Bridgette vs. archivist horribliis: A Tale of True Grubbing

My fieldwork of information research takes place at a Montreal-museum as well as at libraries and governmental/non-governmental archives. I can confidently say that my research will take me to a variety of sites; some that are physical, place-based, and analog and some that are digital places. I will have to see where the evidence trail takes me… (more on this in a moment). At first glance, one may not think that my sites of research conform to the vision of the field put forth by Robert Park. However, perhaps it’s just that my cultural institution/information centre research simply complicates conventional ideas about of the range of sites of observation that are considered to be fonts of analysis and meaningful research? 

To conduct archival fieldwork at these cultural institutions, I will most definitely have to “go grubbing” in order to access data, generate data and conduct analysis that will help me to produce theory! To put it another way, in order to engage in the generative process of theory building as it relates to role of cultural institutions in mediating nationalism and contributing to urban-regional economic growth, I will need to access and analyze a variety of primary and secondary documents to generate my units of analysis (Davidson & Layder, pp.198-203; Luker, p. 160). This will help me to locate and classify the social interactions present in and through the documents that I hope to come across in order to produce some findings (ibid.). I might also look at a range of social practices at the site of the museum as an important cultural text in and of itself. 

Generating and defining units of analysis at sites of fieldwork requires a lot of grubbing just to even get to the data! And doing this leg work is important in the long-run so that our salsa-dancing has some kind of structured goal as well as repeatable dance steps. I mean, ideally you’d want to be able to teach someone your dance! From my experience in conducting historical fieldwork in Montreal, I did a lot of grubbing and I certainly came back a little dusty, sore, and even bruised from the experience. Well, my ego was certainly bruised at points! I started out with the wind at my back and full of hope about finding archival treasure. All novice researchers think that they will find the needle in the haystack, smoking-gun document. But, often we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for. The evidence trail eventually takes us there and in the meantime we desperately need the help of information professionals *cough, hello fellow colleagues* to help guide us through a morass of left over documentation that people in positions of power often don’t think is important enough to censor, withhold from the archival record, or don’t even know exists. 

However, not all information professionals are helpful. One of the biggest challenges underestimated research challenges is engaging with institutional gatekeepers. Like Luker emphasizes, negotiating the official as well as informal power structures that gird the field is an incredibly important and sometime very difficult part of gaining access to data: “…the catch-22 here is that you can’t get any real data until you negotiate the informal power structure, you can’t negotiate that structure until you know who runs it, and you can’t know who runs it until you’ve gotten some real data.” (p. 163). No kidding. This was the story of my life circa 2008. I was glad to have located some potential documents that pertained to my lofty theories and all of these corrections to conventional histories of Québec nationalism that had been milling about my head... And then I encountered archivist horribliis. The gatekeeper of gatekeepers. A provincial archivist in a white lab coat who had a very stern face. I didn’t want to judge a book by it’s cover so I overlooked the archivist’s outward emotional appearance… focused on trying to remember what I wanted to ask in French. Now, keep in mind that I was quite nervous about this too. I had been in French Immersion from kindergarten to end of high-school… but was out of touch with my conversational French… I was trying to locate documents about the construction of the Turcot Interchange in advance of Expo ’67. I said “Turcotte” instead of “Turcot”. Turcotte is a family name and name of a fonds. Not the same as Turcot at all. It’s one of those horribly confusing masculin/féminin things. Oh la la. The archivist claimed not to know what I was talking about at all. The face became sterner and sterner and I felt like that well-worn Canadian caricature of the non-native French speaker trying to speak French when in Québec.  Needless to say, I was not able to build good rapport in that moment and the entire archival reference interview deteriorated to the point that I could barely remember my questions or make sense of my written questions. The experience also made think a lot about my ethno-linguistic positionality in relation to the research that I was conducting and how it may affect my ability to access resources. While I did go back and ‘kept calm and carried on’, I was certainly more apprehensive. On the other hand, mere days later, I met a great archivist — a benevolent gatekeeper — at the city archives who guided me to significant fonds and subject files that I may have never found on my own (and made me feel like I could in fact speak French). 

In reflecting upon my own experience, it’s clear that while the nature of sites of fieldwork may have evolved since Park and the Chicago school of sociology’s time, their call for renewed empiricism and notion that experiential fieldwork forms the basis good quality research remains as relevant as ever.