Poster & Transcript

Video Transcript

Hi, everyone! I'm Elizabeth Pineo, and my pronouns are she/her. I'm a Master's of Library and Information Science student at the University of Maryland. My research focuses on representations of disability in the music archive, and I'm—virtually—here to present some of my findings today. A quick note about terminology: As an autistic woman, I believe strongly in the power of identity-first language to empower the disability community. In recent years, I have also seen the beginnings of a movement back toward identity-first language in the disability community writ large. As such, I will be referring to "disabled people," not "people with disabilities" in my presentation.

And, a trigger warning: I'll be discussing outdated and offensive terminology used to describe disabled people. As a result, I will be using words like the r-slur throughout my presentation. Please take care of yourself, and if you find yourself struggling at any point during this presentation, please feel free to turn it off.

According to the CDC, 1 in 4 people is disabled, making disabled people the largest minority group in the world [1]. Yet diversity discussions often overlook disability topics, issues, and challenges. This erasure is a large, systemic problem that I cannot hope to change on my own. Instead, I am focusing on affecting change in the fields in which I hold a powerful enough voice: information studies and music. To this end, I conducted an online survey of the digital or digitized holdings of 105 archives with the aim of bringing to light the realities of disability representation in music archives. It is my hope that my findings will inspire terminology revisions within archival description in line with those we've seen applied to other minority groups.

Between February and March 2022, I conducted an online survey of 105 archives to determine types of disability representation within them.

Music archives take many forms, the most traditional of which is an archive of Western Classical music materials. For this survey, I chose to include sound archives, which hold not just music recordings but also spoken word, commercial, or other types of sound too. At times, a music archive was technically a collection within a more general archive but was large enough to warrant inclusion anyway. For example, The Moldenhauer Archives are part of the Library of Congress, which holds materials not limited to music.

To conduct the survey, I used the following search terms:

Disability

Disabled

Autism

Deaf

Handicapped

Retard(ed)

A quick word about terminology: I used outdated terminology that is or could be considered offensive today, words like handicapped and retarded, in my search terms because descriptions of archival records are not updated regularly. For example, if a record from the 1970s is tagged with "retarded," but not "autism," searching "autism" won't bring that record up. So, by using outdated terms, I was able to increase the number of results my searches gathered—and to demonstrate the importance of using outdated terms that we might find offensive when doing archival research. We need to work on changing the descriptions used so that they include terminology users will actually be searching today.

While conducting the survey, I limited my search behaviors to those typical of an untrained archive user to determine the baseline accessibility of disability-related records. For example, I refrained from using the "advanced search" features, because the beginner online archive user won't know how to use those. I wanted to emulate the behaviors of the untrained user because it is my belief that archival records should be accessible to everyone—not just the people who know how to use the insider tricks of the archival trade. Usability is important, and it's an area that it easy to end up lacking in, especially when time and budget constraints come into play.

Finally, to reduce the influence of my own biases in this work, I endeavored to make sure that my categories were as close to objective as they could be. For example, "noun" refers to an instance in which phrases like "the disabled" or "the handicapped" are used. These objectively refer to disabled people as collective nouns. In this example, the entry using "the handicapped" would also be counted in the "outdated" category—which brings me to an important point. I surveyed 105 archives, but the number of entries in this chart don't add up to 105. That's because some of the descriptions I encountered used different categories of representation, say, both person-first language and care-orientated language. In those cases, the description was counted in both those categories.

As you can see from this bar chart, "no mention" and "person-first language" are tied for the most prominent forms of representation, followed by "outdated language" and "identity-first language." It's worth pointing out that the identity-first language references were largely not implemented in response to the present-day movement back toward identity-first language in some circles, but, rather, the result of records that were last updated in the 1980s or 1990s when that was still the language typically used to describe disabled people. The full breakdown of these categories is provided on my website, so I won't go through it in detail here. But I do wish to draw attention to three categories in particular: records inaccessible, unprocessed, and sexualized.

Records inaccessible means that the records pertaining to disability were in some way unable not just to be viewed online but unable to be viewed at all. Even if I were to travel to the physical archive where those records were located, I wouldn't be able to view them. This is for a number of reasons. They might pertain to people who are still alive, who have asked that people not be able to read their personal letters until after they've died. That's completely fair, and it's standard archival practice. It could also mean records that are too fragile to be handled anymore. So, just know that records inaccessible encompasses a broad range of "inaccessibility" that usually isn't the result of any sort of malice, but the result of the practicalities of the archival reality.

Similarly, unprocessed means that the records had been acquired by the archive and had been entered into their system in a preliminary manner, but they hadn't yet been described, assigned metadata, or had any other fun cataloguing things done to them. Typically, unprocessed documents aren't accessible to the public, simply because they aren't ready. Again, this is just part of the archival reality. There are more documents awaiting processing than we'll ever be able to process in our lifetimes.

Finally, sexualized. Sexualized refers to descriptions that, well, sexualize the disabled person they are referring to. This sort of practice is appalling, and, unfortunately, was found in records described fairly recently. Archives reflect society's thinking at any given moment, and sometimes that reflection shows us unpleasant realities. We must continue, as a community, to demand understanding and acceptance—because that's the only way to change such perceptions of us.

Because the autistic and Deaf communities have made clear the type of language they prefer to have used to describe them (that is, identity-first language), I was interested to see whether archival descriptions honored those preferences. Unfortunately, like general disability, "no mention" continues to be the most prevalent category, followed by "outdated"—and the "identity-first language" category doesn't have any records in it.

This is saddening, and it is indicative of the lack of awareness, understanding, and acceptance of disability terminology in mainstream society.

While surveying the archives, I paid attention to the difference in results in a subset of them (roughly 33%) when searching "autism" or related terms as opposed to the outdated, offensive "retard" or "retarded." Because this sample size was so small, I could not draw any definitive conclusions. That said, I can anecdotally conclude that searching "retard(ed)" tends to increase the number of results pertaining to mental disability. Given that most people today would not use this terminology or would find it offensive, this is problematic for conducting successful, thorough archival searches.

Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are like hashtags on social media—but for every item under the sun! Much like a hashtag, they allow someone searching an archive to click on them, then quickly find more materials pertaining to the same subject. They're created by the Library of Congress, and cataloguers or other information professionals can submit suggestions for new subject headings or changes to existing ones. Submissions for new subject headings or changes to them are evaluated on "literary warrant," which means that the submitter has to be able to prove that literature uses the suggested term. The problem with that is that literature largely reflects a society's dominant voices as opposed to its marginalized voices. Like many spaces, marginalized voices in literature are the exception—not the norm. As a result, LCSH follow the dominant tendency to use person-first language. So, when a surveyed archive used LCSH (as most archives do), it necessarily got counted in the person-first language category.

I surveyed only English-language archives. This was a necessity because issues of representation vary by culture and language; for example, the person-first vs identity-first language debate cannot exist in most non-English language structures. To gain a global view of disability representation in music archives (and archives in general), we must also take an approach that decenters the Western, English-speaking world.

Given the pandemic, time, and location realities surrounding this project, I was only able to survey archival material that had been digitized. There are billions of analog archival records in existence that I was simply unable to access. For a fully comprehensive approach, finding aids, descriptions, and metadata for those records also needs to be analyzed.

Finally, the very nature of a survey resulting in categories able to be graphed is a limitation. I am but one person, surveying a broad range of archival records. In a space as subjective as that of representation, my decisions about categorization are easily called into question. To enhance what potential objectivity there is in a project as inherently subjective as this one, additional reviewers of the records would be required and comparisons of our categorizations would need to be made.

Language is messy, complicated, and powerful. The words used to describe marginalized groups are often used not to uplift, but to diminish. In the world of archives, the language we choose to use to describe marginalized groups is evermore important. Archives are, after all, the physical embodiments of not only our society's past—but also our present. They define our memories, and, in doing so, they define the knowledge we will have access to in the future.

Western music is often critiqued for its whiteness, its male-dominance, and its general lack of representation. These are critiques that are more than valid. Yet at the same time, we must remember that the Western music canon is often more diverse and representative than we give it credit for. Ludwig van Beethoven, for instance, was deaf. Most anyone who knows Beethoven's name knows this, yet we do not celebrate him for allowing members of the Deaf community to see themselves represented in the Western canon. Instead, we romanticize the great "tragedy" that befell him and call him a tortured composer. Why should this be the narrative we enact around disability in Western music?

This survey of music archives' representations of disability is but a starting point; we cannot improve our language choices until we know what they currently are. With these findings, it is my sincere hope that we will be prompted move with vigor toward a more inclusive, justice-filled future, not just in the music archive, but in society writ large—for our archives are but a reflection of our society.

If you're interested, a list of further reading materials can be found on the page called "Further Reading" on my webpage. With any additional questions or comments, I can be reached at the email address also listed there. Thank you all so much for watching.