The Poetics of the Archive: Creativity Engagement with the Bloodaxe Archive.
- Submitting institution
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University of Newcastle upon Tyne
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 212991-73339-1285
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- On-line and various art galleries
- Brief description of type
- Multiple component project, including artworks, exhibitions, films and website
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- June
- Year
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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7
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Poetics of the Archive was a two-year (2013-15) AHRC-funded collaborative research project focusing on the newly acquired Bloodaxe poetry archive. Turnbull, Schofield and Brown were part of a team of 8 researchers led by the School of English including poets Jackie Kay, Sean O’Brien and W.N. Herbert.
The research challenge was to unlock the archive’s meaning and use by first understanding, then making it available as more than a scholarly resource accessible through a standard search-based catalogue. By developing creative, open-ended and playful interactions with it and presenting these within a new kind of creative interface, the project challenged the traditional idea of an archive, where the notion of search is simply objective.
Taking this as a point of departure, Turnbull, Schofield and Brown investigated, in different ways, the digitisation of archival materials and considered what is lost when the materiality of archives is abstracted behind an interface. The process of research drew upon serendipitous encounters with surrounding materials: feelings of privileged discovery are explored as an important part of the physical, visceral, experience of archival research. Scofield’s output, The Marginalia Machine playfully attempts to reproduce some of these experiential threads and in so doing provokes questions as to how more conventional interfaces might respond to them in future designs. Turnbull’s experimental study of poet Anna Akhmatova, developed collaboratively with poet Tara Bergin, experiments with notions of archival process as a site of knowledge production and the archive itself as a place of cultural memory. Brown’s work Panegyric Panorama was developed as a contrast to the close focus typically exacted by an archive, pulling back to consider the broader context of the origins of the artefacts themselves.
Research outputs formed part of the Bloodaxe Archive online, an outcome of the project, and more widely disseminated through exhibitions, films and events.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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