Archive Ethnography: What is the main argument, narrative, or e/affect?

What is the main argument, narrative, or e/affectThe authors argue that the making of an archive is an act of power, which influences the structure and content of the archive—data—itself. According to Mauthner & Gardos (2015), “Data curation and archival practices… can be understood as historically—and culturally—specific and contingent ‘metaphysical practices that necessarily enact specific metaphysical commitments to the exclusion of others’” (p. 156). By this they mean that archives consist of both the processes of memory-making and forgetting. Citing Derrida (1995), the authors claim that aside from the positionality of the archivist, the normalized processes of data curation within a given society, “privilege” certain perspectives (concepts and categories) within an archive and naturalize the forgetting of how archives are situated according to these specific “ontological and political commitments” (p. 158). In particular, Mauthner & Gardos (2015) focus on three data curation practices 1) data cleaning 2) data anonymization 3) metadata preparation and demonstrate how these processes perpetuate subjectivities that ultimately affect and situate the archival data they create.