“Interrogating the Archive:Preserving and Interpreting

Knowledges of the Past”Interdisciplinary Research Seminar

October 16 – The City as Archive: Urban Spaces and Historical Memory

•Gabor Gyani, Identity and the Urban Experience: Fin-de-Siécle Budapest. Social Science Monographs, Boulder, Colorado, 2004, 59-79. •Benjamin Filene, “Open House Journal” Part 1: Meeting at the Doorstep and Part 3: “Telling Their Story” in Minnesota History Fall 2003 (Volume 57, number 7, pages 366-367) and Winter 2004-05 (Volume 54, number 4, pages 153-157). Plus images from the Minnesota Historical Society “Open House” exhibit at:http://events.mnhs.org/media/images/Events/1541/index.htm Andrew Urban, “Mill City Museum” review in Journal of American History (2005), 938-941.

Field trip archive

 Part 2. During the field trip, using any appropriate media (such as your cellphone, a camera, or even pen and paper!) students from each campus will collectively gather and then “archive” records of their field trip on the appropriate field trip wiki of the Moodle site. Students on each campus will thus have access to this archive of records of each other’s field trip experiences.

“Women in the Labyrinth of Budapest” bus tour

who gets to be commemorated by a street name and why(Edit)

Such an example could be Piroska Szalmas, a member of the workers’ movement, choir conductor and composer, after whom a street was named, which was changed during this summer so that the street now bears a right-wing male writer’s name. Interestingly enough residents of the street crossed out the name of the writer and reclaimed the old street name through what can be called an act of public disobedience.

What’s Not Here (Stephen)"I'm standing where my living room was and it's not here because my house is gone and it's an Ultimart! You can never go home again, Oatman...but I guess you can shop there."John Cusack in Grosse Point Blank

You can't pray there, but I guess you can rent a room there.

You can't live in a tenement home again, but you can shop there.

You can't go to a porn theater again, but you can listen to live music there.

“Notes from a Neighborhood Tour”(Ellen)

…

Today, a tour of my own new neighborhood, and some of this I've heard before, especially in those early days when I first moved to the Twin Cities and wanted to know everything at once about every new place I wandered … The man who always waves to me doesn't sit on his front porch anymore. I think it's too cold now, but maybe he's watching from inside the house, wondering when I too will give in to the cold and shut away the bike for winter.

The layers of the present are here, too, the people we intersect and pass, who step around or through our group … [My] notes are traces of a field trip, really. I am interested, in part, in strangers coming into the neighborhoods of the past/present to study them, and here I am, standing in a group of strangers who've come here to learn about, to archive this neighborhood. It is a different understanding of a place than the quotidien daily life of a neighborhood resident, I think.

… the more I see it, the more I learn about the neighborhood, I see also that I remain partially on the surface, and that the neighborhood is just a place I'm walking through, as so many others have done, as so many others will do, without leaving any trace at all.

Interrogating the Archives Conference

“Cities as Archives”Chair/Comment: Kevin Murphy

Ellen Manovich, “Interrogating Twin Cities Neighborhoods as Archives”

Katie Lambright, "F. Stuart Chapin's Living Room Object Scale: Archives of Domestic Materiality"

Clara Oberle, “Berlin: The City as Archive”

Pedro Quijada, “Rescuing the Historical Memory of the Salvadoran Diaspora in Los Angeles: A Non-Traditional Archival Project for the Preservation of the Salvadoran Angeleno Cultural Production and History”

Spaces of Historical TourismChair/comment: Marynel Ryan van Zee

Elizabeth Dillenburg, “Coronation Park and the Negotiation of Colonial Legacies in Delhi”

Chris Burwick, “Archiving the Wende in Los Angeles”

Hanno Hochmuth, “Histourismus in Berlin”

Reflexing the Archive(Nichole, Meagan, Adri)

• http://reflexing-the-archive.weebly.com/index.html#/news/