"the Archive" As a Media Technology: Applying Interdisciplinary Methods to Historical Phenomena

Background and Purpose: Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children emerged in the 1870s, and serve as the most direct organizational ancestor to the modern day public child welfare system. This paper reads the Annual Report Archives from the Pennsylvania SPCC from 1877 - 1923 with an interest in understanding the inheritances of contemporary data-driven governance. By defining data and datafication as an epistemology rather than as computationally contingent, this case study’s interrogation of historical, organizational archives opens us up towards a stronger understanding of the genealogy of child welfare governance. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to describe the interdisciplinary methodologies utilized in reading the SPCC’s annual reports, and discuss how this methodological approach: 1) facilitated historical understanding of the SPCC and its data producing practices and protocols, and 2) led to an alternative definition of ontologies of data that contribute to understanding problems of practice and research of the present.

Methods: This paper is fundamentally interdisciplinary, defining the object of analysis through Media Studies, conducting its discursive analysis through Feminist Science Studies, and organizing its analysis through paradigms in Black Studies. Through Media Studies, I define the SPCC’s annual report archives as a media interface, and open up the historical record to consideration of the different levels of the social that interact, and are mediated with and through the archive. Diffractive Methodology, an epistemology within Feminist Science Studies, argues that the measurement subject, object, and device are inseparable, demonstrating the necessity of multi-modal, interdisciplinary inquiry towards building more robust understandings of phenomena. Lastly, through the work of Sylvia Wynter, I organize my discursive analysis, finding relations and interactions at the metanarrative, organizational, and inter-relational levels.

Results: What emerges through this methodological approach to organizational reports is an empirical and theoretical mapping. Empirically, I define and demonstrate that data are an assemblage. Here, rather than co-extensive signifiers with that which they purport to represent, data are seen as the product of a variety of affects, relations, cultures, materials, sciences, and perceptions. Theoretically, I argue that datafication is an epistemology, a particular way of knowing and being in the world, rather than a process of technology and labor practice.

Conclusions and Implications: I argue that method is a crucial aspect of how we understand our past, and by extension, think about and construct our future. The interdisciplinary lens I constructed to read the SPCC’s organizational reports allowed for a different understanding and description of both the past and present moment in Child Welfare practice, as it continues to grapple with the tensions and paradoxes of managing abuse and neglect across class and racial divides, when the very differences constitutive of those divides are what produced the field’s definitions and understandings of abuse and neglect. I argue that it is through method that we can work to understand and break this logical circle, finding solutions in how we think about problems and engage with communities, rather than how we compute them.