All this means, of course, that the DALN is a messy archive for scholars. Indeed it is not created for scholars. It is a community literacy project that is shaped just as directly by the GED graduates who contribute their literacy narratives during their graduation ceremonies, as it is by the residents of Black Columbus communities who are preserving their stories and histories, and as it is by social activists with Asperger's Syndrome who tell their narratives to dispel the myths associated with autism. And because the DALN doesn’t resemble a typical, scholarly “evidentiary site,”  it also makes no claims for validity, reliability, or comprehensiveness.

As Biesecker (2006) reminds us, however, when we recognize “the deconstruction of ‘fact’ or of referential plentitude" in relation to archives, we don't "reduce the contents of the archive to 'mere’ literature or fiction," which is, she notes "the most common and silliest of mistakes." Instead she argues, deconstructing the "motif of truth" (p. 124) connected with archives "delivers that content over to us as the elements of rhetoric” (p. 130).

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The reciprocating functions of archivization, curation, creation, and de(con)struction that constitute Derrida’s archive also constitute the endless possibility of rhetoric in, and from, the archive.

 (Skinnell, 2010)