Platform Archives, with Weird Medieval Guys
Curating a collection like it's 1199
The What
We’ve been building libraries and archives for about 4,000 years. For the vast majority of that time, we spent years building structures and shelves. We then spent even longer collecting all the tablets, papyrus scrolls, and dusty books we could find and finally, when we were ready, we found some wrinkly mean people to guard them. Actually stepping into these archives was an act inspired by only one of three reasons: (a) nerds being nerds, (b) making out in the dark, (c) discovering a haunted portal. I only have personal experience with one of those but I won’t say which.
What I will readily admit, and chances are you will too, is that I’m a freak for the multitude of archives now housed on our social media platforms – an explosion of digital archiving, which itself only became possible four decades ago. Twitter and Instagram, in particular, are natural interfaces for collection: collections that are far easier to build than through, say, trading bushels of millet for the latest text on leeches or securing oil money for climate controlled robotic storage. The infrastructure and patrons are already there – Platform Archivism (™ Stephen Lurie 2024), requires only a clear subject for content and a strategy to retrieve it.
As a result, we’ve got all types of archives in the scroll. There are those dedicated to time periods down to the decade: 80s Vintage Visions is an appetizer sampler platter of entertainment of that decade; 90s Anxiety carefully curates stills of 1990s vibe. Others like Catatonic Youths, Bygone Broadway, Nuevayorkinos, document the history of subcultures, identities, and scenes.
Pre-existing institutions, like French audiovisual archive INA, have also found social media space fruitful for publishing from their own extensive archives. Others have pivoted their expertise in a subject area into platform archivism. Dust to Digital, a niche record company started in 1999, has found a new massive audience for their curation of “music and sound cultures” on Instagram.
While their catalog is young for now, accounts that contemporaneously aggregate content on a particular subject are also creating archives. Grassroots Goals is compiling what soccer looks like for average people around the world in the beginning of the 21st century; WhatIsNewYork is using [Flight of the Conchords voice] *many spies with many eyes* to archive weird life in this city on a daily basis – a hyperactive and anarchic of archivism that did not exist even twenty years ago.
To be a Little Extra about it, I’d argue that *all* of our personal accounts are some form of archive and generations hence may scroll through each of our grids to understand (read: laugh at) our time. But no pressure.
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why platform archives are so popular — forever engaging in amateur self-curation of our own fleshy containers of multitudes, there’s deep pleasure in the specificity and consistency of these accounts.
To learn more about the scene, I turned to one of my favorite examples of the genre, one that bridges the gap between the old archives of stone and manuscripts to today’s archives of posts and vibes. Weird Medieval Guys is a (platform) archive drawn from (digital) archives that have harvested from other (physical) archives. But instead of being guarded by berobed sages or bored college students, it’s run by Olivia Swarthout, Gen-Z data scientist and self-described “not a historian.”
Here’s our chat, via Twitter DM, on what it’s like to go medieval, get weird, and hunt for all those guys — and why such an archive might delight and fascinate us.
The Chat
In preparation for our chat, I just googled “greeting words in medieval times” so let me kick things off by saying: hail fellow, well met! Can you start by telling me about the first time you recall encountering a weird medieval guy, what the context was, and what was going on in your life at the time?
it's hard to remember the first weird medieval guy i ever saw, since so much of western culture and aesthetics is steeped in medieval culture and aesthetics! so i think that we are exposed to so much medieval artwork that we often don't take note of it consciously. that being said, some of the first "guys" i saw that made me think more consciously about medieval art were anthropomorphised drawings of animals in bestiaries and parables such as reynard the fox.
i've always been an animal lover and so realising that medieval people had this very complex view of the natural world--derived not just from christian theology but also from classical and other pagan sources--really helped me connect with the works on a deeper and more personal level.
at the time when i began thinking about medieval art more and eventually started this twitter account, i was in my last semester of university. i had been doing graphic design and layout work for one of our campus magazines and had just finished designing an issue titled "DAWN". i love incorporating public domain images into my graphics work, and wound up using a lot of medieval and early modern imagery in that particular issue... which led me to discover how many medieval manuscripts have been digitised and uploaded to the internet to be freely accessed by the public! even though those resources are by no means a secret, to me it felt like discovering a hidden world: there was just so much to look at!
Now that you’ve become the world’s foremost expert in this particular subject matter, take me through your process of where and how you’re finding your guys.
hahahah, i'd *strongly* push back on the idea that i'm an expert at all, and i'm certainly far from the foremost authority on medieval manuscript art! i actually studied statistics at university, although i did take some history of art classes when i could fit them in! there are many, many people who are much more knowledgeable on the topic than am i.
that being said, i have gotten pretty good at hunting weird medieval guys down! i'm always keeping an eye on sites like the Bodleian Library and the National Library of France to see when they upload newly digitised works to their online libraries. it's a lot of fun going through an entire manuscript in search of weird little details. some libraries even include written descriptions of each page, so i can search for particular subjects like "snails" or "decapitation" if i'm after something specific.
sometimes i'll find images on third-party sites like pinterest or instagram, but i don't like to post them unless i know their source and can verify that they aren't edited and really are medieval. a lot of art gets labelled as medieval that really isn't. for instance, neither of these memes contain any medieval art:
The discipline around truly medieval guys is impressive — what period are those memes from, if you happen to know? And are there any other governing rules of content for the account?
the frog illustration is by Jim Woodring, an American cartoonist who is still active. the cat on the right is by Fernando Botero, a very acclaimed Colombian painter who sadly died last September. i don't know where the cat on the left is from but i would be surprised if it is more than 100 years old. so not only is it incorrect to call these paintings medieval, it's unfortunately depriving living artists of credit for their work.
i don't actually restrict my account to only medieval art--i have posted things that are thousands of years older or hundreds of years more recent that the middle ages. what's important to me is that nothing is posted with a misleading caption that gives a false view of art history. other than that, i don't have many strict rules for what i post. the main thing i try to steer away from is inserting contrived jokes like those in the memes i shared above. the artwork is much more engaging and interesting than anything i could cook up, so the focus should be on the art! less is more.
Well you may not be the foremost academic expert in traditional fields of study, but I think you could claim this particular subfield as your own. I did notice, however, that your personal account bio also says “not a historian” — is this hedge in response to some feedback you’ve encountered from the academy?
on the contrary, medievalists who i've encountered online have been extremely friendly to me and supportive of the weird medieval guys account. i try to be as respectful as i can of the artwork that i post by linking sources to the original works and, when i can, giving some context to what is depicted in pieces. i also try to promote the work of medievalists whenever i can by sharing articles and twitter threads that are written by actual experts.
when my account began to gain more visibility, i noticed that many people did refer to me as a medievalist or historian, which was why i felt that it was important to stipulate somewhere that i am not! although i do have some knowledge of the medieval world, being a historian is so much more than that. studying history teaches you to think critically about and apply different frames of reasoning to that knowledge in order to synthesise it it together into broader interpretations.....and these are skills that take time to develop! so it is important to me that people know i'm just one voice and by no means an authority, and that i welcome criticism and input
Among all the potential weird medieval guys you see in your research, what’s your hit rate on finding all three of (1) weird, (2) medieval, and (3) guys (non-gendered, of course)? And once you find them, how do you decide whether you’ll go with a straightforward description caption, or something more personal?
the vast majority of medieval manuscripts aren't illustrated at all, and of those that are, the vast majority don't contain any "weird guys", so to speak. sometimes i worry i'm just reinforcing people's stereotypes of the middle ages, since my account definitely overrepresents the weird stuff! i don't really have any systematic approach to captions — it's all pretty stream of consciousness.
What’s your take on why people today love seeing weird medieval guys?
i think anything that looks "random," "uncanny," or "naïve," (so to speak) is often labelled as medieval, because it fits in with our preconceptions of what people and culture in the Middle Ages were like! i suppose random, uncanny, and naive are all relative--if you think about it, medieval manuscript art contains a lot of motifs and themes that are familiar to people of today. anthropomorphised animals and monsters, christian iconography, and depictions of gender and class dynamics, for instance, are all things you're likely to see in modern art. even the book as an object (as opposed to the earlier papyrus scroll) is a medieval invention, and thus so is the habit of drawing in margins....which is an intimately familiar practice to most of us!
in many ways, the middle ages were the genesis of so much of the modern world and its culture. a lot of the art I post was created by people who spoke languages, lived in cities, and followed religions that are still recognisable to us now. and although we're less likely than medieval people to encounter a knight in armor, a labouring peasant, or a lady in a tall pointy hat, these are very much symbols that have retained their relevance and meaning over the years. so i think it's actually pretty easy to feel a sense of kinship with the people who drew all of these weird medieval guys so many centuries ago.
of course, that's not to say that society hasn't changed at all in the past 500 years, or that the people who drew medieval art that we find funny did so because they found it funny in the exact same way. we'll never really know exactly what medieval manuscript artists were thinking when they drew those weird little guys, and i think that's part of the appeal: it wouldn't be as funny to us if we knew they were just trying to be as random and silly as possible, but they and their world feel familiar enough that we can imagine them having a laugh at the same things as us :)
Given our perceptions now – mud, swords, plague, etc.-- it’s actually kind of mind-blowing to consider that medieval artists her may have sometimes intended to be funny (even if a lot of the humor now is just about distance). What do you think will be the “weird medieval guys” of today for the people (AI cyborgs?) of year 2700?
I don't know if there will be any things from today that fill the same niche as weird medieval guys! Nowadays, content is cheap. We have so much of it. Everyone makes it and everyone has access to essentially all of it. Consequently, most things that are made nowadays seem a bit transient. So I can't really imagine things like memes and tweets being of much interest to people (or our incorporeal brainwaves once we've transcended the need to inhabit flesh) in the future.
That being said, I think that in the same way that we are baffled by motifs in medieval art such as violent snails and bunnies, I can imagine people in a few centuries being baffled by our fixation on certain genres or characters. One of my favourite modern phenomena is Dracula: we've been making variations on this one specific guy for over a hundred years! Each one bears the distinctive stamp of the people, time, and place that made it, but they're all clearly the same guy who we keep returning to because he feels relevant and speaks to something particular about today's culture. When he stops being relevant, we'll stop making draculas, just like how people stopped drawing violent rabbits. And then a guy with fangs and a cape who drinks blood will seem very foreign and silly to people!
