As I am now starting to write up my methodology chapter, I have been gathering articles and books on archival research. While reading through Maria Tamboukou's remarkable 2014 article on the epistolary archive of Dora Carrington, I came across the following words from Caroline Steedman, which have not left my mind since:
"[Y]ou find nothing in the Archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things: discontinuities."
(p.45)
These discontinuities, these absences and gaps haunt the journal extracts making up the vast part of my very own source material. Steedman's almost poetical description of what I often felt was frustrating and tedious and challenging can almost reconcile me with hours of guesswork and searching for answers in piles of crumbling paper.
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Tambokou, M. (2014): Archival research: unravelling space/time/matter entanglements and fragments. Qualitative Research, Vol. 14(5), 617–633.
Steedman, C. (2001). Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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