Researching as Searching

In this article, the author recounts her efforts to locate archival materials pertaining to women’s participation in travel-lecture filmmaking. Encountering an archival absence, she refuses this lacuna and speculates that some of these films and their paratexts have survived. Undertaking a form of speculative archival detective work the author summarizes the various clues and avenues she pursued to locate the work of a prominent travel-lecture filmmaking couple. She argues for an understanding of speculative archival work as encompassing not the work a researcher does with extant materials in an archive, but the work of research entailed to bring a collection to an archive.