The document discusses performing archives and using performance to engage with sensitive data from historical records. It describes a project to capture demographic patterns and individual experiences from over 18,000 sterilization recommendations in California from 1921 to 1953. The document proposes sonifying and "haptifying" (engaging through touch) some of this archive data as a way to perform the archives and experience the data in a different way than traditional archives that house information. Performance helps reframe data and archives as already active rather than passive things we act upon and encourages taking responsibility for the knowledge created from engaging with them.

1. Performing Archives: sensitive
data, social justice, and the
performative frame
Jacqueline Wernimont, Ph.D.
Arizona State University
Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics Fellow
Literature and DH Faculty
@profwernimont | jwernimont.wordpress.com
https://vibrantdata.wordpress.com/
#vibrantlives & #performingarchives

2. Authorized by eugenics laws
more than 64,000 people
underwent sterilization
procedures in the U.S. between
1907-1963
Source: https://eugenicsarchive.org

3. California Eugenics Archive Project
Collaborator: Alexandra Minna Stern and
team (Michigan)
Goal
Capture and illuminate demographic patterns and
individual experiences of eugenic sterilization over four
decades in California
Scope
18,000 sterilization recommendations processed by
the state of California from 1921 to 1953
patient records that includes 212 discrete variables
culled from over 30,000 individual documents.
nearly 1/3 of all sterilizations performed in 32 states in
the U.S. in the 20th century

4. “Individually identifiable health
information”
– A person’s past, present or future physical or
mental health or condition,
– provision of health care to the individual, or
– past, present, or future payment for the provision
of health care to the individual,
– Individually identifiable health information
includes many common identifiers (e.g., name,
address, birth date, Social Security Number).
Source: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/

5. To edit the missing…
Morris Eaves (2011) ”The Editorial Void:
Notes toward a Study of Oblivion”
Given that “dispersal and disposal are the
normal fate of information when it hits a
generational border.”
“how might we edit the missing?”

6. HIPAA data as promise-crammed
instantions
Wai Chee Dimock (2006) and Simon Palfry
(2015) on “fractal” histories
Palfry: the archival record as “in one sense
an insufficient shard of the true substance;
in another sense, a promise-crammed
instantiation of everything”

7. Performing Archives
Diana Taylor via Rebecca Schneider : “there
is an advantage to thinking about a
repertoire performed through dance,
theater, song, ritual, witnessing, healing
practices, memory paths, and the many
other forms of repeatable behaviors as
something that cannot be housed or
contained in the archive”

8. Vibrant Lives and Data Shed
collaborators: Jessica Rajko (ASU) and Eileen
Standley (ASU)

9. Sonifying the Archive
Visual Map of Sonified Sterilization Data
(selection of 100 files from first two years of data)
M + consent =51
F + consent = 75
M w/o consent=250
F w/o consent=300

10. “Haptifying” the Archive
Haptics : tactile experience, knowing
through touch/skin
Woojers (personal sub-woofers,
essentially) playing the same sonified
selection, currently attached to
enameled wire to make group
experience possible

11. Performance helps to orient away from thinking of
data and archives as something upon which we
act toward the idea that data and archives are
already acting.
It is also a way to imagine that to engage the
archive/ data is pledge ourselves as responsible
for the kinds of knowledge and subject positions
that our efforts engender.