While journeying on the train today I noticed a man writing in the white spaces of a newspaper. He did not appear to be contemplating thought, just writing it down. The inner film maker in me saw this as a scene in a film and wondered what an audience would think if they witnessed this activity in a movie. Why would a man with nothing else in his possession except a newspaper need to write on it? Was he performing an action of remembering or of creativity? Was the scribblings text or images? Where did he get the pen from anyway?

My thoughts then wandered about and I began to reflect on how I used to love film writing and the convention of leaving as much white space as possible. Brevity and intrigue was my approach to writing the scene description and accompanying dialogue. Someone once called me a laconic writer. I wonder where I left that skill behind. I thought briefly that I would begin to write down these 'scenes' I see, as I did when I was a film writing student. I used to collect these 'scenes' like cards. A 'card scene' could be slotted into a narrative and it would provide meaning depending on what the other scenes were around it.# Film (and TV) audiences are very watchful of what you do however, so you have to make sure that each scene fitted contained relevant meaning. It could be that the card scene helped explain another scene, or later in the film an entirely different scene explained your card scene. 

I suddenly realised that by watching and thinking, I had become (and was becoming) part of a continuum of action.  I could see how the Records Continuum model could be understood by using this scene.% The man is writing on a newspaper. I am watching him. The newspaper is a record of the actions of a particular printing press and also of a series of decisions that were made about content and layout. Once the man has written on the newspaper, it becomes a place of recorded actions - his writing. This newspaper is transformed into something else - a personal object? a place to doodle? a tool to remember? Perhaps the man is doodling on a newspaper as he travels on a train as he does every day. But what about the content of the writing? This may give us some clues as to the purpose of writing, but is it important to know? When is it important to know? 

Perhaps the action I am watching is part of a larger process that has meaning to this man. Perhaps he keeps these newspapers and he has several hundred at home? What other parts of the story cannot be easily seen? What if the newspaper has been found or borrowed from someone else? It might contain traces of the other people on it as well - a crossword filled out, a smudge of the ink. What if the man left it on the train and someone else found it?  What if the man gives the newspaper to someone else? What would the newspaper be a record of then?

And what of my own participation? I have written this blog about this event I witnessed? Was I a simple witness or was I part of the event? Is the one who chronicles separate from the action or very much a part of it? The story of the man who wrote on the white spaces of a newspaper is now my story. The traces of the man are here in this blog post. So then, what of the others that might be linked to this paper and this action? Are they part of my story too? What role might they have to play? And now you, the reader - how do you participate in this story? As an Archivist, if you found a newspaper with writing on it in a box that you needed to describe and arrange, how would you think about it? What is your role as Archivist in giving meaning to the newspaper? What if in the box were other newspapers, some written on and some not? 

Is the newspaper the only record? What is it record of? What gives you clues as to what it is a record of? What about the other spaces of knowing that I have described above? Are they relevant? Useful? 

To me the newspaper is part of a process and contains a trace of that process - a recorded moment in time. Each object we call a record is a a piece of a larger puzzle, which may have multiple meanings to multiple people. Each person who interacts with the object leaves a trace of their actions. So the newspaper is a record of those actions. From deciding what is on the front page, to it ending up in a cat's litter tray. The newspaper of this story is not just a record of its documentary form (newspaper) nor a record of what is written on it. It has multiple past and future lives in different spaces, places and times. 

# I used to write films on system cards - as many of us did. Each card contained a single scene. It was always entirely feasible to manipulate the timeline, the reveal and the plot points simply by moving one scene to another place in the film narrative. 

% The Records Continuum model, if you are not familiar with it, is a space of connections, or at least that is how I see it.  Please take a look at the following links

http://john.curtin.edu.au/society/australia/

http://infotech.monash.edu/research/groups/rcrg/publications/recordscontinuum-smckp2.html