Counter-Archives in Digital Spaces

As evidence of human activities and time periods, archives are invaluable resources for research and the historical record. Digital, public archives are powerful sites of memory and discourse. Since 2005, The New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Collections platform has provided over 900,000 prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, and more on their public website. However, recent calls for museums and heritage institutions to confront their legacies of colonialism have led to scholarly and activist work in the area of counter-archives that address inequalities and empower excluded voices. Counter-Archives in Digital Spaces is an interactive website that explores history and visual literacy using a group of digitized objects from the NYPL as the basis to form new perspectives and alternative narratives by exploiting artistic, experimental, and ludic strategies in interface design, suggesting how archives can be seen through new lenses. Using a data set of problematic cigarette cards from 1889, the website presents three case studies in what I term a “reluctant interface” that purposefully slows down and obfuscates the viewing experience for visual materials, an interface that is ambivalent about what it shows. The project uses an interactive experience that places the cards in various frameworks to posit questions of absence, visibility, representation, human value, and other provocations.

The “Coins of All Nations (Duke's Cigarettes)” card collection from the NYPL (George Arents Collection) serves as the data set to create three case studies exhibited on the project website. Donated to the library in 1943, Arents’ collection — consisting of advertising, books, prints, ephemera, products, and more — is among the largest in the world pertaining to the culture of tobacco. Cigarette cards first appeared in the late nineteenth century as trading cards placed by tobacco companies in cigarette packages to add rigidity. These collectible cards served as advertisements targeting bourgeois consumers and depicted the period’s cultural norms by featuring actresses, sports, travel, Americana, and more.

Duke’s Cigarettes, founded by James Buchanan Duke in Durham, North Carolina (which later became the conglomerate American Tobacco Company) released a set of cards in 1889 titled the “Coins of All Nations”, printed by Knapp & Co., NY. Coins from fifty nations were displayed on cards containing illustrative, satirical caricatures of racial and ethnic stereotypes as an attempt at humor. The caricatures give insight into misguided and negative attitudes toward people from other nations by mainstream Americans in the late nineteenth century, particularly those who were consumers of cigarette cards. An historical distance enables a view of these stereotypes as dehumanizing, offensive, and racist, especially considering the imperialist practices and the history of enslaved labor in the tobacco industry prior to the cards’ debut in 1889. Additionally, the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries saw the end of the Reconstruction era, the expansion of Jim Crow laws, the arrival of immigrants, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Wounded Knee Massacre, the Chicago World’s Fair, the Spanish–American War, the Philippine–American War, and countless other incidents related to colonization, segregation, racism, power, and violence in the United States. Considering these historic events within the current cultural moment of reckoning, we can now look at these cigarette cards in a new light, either to reconsider how these stereotypes came to be, or to examine them through contemporary perspectives.

As an archival provocation, the project prompts the following digital humanities inquiries:

• How can existing archives and publicly accessible materials be reconstructed to provide new points of entry into history?
• What is the role of subjectivity, ambiguity and speculation in assembling and caring for archives?
• Can a process of close reading visual elements without explicit explanation elevate visual literacy and comprehension?
• Can the design of an online archive provide an environment to generate new meaning between archival materials and between viewer and materials?