Work in Progress

The Gallows Diary of Mary Surratt, Presidential Assassin–a book that uses this case history to examine the conditions of subjectivity when accessed exclusively through secondary archival sources only.

The project speculates on new ways to render archival sources using an array of contemporary collecting and presentation tools from Google image search to Polyvore, Tumblr and Instagram.  My attention is rapt by the way her archive, as it continues to assemble even today, forces the kind of intellectual quandry that we face in our hyper-mediated age.  This is a new kind of LIVING history—one we can leverage more productively as teachers and learners. This project harnesses the archival powers of the internet to explore the ways in which what we think about the past, and perhaps more accurately, to explore what we use to think about the past, how it changes, and what those changes might mean.

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