LAUSR

In 2010, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America announced a plan to digitize their entire collection of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s papers. Over the next five years, 34 boxes, 354 folders, and 77 volumes were converted into 34,881 digital images. Now organized and searchable by tags, Gilman’s paperwork finds itself deconstructed by the calculating memory of digital machines, a discourse network whose archival accounting resists the humanities’ preference for textual and narrative approaches to history. As Wolfgang Ernst explains, digital archives liberate historical objects from the burden of narrative by rematerializing the archive’s calculating function: “The archive does not tell stories; only secondary narratives give meaningful coherence to its discontinuous elements. . . In its very discreteness the archive mirrors the operative level of the present, calculating rather than telling” (“The Archive” 48). Archives remind us that an archaeological sense of the past begins with the monumentality of discrete data, not the continuity of textual patterns produced by narrative. Accounting for archival memory thus demands a new method of telling and counting history, one that distinguishes the “discontinuous elements” that resist narrative, push back against its textual bias, and calculate historical memory on a register that precedes hermeneutic interpretation. I argue that archival collections like Gilman’s hold the potential to detach our study of authorship from both the linear continuity of historical narratives as well as the abstraction of discursive categories. Most studies of US authorship locate authors in the broader context of cultural, economic, and literary history, reading their