The text largely advances Alexander Weheliye’s critical reflection on the human category.
The text advances Black Digital Humanities, digital humanities and African American Studies.
The text builds on ethnography by linking it to archives as a feasible method.
The text advances ethnographic methods by attempting to standardize approaches to recording and collecting data, anonymization, fact checking, and data sharing.
The text builds on community archives by researching the process by which they seek empowerment and social change (84).
The text builds from Derrida, Foucault, and Trouillot as well as archival theorists. The text advances methodological approaches through metaphors.
Zietlyn (2012) builds on the concepts of power, positionality, and coloniality throughout the archival process, drawing from Foucault and Derrida. Historically, archives have been used by colonial forces to document narratives through their own lenses and in order to serve colonial purposes. Zietlyn makes a case for reading such work through subversive lenses, as well as involving interlocutors and research subjects in current processes of archival work; weighing on the concept of "anonymization," Zeitlyn suggests that anonymity could potentially harm interlocutors or research subjects by erasing their rights to their own words and ideas. On consent, Zeitlyn prompts the reader to remain critical about just how consensual these relationships can be, as the use of archival work for future purposes is often fair game for a host of readers or viewers to do with it what they wish (such as fiction, as Zeitlyn suggests). Overall, Zeitlyn charges the reader to reimagine the concept of the archive, its goals, and effects.