UNE's Jennifer Tuttle publishes article in journal Women's Studies

Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy professor of Literature and Health in the University of New England School of Arts and Humanities and 2021-2022 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has published an essay titled “‘To Turn Over and Over’: The Loss of the Verso in the Virtual Archive.”

Tuttle's essay is one of several meditations published in the journal Women's Studies on the challenges facing archival researchers during the COVID-19 pandemic, when repositories have largely been closed to in-person visitors.

In her meditation, Tuttle considers researchers’ inability to access the verso — the reverse side of an archival object — and explores what it means to be able to turn an object over to examine what is on the back. Although some archives scan some materials to include the verso (often providing remote researchers with a digital image of a blank page), Tuttle argues that this is a poor substitute for handling the materials directly.

“Digitization is a boon for libraries and researchers alike, yet it creates the illusion of comprehensiveness that potentially further silences those who already may be overlooked or misrepresented in archives,” Tuttle said.

More generally, she argues, the verso (or reverse) side embodies all of the ways and reasons that handling materials directly, having greater access to less discoverable objects, and reading archives against the grain are crucial to the recovery of women’s work and lives.