Indexing archives

On our second studio brief on Societies, we learnt about indices and indexing. We did the activity in groups of 2 to 3. We worked with a previously chosen archive from the Bishopsgate archive. My chosen document was a publication called ‘The Lavender Letter’, it used to be a publication around the themes of homosexuality & culture. They published only 3 publications ever produced. We decided to work with the one published in 1982.

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We decided to use this one as our material for creating an index as it had a variety of articles, news, events, adverts, and a lot of different visuals, imagery, typography, etc., We thought this could generate interesting and strong visuals with a really strong underlying context relating to representation and culture.

The final outcome came out to be a collage of images and text. Our thought process behind that was to establish a link between the community surrounding the culture, the community of people it represents, with the content of it and how it connects with the community itself.

Things that directly talked about the community were put close to each other in the center of the page and everything else, that had loose relations to the community or was trying to establish connections for benefits not directly relating to the people, or were clearly disconnected and unrelated were put towards the edges of the page.

We arrived at an understanding about the relevance and nature of the publication and its content, through the method of indexing, we could visually see how much of the content actually talks about its people and how much of it is less geared directly towards the community it represents.

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