Hannah Albert-Abrams - "The Perfect Copy: Photographic Facsimiles and the Remaking of Colonial History"

Abstract: In 1912, the John Carter Brown Library of Providence, Rhode Island, acquired a machine that would have an "unexpected influence" on library operations. The Photostat allowed librarians, for the first time, to produce affordable copies of entire printed books and manuscripts, transforming the ways that documentary heritage could be circulated, collected, and researched. Just one year later, in 1913, the library launched its first major Photostatic copying project: the replication of their extensive collection of Mayan documents. In this talk, I use the coincidence of this new technology with this ethnographic project to examine the colonizing impulse that underlies efforts to diversify the historical record. I show that through textual reproduction, the hands of copyists, collectors, librarians, and machines leave their mark on the page, and on the past. In asserting accuracy and authenticity, textual reproduction can serve as a vector of colonization. These practices have left traces on the collecting institutions that we work with today, and have implications for the new digital collections that we are designing for the future.

Hannah Alpert-Abrams is a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation and Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in library studies, book history, and digital humanities, with a focus on the circulation of documentary heritage in the United States and Latin America. Her current project, "Unreadable Books: Colonial Mexican Documents in Circulation," offers a history of textual reproduction and its role in shaping colonial history, from scribal copies to photostatic facsimiles and digital repatriation projects. Her digital scholarship focuses on questions of access and ethics in the development of tools and platforms for culturally sensitive historical records, including the Primeros Libros collection of sixteenth-century printed books and the Guatemala National Police Archive. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017.