Note: this map is outdated in terms of holding content but not the idea itself. My personal holdings of hard copies have dramatically increased since the original time of writing, and during the failed attempt at donating this project to the UMB archives I received verbal confirmation from the archives that they have about 50% of what I have / had as of the summer of 2026. Note also that these nodes are by now out of date, with Node #4 vanishing from my radar but allegedly remaining on campus, Node #2 merging with my own, and Node #3 continuing on its merry way randomly spawning boxes of books in unlikely places.
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What happens when an institution develops amnesia, and information becomes siloed behind personal and departmental networks instead of broader cooperation and coordination? The phenomenon can be described as Archival Feudalism. This is where no one is wholly responsible, everyone partially controls information, and no one has the whole picture of events or of history itself. Knowledge-based authority, as a result, breaks down and becomes conferred by material possession of actual books and records. The ability to shape narrative, to grant/deny access, and to define legitimacy are all now negotiable in the immediate near-term future. The competition that emerges from this breakdown is latent, but not non-existent. This condition emerges most clearly in low-prestige or poorly documented materials, where institutional coordination is weak and preservation is not centrally enforced.
One would think a university is a network of interoperable and interacting branches moving outward, parallel, and forward in different directions in accordance with different priorities. That research is generated not in isolation. This is entirely reasonable, but in the instance of niche subjects or poorly documented ephemera, it is also partially incorrect. The word ‘partially’ is a deliberately used one, because the university does remain a network of branches containing their own mandates, authorities, and internal rules that bind, but this network is loose, informal, and founded on (at times) working relationships between individuals rather than overall centralized mandates that enable cooperation.
To return to our feudal example, The Duke controls a province, the Baron a corner of a province, a minor lord a patch of land, a Knight might have a little here or there, and the King in theory controls it all through the perception of authority. In practice the King is dependent on the Duke, and the Baron to control portions in their name to form a collective whole. This continues until the entire structure either centralizes under the control of a dominant authority with a clear and legible mandate, or else collapses into separate power bases that draw clear lines of authority around themselves.
This feudal structure is also applicable to the niche research subject at the level of the University. One just replaces the King with The Archive, and the Duke and Baron with other institutional actors or nodes of control. Secondly, one then just replaces the idea of geography with the idea of a niche research subject. For example, instead of political territory in the historical sense, at the University of Massachusetts Boston has its now-defunct student literary magazine, The Watermark as a primary vehicle for unintended feudal dynamics.
Running from roughly 1993-2023 UMass Boston’s Watermark journal put out 34 individual books across 35 volumes (one being a hybrid Vol 31-32 production, possibly due to COVID-19). Currently, no one owns a complete run of all 34 hardcopy books. In our feudal analogy, this can be equated to no one controlling the full political environment. This is a bold claim, but one I feel moderately comfortable making based on my own research.
Furthermore, I am also confident in claiming there are a total of six documented separate collections, archives, or shadow-archives that have separated the 34 books into the equivalent of territorial holdings, that I personally am aware of or have had interactions with. Much as feudal lords competed for influence and status, this Archival Feudalism is just a series of competing nodes that cooperate nominally, or when forced / compelled to do so. More often than not, they just exist independently of one another. One must imagine the lubrication holding it together is not so much a church or a crown as in actual Feudalism, but instead funding.
In order to facilitate support for this claim I have to the best of my ability applied it within my own university context, ranking them by how “complete” their holdings of The Watermark are, and included it in map-form at the top of this article.
Firstly there is the archive itself. Its records are searchable by the public. Digitization of student work stops in 2013 with Volume #22 in 2014, but holdings of physical copies continue into Volume #25. They, in theory, are the monarch in this framework: institutionally, socially, politically, and culturally acknowledged as the central force binding together holdings of knowledge. And yet, they do not have a complete run: meaning instead of centralization, knowledge is drifting rapidly towards fragmentation and separate knowledge bases. The farther one goes from the archive, the less the archive understands in turn what is going on around it: exactly as a medieval king is dependent on lesser nobility for a full picture of the situation. The archive, much like a King, cannot be everywhere at once.
Secondly, there is Node #4. The Archives and Node #4 in theory cooperate under the UMass umbrella, but in truth don't, given that I have spoken privately with both, and neither seems aware of the other. Node #4 has hard copies going up to around Volume #22 from 2014, as well, with scattered holdings of physical copies going into the year 2016. They also hold control over editorial / rough draft PDF volumes of post-2018 copies of The Watermark.
Thirdly, there is Node #1. I have spoken with them as well, but given they are a student organization of a sort, they are dependent on Node #4 for funding. They function as the knight in our framework. King→ Lord→ Knight, becomes Archive→Node #4→ Node #1. Their holdings are entirely physical and only contain volumes Post-2015 with no digital copies beyond what they can share from the publicly available ScholarWorks page.
Fourth, there exists a series of small documented Private Collections, which are lumped together under Node #2. Their collective volumes often run from 2016-2022(ish). We have now reached the borderlands of university territory, where the words “here be dragons” appear on the map and the Archive does not know what it does not know, and actors exist far from centers of control. Technically, copies exist also in faculty offices, which collectively make Node # 3. Occasionally books surface in donation boxes and “free book” collection dumps left in stacks on random tables. These are as the oceans tide though, professors move in and out and around, and in their wake debris is deposited randomly. It cannot be truly relied on.
Everyone is holding onto some shreds of the past, using it as a sense of continuity for the present. There are some feudal archives more official than others, but all are decentralized and operating in their own existing foundations and own power bases. These power bases are based on access to copies, as only by holding books does one have the legitimacy to say they are an archive. Only those who have copies can shape the narrative of the history of student publication, and any subsequent research that comes from it.
The word ‘shape the narrative’ is not inherently malicious but it is a truth that must be acknowledged. Some power bases use their copies of The Watermark to anchor the past. Some use their copies to promote a future as a legitimate publication. Private collections are engines of nostalgia. And the Archives are waiting for direction from above, given their nature as a reactive donor-driven based model of acquisition where they cannot go out into the world and build their own maps. But I have done so for you.
In the event of Archival Feudalism, where power, access, and legitimacy over control of the record stands at the fork in the road, the role of the independent researcher becomes interesting in attempting to tie everything together, but carries its own dangers. More often than not, the independent researcher is not wholly integrated into the system they study. At worst, they are just another student who is expected to write term papers, and doors close in front of them. While the independent researcher can respond in hours where others respond in weeks, or months, they often find themselves lacking the institutional backing to formalize any research or project. The independent researcher, if still embedded in the university, is able to leverage access but not necessarily the perception of power beyond brute accumulation of hard copies of records. While this does confer a species of legitimacy, it is as ephemeral as their materials are. What happens when the independent researcher leaves the university?
The above map shows black lines connecting institutional pathways, which trod the predictable routes of power, access, and archival legitimacy. The red lines show how I myself, as an independent researcher still embedded at the university, interact with every other node in the network. Naturally, this framework is not sufficient to interact with larger and more public bodies of knowledge. It cannot scale up laterally to say, a Hemingway Archive or a Presidential Archive just because of value perception both internally and externally. The perception of the importance of this knowledge is just too great to allow for Archival Feudalism to the degree that materials considered “lesser” are allowed to become feudalized. For niche research, undervalued materials, or poorly documented bodies of work like undergraduate arts journals, one can imagine it scales up in parallel to other organizations, publications, and even universities.
The Watermark existed for almost 30 years. This makes it a structural and organizational anomaly in the world of student publications. Many new undergraduate journals are lucky to get five years (or one graduation cycle), and then promptly vanish. The Watermark, as a result of its age, exists as a kind of Schrodinger's Cat Archive. It exists, and it does not exist. There is a record, and at the same time there is not a sanctioned record. The independent researcher, in this framework can only point that out but do nothing to fix it.
This condition, once it takes root, is not within the power of the admittedly powerless independent researcher to fix from within the institutional confines. The best that can be done is the accumulation of materials outside of institutional control, like a lifeboat on a sinking ship. Once the record is stabilized, re-engagement becomes possible not as independent researcher to archive, but as archive to archive.
This is not necessarily a fixable condition. As long as knowledge is treated as hierarchical, and universities operate on district funding and acquisition patterns oriented towards prestige, it becomes clear that a solution is harder to conjure up than a nebulous statement that “change is necessary.” I can map the system I have described. I can even attempt to rebuild a simulacrum of the system: a copy of an archive that has no original. The relationships, the permissions, the informal pathways: none of them are permanent. The current archival system will continue to exist, and likely degrade further as people within the system continue to move through a fragmented record that has gaps and blank spaces hardening.
All the while, the archival record will continue to exist, and not exist.
(Note: This essay was first written in February of 2026)
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