Capturing Creativity Week 2024: Event 3: Presentation 2: Capturing, Recording and Representing Creativity in Personal Digital Archives
Presentation given as part of Capturing Creativity Week 2024. Event 3: Panel session, Friday 13th September, 2024.
Presentation by Dr. Callum McKean, British Library.
Speaker Biography: Callum McKean is the Lead Curator for Born Digital Archives and Manuscripts at the British Library, where he has looked after the UK national collection of literary and political personal digital archives since 2021. In this role he oversees the acquisition, preservation, processing and access provision for these collections at the Library. He has recently completed the funded project, 'Data Analysis and Network Visualisation as Tools for Curating Hybrid Correspondence Archives', which considered e-mail and analogue correspondence networks in the Harold Pinter collection. He also supervised the PhD project 'Interpreting Writers Digital Lives' which examined patterns of use in the digital archives of Andrea Levy and Will Self. His research interests include contemporary literature, born-digital manuscripts, and computational approaches to cultural heritage material. He holds degrees from University College London and the University of Cambridge.
Presentation Synopsis: The British Library’s Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts Department collects the personal and professional archives of individuals whose work has made a significant impact on the social, cultural, artistic or intellectual life in the United Kingdom from c.1950-present. This historical period is one of huge technological change, tracing the rapid expansion of personal computing in the latter half of the twentieth century and the explosion of the internet and social media early in the twenty-first. Writers have changed how they write during this period too, perhaps more than at any other point in history. As a result, most of the archives the Library collects are now ‘hybrid’ -- containing traditional paper material alongside a variety of digital formats (including floppy disks, CD-ROMs, spinning hard-drives, USB sticks, and laptop computers). Despite a strain of methodological conservatism and superstition haunting many writers’ relationships with their own practice, the personal computer and the word processor especially have been adopted as standard ‘tools of the trade’. But unlike writing tools of the past, the personal computer is not a passive replication machine or dumb mechanical servant, it is an active participant in the creative process, silently recording, shaping and arranging the work of the writer as s/he writes; collecting traces of the creative process which would otherwise be lost forever. This talk will explore the ways in which computers capture the literary creative process and some of the tools and methodologies available to a curator, archivist or researcher to understand this complex and evolving relationship between artist and machine.
This item contains: Powerpoint slides and the recording of the presentation.
