To attempt to resolve this mental block, I've been reading around research methodologies, particularly those relating to memory as that's one object of my research. However, I'm also interested in methodologies for analysing discourse, since my focus is on the use of memory in policy and policy sensitive documents relating to digitisation. In trying to get to grips with different approaches, I've been paying close attention to book and article intros, which sometimes seem closer to methodological disclaimers, as in the case of David Lowenthal (The Past is a Foreign Country):
I have not conducted exhaustive research on most of the topics this book surveys. Instead I have tried to fashion a plausible synthesis out of heterogeneous materials. Necessarily trespassing beyond my own putative disciplines, I am bound often to have misinterpreted the art and architectural historians, the psychologists and psychoanalysts, the archaeologists and Renaissance scholars and others on whose research I have relied; for this I beg their pardon and my readers' forbearance (xxv).
It's tempting to proceed along similar lines; I've always thought that broader disciplinary and literary and art references can enhance critical writing. Unfortunately, I can't shake the feeling that there's also something undisciplined about wholly embracing this approach and that, since a PhD is a particular kind of assessment, for a PhD student, there's a danger of running into difficulties without a more clearly defined set of terms. So, for my purposes, I'm focusing on writers that explicitly deal with methodological issues and reflect my own research interests. Some highlight the dangers of deploying memory as a mode of cultural history, or privileging one aspect of collective memory to the detriment of alternative perspectives. Others provide a potential blueprint for my own project, although I'm not uncritical of all these methodologies. The positions I want to concentrate on (for now) are summarised below.
Uses of Heritage - Laurajane Smith
Laurajane Smith's central idea is that heritage does not exist in the sense that it is embodied in grand, monumental and historic sites. Instead, heritage is a discourse that 'validates a set of practices and performances, which populates both popular and expert constructions of 'heritage' and undermines alternative and subaltern ideas about 'heritage' (p. 11). Elsewhere, she writes that the way discourse is constructed 'is linked to the way heritage may be understood to be incorporated within the processes of remembering and forgetting' (p. 292, 'Envy of the World'). In her introduction, Smith gives a breakdown of the book, describing how the first chapter, informed by concepts of discourse analysis, 'identifies and examines the orders of discourse that surround heritage, and considers how and when they developed, and who engages in this dialogue' (p. 6). This process 'thus presents a theoretical and methodological underpinning for the rest of this chapter and the book' (p. 12). The analysis Smith constructs deals specifically with cultural and social work of heritage practices and performances and, while acknowledging Foucauldian modes of discourse, she anchors her approach in critical discourse analysis (CDA) so as not to lose sight of the materiality of heritage even as it is being problematised (see p. 13). CDA is concerned with illuminating the links between discourse and practice (more so than Foucault by implication, see critique on pp. 14-15), and with understanding how people organise themselves and act through particular discourses. Discourse is characterised as an 'irreducible part of social life' (p. 15) and competing discourses impact on on the way people live, both through legitimising social practices/relations and by potentially effecting social change. However, CDA does not just entail an analysis of discourse but also an analysis of the social and political context of that discourse. The notion of discourse advanced by CDA is summarised by Smith as 'both reflective of and constitutive of social practices' (p. 16). By extension, this is how heritage discourse is understood throughout the rest of the book.
'Engaging with Memory' - Emily Keightley
Emily Keightley's essay explores methodological approaches to memory as a topic of research, stressing that 'it is necessary to consider the commonalities and collective trends in memory, the features of their communication and representation, and their ritualised performances'; these traits 'suggest that memory is more than an expression of individual consciousness and is both socially and culturally constructed' (p. 176). However, memory is also understood to be in a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the collective in the generation of mnemonic texts (see p. 177). While suggesting that memory acts on and through the social world via a network of social structures that extend beyond the individual, Keightley guards against straighforwardly functionalist reasoning by emphasising the importance of memory's modes of representation and communication in this process. By way of an example, she references Jameson's (postmodern) account whereby memory, being intensely mediated, now only reaches us as a simulated version (see p. 178). Her summarising statement on the definition of memory borrows from Richard Terdiman: 'memory is central to understanding cultural life, not because it is the past but because it is the modality of our relation to it' (p. 179). In what follows, Keightley goes on to outline different ways of working with memory, one approach being an investigation of memory as the object of research. Like Smith's theory of heritage, she proposes that memory can be studied as a discourse, which is linked with the idea of memory as narrative: 'the codes, conventions and norms of representing the past as a memory can be examined, and in doing so routine ways that we make sense of past experience can be investigated' (p. 185). This approach to researching memory is intimately bound up with 'what memory provides for us in our contemporary lives' (p. 185). If I took a similar line to that outlined by Keightley, my study would be a largely theoretical consideration of the role and significance of memory in contemporary culture in relation to digitisation as a representation or mode of communication.
'Analysing Discourse' - Martin Barker
Martin Barker suggests that 'the seemingly inexorable rise of the concept of 'discourse' has made it almost unavoidable for cultural studies researchers, particularly since its invitation to theorise culture as 'like a language' coincides with so many impulses within our field' (p. 150). He describes how during the last thirty years discourse analysis has become one of the most pervasive areas of academic research, although the field is also distinguished by its diversity. Scholars are united by their interest in questions concerning 'the nature and role of language and other meaning-systems in the operation of social relations, and in particular the power of such systems to shape identities, social practices, relations between individuals, communities, and all kinds of authority [...] discourse work emerged from the collapse of academic Marxism, the rise of alternative social movements theorised by near-simultaneous academic constituencies, alongside the 'cultural turn' in various fields of the social sciences' (p. 152). After compiling a list of the seven main tendencies in discourse analysis, Barker offers a series of methodological tests that can be applied to specific cases to strengthen the integrity of discourse analytic claims, and make them more open to empirical testing by reception research. These are:
Defensible corpus - the corpus refers to the group of items studied by the qualitative researcher. If there is independent evidence of the cultural importance of the corpus, the researcher will have a better sense of what aspects may be most relevant to attend to and will have stronger grounds for the relevance of the outcomes of the analysis.
Defensible method - 'the conveniently small corpus is at greater risk of never being more than illustrative (i.e. it may favour cases which suit a conclusion reached on other grounds). In the act of becoming more than this, it inevitably grows. We have to face and find solutions to the problems of managing (both analytically and presentationally) large bodies of discursive materials' (p. 165).
Taking responsibility for implied claims - 'discourses inevitably make substantive claims about things beyond themselves. Most typically these are claims about reception'. We must take responsibility for these claims. A model of discourse analysis can be compromised if too many assumptions are made about audience reception; 'the moment we move beyond the loosest and least satisfactory use of terms like the 'audience'or 'the spectator', we begin to impute characteristics to them. The difficulty is that these imputations are simultaneously pseudo-empirical, and theoretically charged' (p. 166).
'Investigating Cultural Products' - Aeron Davis
Aeron Davis outlines what he describes as three of the most common research approaches to cultural production - political economy, textual analysis and sociological/ethnographic work. Case studies of cultural production can involve any combination of these methods. Although my case studies are not yet clearly defined (Europeana is likely to be one), broadly speaking the mode of cultural production I'm interested in is the digitisation of cultural heritage, although this is not linked to one specific industry. Here, I will concentrate on the first two approaches, although sociological/ethnographic methods will also eventually be relevant to my project.
A political economy approach involves studying cultural production at the macro level of industry and examining the conditions of cultural production, taking the view that these conditions influence cultural content, 'the researcher therefore attempts to link cultural outputs to the ecnomic, industrial and political factors that shape organisations and industries which then produce culture' (p. 53). Research is often carried out by collecting quantatitive data about industries. The important thing here is that cultural production is investigated indirectly; the focus is on structures, external factors and high-level decision makers not on individuals working in the industry (see p. 54); ' key practical operations involve locating, collating and aggregating data sources. Government institutions [...] professional associations and trade publications are all potential sources' (p. 66). Findings tend to give a more general representative account of the research object but if there's too much emphasis on quantatitive data, these findings can also be subject to manipulation.
A textual analysis approach investigates cultural production through an analysis of research outputs. Analysis can be applied to printed, audio and visual texts, to reports and historical documents. Here, cultural production is again studied indirectly. Assumptions about cultural production are inferred from the outputs themselves - 'in analysing texts researchers seek to highlight the common codes, terms ideologies, discourses and individuals that come to dominate cultural outputs. What can be said about the individuals featured in texts? Who are the contributors to the text? How are the texts framed and presented? What are the terms and phrases used and what is their symbolic meaning? What are the assumptions embedded in the texts?' (p. 56). The analysis may draw from qualitative or quantitative data; a qualitative approach would use a smaller sample of texts but look at them in more detail, whereas a quantitative approach would generate large quantities of numerical data (see p. 57). When looking at different organisational approaches to a set of issues (i.e. issues pertaining to digitisation), a comparative textual analysis can be illuminating. However, as Davis observes, 'in the past, rather grand claims about material and cultural relations have been deduced from limited and unrepresentative selections of texts' (p. 58).
Sociological and ethnographic approaches usually tend to involve interviews and participant observation. 'Key practical operations involve selecting, assessing and working with individuals - either elite professionals in the cultural industries or those who are part of a subculture (or field or network). Data collection, hypotheses and analysis must adapt during the research period' (p. 66).
'Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method' - Alon Confino
In Alan Confino's essay the concern is that 'memory studies lack a clear focus and have become somewhat predictable [...] The history of memory, in fact, has developed into a fragmented field. It lacks critical reflection on method and theory, as well as a systematic evaluation of the field's problems, approaches, and objects of study' (p. 1387). He also highlights the tendency to label historical events as a form of memory, warning that 'though the label is an attractive one, in itself memory does not offer any true additional explanatory power. Only when linked to historical questions and problems, via methods and theories, can memory be illuminating' (p. 1388). For Confino, memory is at its most useful when it communicates connections between the cultural, the social, and the political, between representation and social experience. He also expresses the view that the construction of memory should be inseparable from its contestation and reception, a relationship he compares to that of text and context (see p. 1398). Memory is in danger of falling prey to political reductionism and functionalism when it is defined solely through the 'politics of memory' or the 'politics of identity'. A neglect of its social and cultural dimensions can reduce memory to 'an illustrative reflection of political development' and become 'relativized to ideology' (p. 1393); thus 'we transform memory into a 'natural' corollary of political development and interests' (p. 1394). Confino summarises by suggesting that 'perhaps the first task of the history of memory is to historicize memory' (p. 1403). [Pierre Nora has made a contentious attempt to do this]
'Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies' - Wulf Kansteiner
In his article, Wulf Kansteiner takes a similar view that 'while memory has clearly become a central concept in the humanities and the social sciences, it remains unclear to what extent this convergence reflects actual common intellectual and methodological interests' (p. 180). He draws two main conclusions about the state of collective memory studies:
1. That collective memories have not yet been sufficiently distinguished from individual memory, and that the dynamics of collective memories are misrepresented through references to psychological methods (see p. 180). On the scale of large collectives, these references can be misleading - 'nations can repress with psychological impunity; their collective memories can be changed without a 'return of the repressed'' (p. 186).
2. 'Collective memory studies have (also) not yet paid enough attention to the problem of reception both in terms of methods and sources. Therefore, works on specific collective memories often cannot illuminate the sociological base of historical representations' (p. 180).
His recommendation is that 'we should reonceptualize collective memory as the result of the interaction among three types of historical factors: the intellectual and cultural tradtions that frame all our representations of the past, the memory makers who selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions, and the memory consumers who use, ignore, or transform such artifacts according to their own interests' (p. 180).
While Keightley outlines useful strategies for thinking about memory as an object of research, Olick and Robbins point out that 'memory is a process, not a thing, and it works differently at different points in time'. Likewise, the importance of reception in relation to collective memory emerges as a strong theme (most notably in Barker, Confino and Kansteiner). The particularly significant point in these essays is that any theory of collective memory should be mindful of making lazy assumptions about its audience or overstating the effect of theory-based claims, particularly in discursive analyses of memory. The political, social and cultural context is also important; as Jacques Derrida suggests, we '… must practice a politics of memory and, simultaneously, in the same movement, a critique of the politics of memory' (p. 63). However, memory should not be defined solely through its connection to political ideology, something that Laurajane Smith is in danger of doing with her uptake of CDA, applied to heritage discourse. Finally, any text-based or discursive analysis should draw from credible and representative sources, which may involve collating data from a large sample or ensuring that the cultural importance of documents can be independently verified.
N.B. In 'Twilight Memories', Andreas Huyssen defines his discussion of memory and the museum in the following terms: 'The purely institutional critique (of the museum) along the lines of power-knowledge-ideological apparatus, which operates from the top down, needs to be complemented by a bottom-up perspective that investigates spectator desire and subject inscriptions, audience response, interest groups, and the segmentation of overlapping public spheres addressed by a large variety of museums and exhibition practices today. Such a sociological analysis, however, is not what I will offer, as I am interested in broader cultural and philosophical reflections regarding the changing status of memory and temporal perception in contemporary consumer culture' (p. 17).
References
Barker, Martin, 'Analysing Discourse', in Michael Pickering (ed.), Research Methods for Cultural Studies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008, pp. 150-172.
Confino, Alon, 'Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method', The American Historical Review, 102:5 (December 1997), 1386-1403.
Davis, Aeron, 'Investigating Cultural Producers', in Michael Pickering (ed.), Research Methods for Cultural Studies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008, pp. 53-67.
Derrida, Jacques and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television. Filmed Interviews. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002.
Fairclough, Norman, Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge, 2003. [CDA Ref from Uses of Heritage]
Foucault, Michel, 'Governmentality', in Graham Burchell, C. Gorden and P. Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect, London: Wheatsheaf Harvester, 1991.
Huyssen, Andreas, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Jameson, Fredric, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Capitalism', New Left Review, no. 146 (July-August 1984), 53-92.
Kansteiner, Wulf, ‘Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory, 41:2 (May 2002), 179-197.
Keightley, Emily, 'Engaging with Memory', in Michael Pickering (ed.), Research Methods for Cultural Studies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008, pp. 175-192.
Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Smith, Laurajane, Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge, 2006.
Smith, Laurajane and Emma Waterton, ''The Envy of the World?' Intangible Heritage in England', in Intangible Heritage ed. by Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa. London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 289-301.
Terdiman, Richard, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. New York: Cornell University Press, 1993.
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