewriter for earlier drafts. His shift to the typewriter is a creative strategy to address anxieties about the digital and its effect on the human mind and creative consciousness: a deeply set need to feel the physical engendering of language and the weight of words upon the page. The opportunity for examination and analysis that Self’s born-digital traces offer are particularly interesting in the context of the cultural debate about the digital of which Self is at the forefront. The hard drive gives curators at the British Library an exciting opportunity to emulate the working environment of the writer as we continue to confront the challenges presented by these kinds of contemporary collections and work to make these valuable resources available for the future.
I discover that there are several blog posts by a former colleague of mine (at least, archives being a small profession, I guess it is) who is now at BL, and o dearie me, WOT.
The Lives of Typewriters and Large Data-sets: The Will Self Archive Flatly pictured, the hard-drive makes an elegant image in yellow, green, orange and black. Inside the coloured box, drafts and distractions are captured indiscriminately. For the time being, only the paper archive is available to readers whilst work continues to transfer the remaining material to - in the irreducibly metaphorical language of the digital world - accessible platforms.
You know, I hope that in the days when I was cataloguing the papers of several distinguished figures of a particular psychoanalytical school, I didn't go around actually talking like them.
First report from the Will Self archive: family matters: As the author commented when Umbrella was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize: ‘Having reached my 40s, like many another slightly nerdy man (and I think it is a mostly male preoccupation), I started looking into my immediate ancestry.’
I find that a very dubious gender-generalisation! - often it is a woman in the family connection who is the keeper of the family archives -
‘Post-it’ notes in the Will Self archive: The photographs capture the scale of the author’s devotion to the little yellow pad. The scrapbooks into which Self has gathered the ‘post-it’ notes now form part of his archive at the British Library. Grid-like on the wall, and grid-like in the scrapbooks, the notes intrigue and fascinate. They are little doorways into the text, little honeycomb cells of access.
Okay, I say to myself that I have found useful research material in the papers of individuals who are now obscure footnotes to history and literature. But that had mostly been in their correspondence with other people and their interactions with them over matters of the day.
I can see that there are some nerdy things of archivist interest about this collection - but that's orthogonal to any intrinsic interest...
*Me, I prefer writers who are interesting from the POV of their actual writing, hem-hem.
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