Curating unknowns: designing documentary practices for mental health newsletters

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to explore how different forms of unknown are produced, negotiated and recorded within a mental health newsletter and develop a methodological instrument for curating unknowns in qualitative material collections. Design/methodology/approach The study is an interpretive qualitative case study of a long-running newsletter that publishes lived experience narratives, editorial commentary and contextual texts. Data comprise sampled issues, associated internal documents, digital editorial diaries and online co-produced workshops. Reflexive thematic analysis is used to trace how contributors and editors handle what cannot be fully specified, understood or disclosed, leading to an annotation based framework for documenting unknowns. Findings The analysis shows that unknowns are patterned features of the newsletter ecology rather than incidental gaps. Contributors and editors work with three recurring forms of unknown, protective, experiential and systemic, which are differently distributed across stories, paratexts and organisational rules. An annotation layer that records where and how these unknowns are produced reconfigures how the collection can be read and reused as a research resource. Originality/value The paper reconceptualises unknowns as curatable elements of documentary practice and offers a transferable instrument for recording non knowledge in sensitive qualitative collections, linking document theory, ignorance studies and mental health narrative research.