Arlene Schmuland (1999) and Karen Buckley (2008) wrote what are probably the most frequently cited articles addressing representations of archives and archivists in popular culture; their work suggests that the pop-cultural understanding of what archives are and what archivists do is often muddled at best (and wildly inaccurate at worst, often confusing archives with libraries, among other sins). In this presentation, we revisit Schmuland and Buckley’s work in the context of a study of The Magnus Archives, in order to suggest the tantalizing possibility that a horror podcast might have found its fear in a more accurate (and more critical) understanding of how archives work, both in terms of archival practice and in terms of archival ethics.
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Title
Archival Horror: revisiting Schmuland and Buckley in the Magnus Archives
References
Karen Buckley, “‘The Truth Is in the Red Files’: An Overview of Archives in Popular Culture,”
Archivaria 66 (2008): 95–123, http://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/34730. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, (Religion and
Postmodernism): (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Katherine S. Madison, “‘Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story’: The Use and
Representation of Records in Hamilton: An American Musical,” The American Archivist80,
no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 53–81, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.80.1.53. Arlene Schmuland, “The Archival Image in Fiction: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography,” The American Archivist 62, no. 1 (January 1, 1999): 24–73,
https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.62.1.v767822474626637. Ashley Nicole Vavra, “The Right to Be Forgotten: An Archival Perspective,” The American
Archivist 81, no. 1 (March 1, 2018): 100–111, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-81.1.100 Alex J. Newall and Jonathan Sims, “The Magnus Archives – Horror Podcast | Rusty Quill,”
http://rustyquill.com/the-magnus-archives/. “The Magnus Archives Transcripts Archive Archive A (Extremely Unofficial),”
https://snarp.github.io/magnus_archives_transcripts/. “The Magnus Archives Wikia,” https://the-magnusarchives.fandom.com/wiki/The_Magnus_Archives_Wikia.
