Eva Moreda
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evamoreda.bsky.social
Eva Moreda
@evamoreda.bsky.social
Novelist, musicologist, singer, portative organ player, reader, language learner (lately EL, RU).
Tweets in English and Galician.
The Spanish Banksy.
November 17, 2025 at 4:02 PM
4) During the time I couldn’t go to archives, I did other research things, tried other approaches, and I found that I like them too. But this trip proved to me, in the end, that I still love archival research, and I worry a bit about its place in an increasingly neoliberal university. (13/13)
November 16, 2025 at 8:43 PM
3) I also wonder how the increasing availability of digitized sources will change these on-site stings of archival research – maybe they’ll become less frequent, but perhaps also more overwhelming for us when they happen? (12/13)
November 16, 2025 at 8:42 PM
2) Long days (8 hours +, not that anyone needs to do them) are probably more feasible with archives/collections/documents you know very well. Not so much when you are still learning the ropes. (11/13)
November 16, 2025 at 8:41 PM
Learning how a new (to you) archive works (organization, timings to get your documents, how archivists like to work) is success. Learning how to effectively read and process a new type of document is success. (10/13)
November 16, 2025 at 8:39 PM
A few reflections/notes to self: 1) “Success” at an archive can mean many things. Determining that an archive is not as promising as you initially thought and hence you can divert the rest of your time elsewhere, is success. (9/13)
November 16, 2025 at 8:39 PM
Plus, this time, my project does not have such obvious sources anymore. Most of them are not even music-specific sources –I am working with administrative and military archives, for example, which I did not have experience of before. (8/13)
November 16, 2025 at 8:38 PM
By contrast, by the end of this trip (still a week to go), I will have visited nine different archives and special collections. I have only ever worked in one of them before –many many years ago, for one single afternoon, as an undergraduate. (7/13)
November 16, 2025 at 8:36 PM
3) When you’ve spent the last 3 years doing a demanding but not particularly coveted or thankful administrative role, your mind starts telling you your are most valuable to the institution when you are crouched down on an Excel spreadsheet, not reading 19th century script in an archive. (6/13)
November 16, 2025 at 8:35 PM
In retrospect, there were a few reasons. 1) Since my PhD, I’ve done most of my archival research in a few archives/special collections I know by now extremely well. 2) My research has often been built around the sources themselves: composers’ archives, historical sound collections, etc. (5/13)
November 16, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Then the following week, things started to go a bit awry –collections that were initially promising were useless, or inaccessible. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t remember it being so difficult even in my first forays into archival research. I thought I had lost it as a researcher. (4/13)
November 16, 2025 at 8:33 PM
The first week I had a couple of “archive highs”, that adrenaline rush I had missed so much –being surrounded by documents no one had probably looked at in several decades, even discovering the odd lead to shape a project that was (is) pretty much in its infancy. (3/13)
November 16, 2025 at 8:32 PM
Archival research was my bread-and-butter. I “discovered” it as a PhD student and was probably the main single reason why I wanted to stay in academia. I’d never gone as long as this without it, and I was both looking forward (90%) and dreading (10%) the return. (2/13)
November 16, 2025 at 8:31 PM
Last month marked my first sustained period of on-site archival research since before the pandemic. Here are a few reflections (1/13).
November 16, 2025 at 8:27 PM
75. Paola Capriolo, Il nocchiero
November 13, 2025 at 4:37 PM
74. Forrest Gander, Como amigo
November 13, 2025 at 4:22 PM
73. Lana Bastašić, Denti da latte
November 10, 2025 at 5:43 PM
72. Gabriel Casaccia, Los herederos
November 7, 2025 at 6:30 PM
November 1, 2025 at 8:19 PM
71. Kjell Askildsen, Los perros de Tesalónica
October 30, 2025 at 3:20 PM
70. Hiromi Kawakami, Manazuru
October 28, 2025 at 4:48 PM
69. João Gilberto Noll, Canoas e marolas
October 28, 2025 at 4:42 PM
68. Thomas Wolfe, The lost boy
October 27, 2025 at 6:28 PM
67. Fyodor Dostoievski, The Brothers Karamazov
October 27, 2025 at 6:26 PM
Este xoves, presentación de "Laudatio funebris" en Compostela.
October 26, 2025 at 5:00 PM