At the beginning of our summer internship with Poetry Matters we were told that we would be researching Dr. Barbara Althea Jones—a Trinidadian-born poet, plant geneticist, and professor at McGill during the sixties. Naturally, the first thing we did was google “Dr. Barbara Althea Jones.” We found almost nothing. So, we tried variations: “Dr. Jones,” “Barbara Jones,” “Professor Jones,” etcetera. Still, nearly no trace.
In an age when many of us rely on search engines to answer our every question from “how do you properly cite sources in MLA format?” to “what Caribbean artists performed at Expo ‘67?” it is an odd experience to be tasked with researching the “ungoogleable.”
Most of our internship took place at archives in Montreal. We began at 㽶Ƶ Archives, home to the Barbara Althea Jones fonds. This was the first time either of us had worked in an archive. As we sifted through pages upon pages of notes about the chlorophyll content of potato plants (Jones’ research concerned a chlorophyll mutant found in Solanum vernei), we began to appreciate the archive as an alternative place for research.
In the archive, time moved differently. Gradually, the past and present seemed to fold into each other. Both of us remember particular moments when the archive prompted us to feel that we really knew Jones. Yet, we were also often left with the strange sense that time had crumbled away entirely. As is not the case with the digital world, where we are persistently inundated with more information than we can process, the archive required us to sit in silence with primary sources, away from everyday distractions, and to develop critical lenses of our own.
Without the “Command+F” option to search for keywords, we found ourselves reading more widely and extensively than we have been used to doing. The archive required us to read everything. We had to decide, for ourselves, what seemed most important in the context of developing a portrait of Jones. Although we read many documents directly related to Jones’ artistic life and scientific work, we felt that we discovered her most vividly in the margins of these papers.
In one of Jones’ university notebooks, for instance, we found an intricate sketch of a rural scene across the top of the page. Complete with people, houses, musical instruments, and vegetation, the landscape gave us the impression that we were seeing, for a moment, the world through
Jones’ eyes. At the periphery of her notes, we caught glimpses of her curiosity, humour, and vibrancy.
When we encountered a note from December 1st of 1960 that read, “I hate snow,” we laughed to ourselves with quiet understanding. When we found doodles of professors from Jones’ years as a university student at Cornell, we were happy to recognize another mind that occasionally wandered during lectures. It was those moments, when the pen strayed, that Jones felt most real to us.
After reading through the material on Jones at 㽶Ƶ Archives, we sought to find traces of her in other local archives. This is when we would turn to supplement the work we were doing through the archives with online resources. With the details that we had learned from Jones’ fonds, we were able to find several old newspaper articles and journals that further outlined Jones’ life in Montreal. If the archives provided information about her academic life, these digital newspapers and journals provided more context for what we had learned about Jones’ extracurricular and artistic life.
While certain personal dimensions are often lost when we limit biographical research to digital spaces, we live in a time when we can have access to the benefits of both modalities: the intimacy of analog research through archives as well as the efficiency of digital research through online platforms. While the archive prompts us to engage in a slow and sensitive dialogue with history—to piece together a narrative for ourselves—digital resources are helpful tools for contextualizing that research.
We would like to thank Professor Miranda Hickman not only for her exceptional guidance and support throughout this internship, but also for sharing with us her initial interest in Professor Barbara Althea Jones. Also, as recipients of The Dean of Arts Development Fund, we would like to thank Dean Lisa Shapiro and the Arts Internship Office for making this internship possible.
Poetry Matters is an initiative out of the English Department at 㽶Ƶ that works to foster conversation around poetry. Please keep an eye out on the website for our forthcoming portrait of Dr. Barbara Althea Jones!