Artifact #3: Conference Paper #1
*Note, In addition to the essay publication, I was also invited to speak at 2 conferences during the Spring 2026 semester. One was in New York at Stony Brook, and the other in Amherst at UMass Amherst, in my home state of Massachusetts. Despite submitting proposals, and getting accepted, I could not speak at either. Both conferences were about Archives. The slideshow that came with the conference is based off of old data that has not held up to new discoveries and information. So it has been omitted after some consideration regarding what kind of historical record I wish to present: one that is narrativley clean, or one that is accurate? But the speech itself drew heavily on other parts of work from this website, and as a result has been included below verbatim.
Who am I?
Hello, my name is Carston and I am a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Boston studying English MA program on the licensure track to become a state certified teacher. I also got my undergrad degrees in English and History at UMass Boston between 2016 and 2023, which means I’ve been around one departmental floor for about 10 years now. I think this gives me a somewhat unique perspective to discuss its history, and how that history is handled. I, in specific, do not mean faculty history or funding history, but the output of the students who are in the classrooms and in the lounges.
Introduction
The first inevitable thing one confronts when digging into history is loss. Loss is understandable when put in context, to be sure, after all if it happened 2000 years ago, things tend to slip through the cracks. But what about if that history happened between 1993 and 2023? What if the history being lost happened only yesterday, and the only reason it was lost was because no one thought to write any of it down while it was happening?
Umass Boston is a fascinating campus for a number of reasons, and I say that fondly. I’ve been on it since 2016, I’ve seen and done a lot while under the UMass Umbrella as a student. I am saying that because between 1993 and 2023 it hosted and ran an undergraduate student journal called The Watermark. And now in 2026, some 3 years later, very few students on campus even remember it existed. I have a rough timeline here that breaks down the four major acts of The Watermark, here. (show slide 1). This is to triangulate for you that this history is longrunning, is recent, and is lost.
Okay, but how do we know it’s lost? (show slide 2) There are 35 volumes that the Watermark put out, statistically, we can see that the UMass Special Collections has at the time of writing about 60% of the overall print run archived and digitized, from 1993 to about 2014. Another significant chunk of the post 2016 years is circulating in private collections, former Editors and contributors I’ve spoken with. And one volume, Volume 32, is completely gone. I cannot find it anywhere, or find anyone who has it. Originally, when I started doing this work, Volume 25 through Volume 33 was also lost, until copies were found being held by the school newspaper in one of their storage closets. And even then, they did not know what they had because I had to ask them to double check their closet, it took them 3 days to look.
This was the flagship student publication for 30 years. Longer still, if we include the predecessor publication to The Watermark, Howth Castle, which was founded in 1985. And the school archive has the first half of it. This begs the question, how much student literary output is being lost that does not operate under a University mandate? Zines and magazines and creative writing projects, how much is being made that’s also being lost? This question is not rhetorical, and I can tell you exactly what is being lost, because since November 2025 I have been rooting around in old storage closets, abandoned shelving, and lounges across campus trying to build answers to this question. Unfortunately, because I am in several instances over a decade late to the scene, this is the best that can be done: I can only identify loss, not reverse it.
Codicology
So we’ve established that history is vanishing in real time. But what kind of history is vanishing, what in specific are we losing when we lose these books? Well as we talk about these books, I want to make an important but controversial statement. A PDF is not a book. An archive built entirely on PDF’s is not a complete archive, materiality matters here, especially at the level of the college undergraduate. In book history, we call this “Codicology”, the literal study of the book as a physical object in the world, and once I started holding these books about UMass Boston, it became very clear to me that, historically, a digitally preserved book is presenting an incomplete story about UMass Boston, and all I was seeing was the words on a page of one specific copy, out of anywhere from 1,000 to 6,000 copies made. I want to talk about Volume 11.5 of The Watermark, specifically as emblematic of this.
The ‘point five’ here is doing especially important work, because it signals to us that this was not a standard, regularly scheduled release. (show slide #3) I won't read the full editor’s note, but the beginning is what I want to hone in on here: “they said it couldn't be done. They said that we were mad. But we forged ahead anyway... This is the first year that we've had a fall issue of The Watermark,” this is very triumphalist language, this is students obviously proud of their accomplishments, and reveling a little bit in their success. But to actually hold copies of Volume 11.5 shows us something that the text you see on the screen can’t show, which is that this was a close run thing.
The physical material of the book is lower quality. The covers are a kind of rigid cardstock, not glossy photo paper. When I opened the front cover of the first ever copy of 11.5 I ever held, I physically cringed as I heard the book crinkle and hiss and the glue holding it together threaten to come undone, and this is something that’s happened with all 3 copies of 11.5 I have found. The entire volume, from cover to cover, is a black and white production, and it is the only copy of the Watermark ever made that is entirely in black and white, except for perhaps Volume 32, which I have again, never seen and cannot make any judgments on. Holding the actual book, as opposed to a circulating PDF, shows the attentive reader that these students worked hard to make something that was not guaranteed, and holding just the PDF runs the risk of erasing that material, instinctive recognition.
In truth, the books that undergrads are making are almost all some combination of small, fragile, magazinelike, and unassuming, just like Volume 11.5. Now, this copy is fully archived both physically and digitally. But let’s talk about a situation that’s a little more complex now, let’s talk about Volume 21. Volume 21 is interesting for a different set of reasons. (show slide #4)
The first time I held a copy of Volume 21, I missed this, because I did not have my glasses on. When I went back and re-read the legal boilerplate language buried in size 10 font, I found this line: Unfortunately many of the color images could not be printed in this volume due to budgetary constraints. The full PDF of the volume created by Andria Ward can be viewed on our website. I, curious, went to that website. I do not encourage you to do so, because it has been hijacked by a series of Japanese language loanshark malware advertisements. But there is a PDF hosted on ScholarWorks, with the rest of Volumes 1 through 22. What I have been unable to confirm is if the PDF volume on ScholarWorks is the same volume as what was hosted on the website. Is what we are looking at in this PDF the original Volume 21, or is it a variant of Volume 21, and the original is now lost?
Between these two moments, one of triumph and one of uncertainty, we can see the common denominator running through them is fragility. Undergrad literary culture exists in a sort of closed loop ecosystem. (show slide #5) They generate literary output in bulk that does not travel to the official archive, and then it vanishes, and this fragile pattern has continued unabated for a long time. So if this pattern is playing out for a 30 year old publication, what does it mean for one-off projects, Zines and magazines and passion projects that last only 1 semester?
I mentioned earlier that my self-directed project began in November of 2025. It began when I found a Zine in the graduate student lounge on the floor to ceiling bookshelf there, that described itself as a Jane Austen Fan Fiction project. I was originally looking for a copy of a book for a class that I was too lazy to order online, and then I found this instead. And I became fascinated, and decided that people should remember them. The primary challenge at the time was organizational infrastructure. How does someone with no money, no training, and a stack of books go about building memory? The first iteration of this project was a free Google Site with drop down menus and drag-and-drop photos of book covers, but what turned it from a photographic list to an archival project was provenance.
Where did you find the book, where does the book come from, how does the book move through campus, and how did it end up pressed between a stack of textbooks from the 1990s, if it was made in 2013? Rooting around in grad lounges for this kind of thing is not necessarily something that Professional archivists have the time for. Furthermore, a lot of my work in the beginning was dependent on peer networks: approaching classmates directly to solicit them for donations. Simply, most student-authors in the UMass Boston English Department don’t interact with archivists, and would not recognize one if approached because departments are so siloed.
To illustrate the importance of an archivist being in the room where the history is being made, there was a class taught in the Spring Semester of 2025 on Editing and Publishing, where students involved were broken into teams and required to fund, design, and launch a magazine of their own. Naturally, I became fascinated with this project. Three unique student founded and student projects were completed, titled Queeah, Literally, and The In-Between. I asked everyone involved the same set of questions, because I am naturally curious about how the same environment can produce different results.
This is the question I asked: To the best of your knowledge, did anyone in the archive or university admin know about your work building a student-led publication? What would you have thought if someone from the archive or the university did show up to class and ask to learn about your class’s project as a student-led publication?
(Show Slide 6) This is the answer I got from one of the Editors at Queeah:
(A Classmate) actually worked (possibly still works) at Healey library, but I don't think he got any other university/archive people involved. We were thinking of using his connections to get flyers put up in the library, but since we only had a few weeks to put everything together, we just didn't have time. It would have been great if someone else took interest, but we were already so lucky to have the support of our classmates and communities.
(show slide 7) This is the answer I got from the founding editor, and current editor-in-chief of Literally:
Since I worked at Healey library’s archives, I know that one archivist knew about the publication, but only the fact that it was a class project, and not something that would be ongoing. If someone did show up to our class or the in-class launch party, I would be thrilled. I know that Askold Melnyczuk, the teacher of the class and a mentor during this process, has his own collection in the archives, along with Consequence magazine. To even spark an interest in the archivist's mind would be exciting, and would even feel like some sort of encouragement to continue, if that makes sense.
(show slide 8) This is the answer I got from one of the editors at The In-Between:
No, I don’t believe any administrators knew about our work. I think it was pretty contained to the ecosystem of the English department. It would have been great to talk to archivists to learn more about the history of student publications at UMB. I would have also been happy to speak to administrators about securing resources and/or funding to support the project.
So from speaking to three different editors from three different journals founded on campus, we can determine that: the archives either knew, didn’t know, or else had students who worked in the archives for a stipend actually involved in the class itself. And none of these works are currently in the formal Special Collections wing of the UMass Boston Archives. They are, however, in the student formed The Sixth Floor Archive
(show slide 9)
This is an example page from the first iteration, the free Google site I mentioned earlier, and apart from assigning it an item number in the bottom (broken down by year of acquisition and specific item number.) I have built out as thoroughly as possible in the brief space provided a history of the journal. Archivists can’t do this kind of thing because they aren’t hanging out in the grad student lounges between classes. Attentive watchers will note that the questions I just shared were all labeled #6, that’s Question #6 out of around 12 per person of increasingly specific and detailed questions about funding, distribution, production, and team history.
Formal archives exist outside of peer networks built on trust; and students see the archives firstly as a source of institutional validation and support. They are not vectors to convey unsanitized organizational history, meaning that when these books are inevitably ascensioned into the UMass system, formal administrative networks will be potentially missing key pieces of institutional history that I was able to access through a parallel network.
If we accept the theory that student writers are producing books under the same economic and material constraints as historical printers, meaning low print runs, low funding, and an inherently ephemeral existence, then the question is not whether their work deserves preservation. The question is why we ever assumed it didn’t.
Thank you for your time.