Leaving A Mark: Archival Best Practices in Dystopian Literature

This study is a content analysis to understand how archival best practices appear in dystopian literature. The goal of this paper is to use examples of archival practices in dystopian literature to better understand how people have interacted with archives in the past and may interact with them in the future. This work was done by analyzing the text of four dystopian novels and comparing how they describe archival practices. Those novels were George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Looking at how they describe archival activities and showcase their interactions compared to best practices outlined in traditional archival publications. I identified five common themes. They related to collections, teaching, preservation, the right to be forgotten, and the tension of involvement. This study builds on and provides a groundwork for studying archival practices in non-traditional settings.