ATG Interviews Martha Fogg

Managing Director, Adam Matthew

By Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net>

ATG: Martha, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? What are your responsibilities as Managing Director of Adam Matthew (AM)?

MF: Hi, Tom and Katina, thank you for inviting me to this conversation! I joined Adam Matthew — then still largely a microfilm publisher — in 2004, having previously trained as a librarian. As soon as I walked in the door on my first day, I knew I’d found my home. Initially I worked as a Project Editor, developing some of AM’s earliest digital products including Mass Observation Online. As the company grew, I became Publishing Director, and joined the board of directors in 2014. It’s tremendously exciting and a huge honour to have become AM’s Managing Director this year, taking over the role from Khal Rudin, who has moved to an Executive Chair position, and working closely with Jennifer Kemp as our Chief Operating Officer. As you’d expect, the role is very varied — primarily, I work closely with my co-directors to set our strategic direction, achieve continued growth, and ensure everyone at the company, and all our customers, understand our vision to reimagine primary sources. I know that this role, like every job I’ve done at AM, will be a joy because I really believe in the work we do, and find my wonderful colleagues deeply inspiring.

ATG: The AM mission statement references a belief that at the heart of education is the freedom to think critically. Can you expand on what that means to AM and to your colleagues?

MF: In an age of increasingly overwhelming, confusing and contradictory information, the role of libraries, publishers, and educators in teaching students how to think critically has never been more important. Digital technology has given us an unbelievable wealth of data, but being “digitally native” does not mean that today’s students have necessarily acquired the skills to critically interrogate, effectively search, or understand the sources of their data. The teaching of history, particularly through the use of primary sources, is an essential way of equipping these students with such skills. Our mission statement also specifically describes our desire to encourage current and future generations to “challenge, analyse and debate.” Working with primary sources can be an uncomfortable experience, forcing us to confront the past and how it influences our present; but we passionately believe that honest and measured conversations, based on engagement with real evidence, are the key to addressing problems and creating positive change. These ideas are foundations of everything we do at AM, not just in terms of our publishing, but also our company culture and values. We encourage everyone at AM to continually challenge ideas and ways of doing things — we never want to stand still.

ATG: So when it comes to never standing still, what’s next for AM?

MF: There are so many exciting things I could talk about, and many more that I can’t quite mention yet. But a key focus area for us right now is Quartex, our SaaS platform designed to help libraries, archives, and other heritage institutions create their own digital collections. What’s really exciting about Quartex is that it shares the platform we use for our own AM collections, so alongside our own publishing programme we have a growing community of users who are building their own digital archives using the same technology. It’s been really rewarding to see our Quartex customers showcase compelling and engaging material using the technology we’ve worked so hard to create, and working with them to see how they use the platform in different and interesting ways. We’re learning a great deal that we bring back to our work across the entire AM portfolio.

ATG: You’ve said that you yourself are driven by “a passionate belief in the importance of primary sources to multidisciplinary teaching and research.” From your perspective, what makes AM products so suited to enabling the linkage between primary sources and teaching/research? What unique qualities do they bring to the table?

MF: All of our products are designed very carefully as multi-layered experiences, offering pathways to users with different needs, from undergraduates who are embarking on independent research for the first time, to seasoned scholars, to educators looking for engaging materials to add to their teaching programmes. We put a lot of thought into the UX design of our platform and the ways that we organize and arrange the materials for ease of use. We have a fantastic reputation for adding a lot of value to our digitized materials, and for our considered approach to the selection and curation of material. A lot of editorial expertise and investment goes into creating really good indexing and metadata, so that all users can quickly find sources. We also allow data-mining of our full text and metadata; we are really excited by the possibilities of Digital Humanities and enjoy working with scholars who are transforming the nature of historical research.

ATG: Speaking of primary sources, how does Adam Matthew define a primary source?

MF: That’s a very knotty question! Often when people think of primary sources, they are focused on the written record, whether that’s printed or manuscript. And of course, much of our source content does take that form. But there’s so much more than that in our collections, and having a more expansive view about what primary sources are really increases opportunities for a broader, more diverse representation of the historic record. For example, Ethnomusicology draws on audio recordings, video, objects, and ephemera to explore the cultural and social lives of global communities (often those without traditional written records) through their musical traditions. Objects and ephemera feature in many of our collections, and are very engaging when used alongside written records, giving a really tangible sense of the lived experience. It really can be anything — one of the more outlandish things we have digitized is a lock of “intimate” hair sent to Lord Byron by a female fan!

ATG: In your experience, do many students know what primary sources are? Do they use primary sources without being assigned them? How does this impact the use of AM databases?

MF: It really varies, but many undergraduates will not have used primary sources in either a digital or physical setting before starting university. Embedding primary sources into course reading lists or the classroom is therefore really important at this level. By the end of undergraduate study, and in postgraduate research, students should be making use of primary source databases independently, but still need a lot of support to find content and expand their skills to use it effectively. To help with this, we launched a new flagship resource last year, Research Methods Primary Sources. This unique online learning tool promotes primary source literacy through how-to guides, peerreviewed essays, videos and case studies, and can be used in the classroom or for independent study. It includes hundreds of “practice sources” from our partner archives for students to test out their newly-developed primary source research skills and develop comfort with using historical materials in their work.

ATG: We understand from your website that one of AM’s core missions is “to increase the diversity of voices we present, and to address silences and inequities in the historical record.” How do you make that happen, given that these voices are usually silent in primary sources?

MF: First and foremost, we hold ourselves accountable for our editorial decisions, and we are tremendously fortunate in our editorial team, who are passionately engaged with the subject of diversity and representation, and who have led the way in making real changes to the way we put our collections together in order to make them more transparent, equitable, and diverse.

There is certainly more we hope to do to expand our global reach and use technology, such as language tools, to broaden the range of archival content that we publish. A crucial part of this goal is to engage and connect with communities in the representation of their histories.

There is unfortunately no way to alter the bias of the historical record itself, or historic choices made about what materials to collect in archives, museums, and libraries. However, we continue to increase our efforts to commission essays and features within our collections, which contextualise problematic terminology, highlight archival silences, discuss some of the complexities of historic archival practice and shed light on tools that students can use to overcome these challenges.

ATG: In this issue of Against the Grain the authors have focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion in primary sources. In doing so, they are highlighting the “hidden narratives” they have uncovered in various primary sources. Can you tell us about that? How are such “hidden narratives” discovered?

MF: We’re particularly excited about the role that technology can play in redressing the historic imbalance of representation in archives. For example, we were the first publisher to apply AI-driven Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) software to our products, allowing scholars to search manuscripts freely. While we cannot redress the biases held within sources themselves, the ability to search in this way can remove any historic or unintended biases existing in the catalogue data and improve the discoverability of underrepresented narratives. Through the application of searching software, we also aim to improve our metadata creation processes, actively seeking out voices which may have been obscured.