Forensically Reconstructing Non-Institutional Archival Practices in Timothy Leary’s Digital Archives (1989-1996)

Publication Date

6-21-2019

Document Type

Presentation

Publication Title

Research Infrastructure For the Study of Archived Web Materials (RESAW)19: The Web That Was: Archives, Traces, Reflections

Conference Location

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Abstract

In 1996, the controversial American psychologist and “acid guru” Timothy Leary published a selection of digital archival materials on his personal website at Leary.com, allowing website visitors to browse digitized facsimiles of select primary documents from his decades-long career. In this paper, I will perform a forensic reading of Leary.com and the digital artifacts included within, examining the ways that archival labor, digital file formats, and user interface design work together to produce an experience of historical memory that is uniquely reflective of its non-institutional origin. Furthermore, by focusing on Leary’s role as a public intellectual and his interactions with non-institutional archival practice, I hope to expand existing scholarly accounts of early web archives to include greater consideration of the archival practices that take place outside of traditional cultural and historical institutions.
Developed in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of archivists and digital artists, Leary.com utilizes a graphical user interface that employs first-person perspective and digital photography to simulate a three-dimensional walkthrough of rooms in Leary’s actual California home, with each room containing a different set of thematically-organized digital artifacts from Leary’s career. By situating digitized archival materials within a simulated domestic space, Leary.com’s photographic, three-dimensional, and first-person navigation system reframes materials from Leary’s personal and intellectual history in terms of users’ mutual embodiment within a shared contextual space. In the process, the Leary.com team gestures towards archival practice as a form of collaborative expressive technique, wherein users’ experiences of collective memory are enacted through a particular set of digitally constructed interactions, and sensory immersion is prized above the completeness of records.
This paper will present a forensic analysis of Leary.com and the historical artifacts contained within, comparing the website’s user interface and digitized artifacts against their original counterparts in the New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary Papers. These findings will be contextualized using written correspondence between Leary and his team of collaborators, in addition to various other print and born-digital primary sources from Leary’s personal archive. By emphasizing bibliographic details such as file format, available metadata, and the physical materiality of user interfaces, my analysis will highlight the variability of knowledge construction in an archival setting, thus illustrating several senses in which historically and culturally specific forms of archival labor produce sites of memory according to similarly specific epistemological agendas, both online and off.
While Leary initially rose to prominence as a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University in the early 1960s, the university terminated his employment in 1963 amid growing criticism of his public advocacy for non-medical administration of psychedelic drugs. Buoyed by his outsize public persona, Leary embarked on a prolific career as an independent scholar following his termination, publishing over a dozen books and serving as the inspiration for a 1994 American Psychological Association symposium and a 1996 special issue of the Journal of Personality Assessment concerning his works and legacy. Despite this notoriety, Leary’s attempts to solicit commercial interest in digitizing and publishing his archives via CD-ROM throughout the early 1990s were unsuccessful. Undeterred, Leary assembled a staff of independent digital artists and archivists to construct his digital legacy, and the team won a People Magazine “Cool Site of the Year” award for their work in October 1996.
As a case study, Leary.com provides an early example of the collaborative, interdisciplinary, web-based digital archival projects that have since become predominant in Digital Humanities and public history settings. While similarly interdisciplinary and collaborative digital archive projects from the same era are well-documented in the scholarly literature concerning digital humanities (e.g. Liu 2004, Dalbello 2010), most such case studies concern projects that occurred within universities or comparable cultural institutions. In contrast, relatively scarce academic attention has been paid to such projects when pursued by public intellectuals and independent scholars. By focusing on the independent team responsible for producing Leary.com’s digital archives, I aim to expand on academic history and archival studies concerning diverse forms of collaborative archival labor. In conclusion, I suggest that reexamining Leary.com today helps to emphasize the ways in which all archival practice relies on unseen curatorial and authorial labor in order to construct the subjective experiences of information access and the range of narrative possibilities present within an archival collection.

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