standards into another context, such as East Africa. Table 2.3 illustrates the purpose of this analysis and the anticipated outcomes. It should be noted that, when the interview data is used in this thesis, multiple interviews included in one reference represents a collective opinion or view amongst a group of interviewees, whereas when only one interview is referenced it represents the view of that individual interviewee.
TABLE 2.3 DATA ANALYSIS OVERVIEW WITH ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES Mimesis Developed World
(DW)
East African Community (EAC)
Outcome M1 Identify the issues and
problems that led to
M2 Study Open Archival Information System and Repository Audit and Certification
would affect the applicability of TDR standards.
2.5.5 Anticipated Problems and Difficulties Experienced with the Study
Anticipated constraints with this study include the author’s own cultural or societal biases, which will inevitably affect her ability to delve as deeply into the subject matter as possible. The author is not from the East African region, nor does she come from a developing country, which she understands may impede her capability to understand fully the realities faced by East African records and archives practitioners. While her experience consulting in developing countries has given her insights into the constraints and challenges of digital records management in the EAC, she knows that because she has not lived in the region she is not fully versed in the culture.
Another difficulty with the research resulted when two potential interviewees failed to respond to interview requests. The two interviewees were standards
developers (M1 (DW)), both of whom had been heavily involved with the development of TRAC and RAC. They were considered important interviewees, but after many
unsuccessful attempts to contact them, they were removed from the sample set. In the end, the author does not believe their omission greatly affects the findings of this thesis but she acknowledges that their insights would have been helpful.
Finances were a significant constraint on data collection. The author is grateful for the support offered by the IRMT, which allowed her to visit most of her data
collection sites. However, limitations on finances meant it was not possible to conduct a site visit to the Kenyan National Archives and Records Service or the National Archives Service of Norway.
2.6 Conclusion
This chapter has explored the use of mimesis in the fields of linguistics and philosophy to explain language formation and reality construction through text. This analysis of
mimesis concluded with an examination of Ricoeur’s threefold mimetic methodology and its relevance to this study, contextualising the use of mimesis and highlighting the application of this theoretical model in other discourses. Of particular interest was the discussion of the works of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur.
Benjamin and Derrida underscored the socially constructed and culturally mediated nature of text planning and reception. Based on their arguments, it can be agreed that individuals in society implicitly incorporate into texts, social conventions, cultural norms and other mitigating influences. Readers living in the same time and space are assumed to be capable of decoding these social and cultural cues in the documents. However, there is an implied understanding in these discussions that readers who do not share the same time and space as the author of a text may have difficulties understanding the latent structures present in the document. Ricoeur attempted to deconstruct these underlying subtexts while studying narrativity and time in fictional and historical texts by developing the threefold mimetical methodology.
Mimesis is particularly germane to this thesis, as it seeks to deconstruct how texts are created and to consider the external processes that affect their development and interpretation. By extension, the argument can be made that the standards development, interpretation and operationalisation are not exempt from these pre-existing constructs. Biases are built into documents such as standards by virtue of the fact that standards developers cannot escape their own reality – they live in their own particular time and space. The readers of those standards are also not able to extricate
themselves from the overarching paradigms that influence their understanding of the world around them, which equally colours their interpretation of texts.
Ricoeur’s mimetical model formalises a methodology for a comparative analysis of both the development and reception of standards, allowing the researcher to decode assumptions in the text. It is important to underline again that both OAIS and RAC were formulated and tested in the developed world with no input from developing nations, especially from the Eastern African region. Therefore, there exists a very strong possibility that standards developers have made certain cultural, infrastructural, educational and economic suppositions, incorporating these into the standards. Using Ricoeur’s model allows the researcher to determine if this possibility is, in fact, true.
Methodology guides and supports the research process, providing the researcher with a framework to answer research questions concretely. Any methodology must be carefully selected and aligned to the specific aims and objectives of the research in question, otherwise the hypothesis that frames the study cannot be adequately tested in order to arrive at well-founded conclusions. The methodology used must also adapt to the realities of the research situation. For instance, in this study the researcher was able to draw on extensive field experience in Africa, and in order to ensure that personal experience is clearly identified she adopted conventions for introducing experiential information in the body of the text. Other realities included variations in the availability of interviewees, with an abundance of interview subjects in some jurisdictions and fewer such subjects in another. In the end, every effort has been made to follow the
methodology chosen while ensure it is reasonably adapted to the circumstances on the ground during field research.
The next chapter examines developed world archival literature touching on topics such as preservation and access and ideas related to digital records authenticity and reliability as well as notions of trust and their impact on TDR certification standards.
This examination will feed into later analyses of M1(DW) and M3(DW), as archival literature along with that of digital libraries and space data science have informed current understandings of digital preservation and TDRs.