Reading or Video 

“To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives

 

This article reports on interviews conducted with South Asian American educators regarding their responses to the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), an independent, nonprofit, community-based organization that operates the websites www.saada.org and www.firstdaysproject.org. The article reports on several emergent themes: the absence of or difficulty in accessing historical materials related to South Asian Americans before the emergence of SAADA; the affective and ontological impacts of discovering SAADA for the first time; the affective impact of SAADA on respondents’ South Asian American students; and SAADA’s ability to promote feelings of inclusion both within the South Asian American ethnic community and in the larger society. Together, these responses suggest the ways in which one community archives counters the symbolic annihilation of the community it serves and instead produces feelings of what the authors term “representational belonging.” The article concludes by exploring the epistemological, ontological, and social levels of representational belonging.

Caswell, M., Cifor, M., & Ramirez, M. H. (2016). “To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives. The American Archivist, 79(1), 56–81. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.79.1.56

Case Study 

Using Static Sites Technology for Increased Access: The Case of the Shelley-Godwin Archive / Raffaele Viglianti

 

This case study discusses the key decisions in adopting standards and technologies for a digitization project, in dialogue with ongoing scholarship around minimal computing and minimal editions. It has a specific focus on choices that affect long-term preservation and access, including efforts to enable offline use of the archive in order to increase its availability to a larger number of communities with variable access to the Internet.
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Case Study 

Digitizing and Enhancing Description Across Collections to Make African American Materials More Discoverable on Umbra Search African American History / Dorothy Berry

 

This case study describes a project undertaken at the University of Minnesota Libraries to digitize materials related to African American materials across the Universities holdings, and to highlight materials that are otherwise undiscoverable in existing archival collections. It explores how historical and current archival practices marginalize material relevant to African American history and culture, and how a mass digitization process can attempt to highlight and re-aggregate those materials. The details of the aggregation process — e.g. the need to use standardized vocabularies to increase aggregation even when those standardized vocabularies privilege majority representation — also reveal important issues in mass digitization and aggregation projects involving the history of marginalized groups.

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Case Study 

Terp Talks: Designing a Schema to Describe Interpretive Sign Language Videos / Sarah Sweeney

 

This case study describes the development of a custom metadata schema to support the description of 65 educational videos used to help teach sign language. The creators of this special collection had specific access and discovery needs that were not served by standard vocabularies, and the custom schema developed methods to describe information like the pace of the interpreter’s fingerspelling, the language being signed, and how space is being used by the interpreter.

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Reading or Video 

From Archives to Action: Zines, Participatory Culture, and Community Engagement in Asian America

 

Honma describes the use of zines in an undergraduate classroom to promote alternative pedagogies and incorporate critical inquiry and research skills. By bringing zines into his classroom as research materials, Honma provides an example of how to use archival materials and research to make connections between community archives and community action, and help students view themselves as embedded in larger community histories. This article discusses the framework and assignments incorporated into the course, and the larger impacts of this framework for considering archives as dynamic and contested sites of meaning.

Honma, T. (2016).”From Archives to Action: Zines, Participatory Culture, and Community Engagement in Asian America.” Radical Teacher, 105, 33–43.

Reading or Video 

Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive

 

Archives have a long and troubled history as imperialist endeavors. Scholars of digital archives can begin to decolonize the archive by asking, how is knowledge imparted, in what media, by whom, and for what ends? Drawing on a six-year-long ethnohistorical study of Cherokee language and writing, I explore these questions and analyze the epistemological work of wampum, Sequoyan, and digital storytelling. I argue that decolonial digital archives have built into them the instrumental, historical, and cultural meanings of whatever media they include. To be understood in and on their terms, these media need to be contextualized within the notions of time, social practices, stories, and languages that lend them meaning.

Cushman, E. (2013). “Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive.” College English, 76(2), 115–135.

Reading or Video 

Does Information Really Want to be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness

 

The “information wants to be free” meme was born some 20 years ago from the free and open source software development community. In the ensuing decades, information freedom has merged with debates over open access, digital rights management, and intellectual property rights. More recently, as digital heritage has become a common resource, scholars, activists, technologists, and local source communities have generated critiques about the extent of information freedom. This article injects both the histories of collecting and the politics of information circulation in relation to indigenous knowledge into this debate by looking closely at the history of the meme and its cultural and legal underpinnings. This approach allows us to unpack the meme’s normalized assumptions and gauge whether it is applicable across a broad range of materials and cultural variances.

Christen, K. A. (2012). “Does Information Really Want to be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness.” International Journal of Communication, 6(0), 24.

Reading or Video 

Affective Presence: The Metonymical Catalogue / Cara Krmpotich and Alexander Somerville

 

Drawing on exploratory research of online ethnographic records for particular types of Aboriginal bags in North America, we confront the absence of affective knowledge in museum catalogues and documentation. Although curatorial, ethnographic, and Aboriginal understandings of these items teem with affect, we find affect to be almost wholly lacking from available online records. We ask what the effects of this absence are for descendent Aboriginal communities, for museum publics, and for affect theory. We also look at an example where affect has a presence in online records, the Glenbow Museum, and consider the ways this creates opportunities for comparative and historic affective study.

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Krmpotich, Cara, and Alexander Somerville. 2016. “Affective Presence: The Metonymical Catalogue.” Museum Anthropology 39 (2): 178–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/muan.12123.
Community of Practice, Model Project 

The Sustainable Heritage Network

 

“The Sustainable Heritage Network (SHN) is an answer to the pressing need for comprehensive workshops, online tutorials, and web resources dedicated to the lifecycle of digital stewardship. The SHN is a collaborative project that complements the work of indigenous peoples globally to preserve, share, and manage cultural heritage and knowledge. The SHN, along with our Partners, organize and offer face-to-face workshops, produce educational resources, and link people and resources through our digital workbenches. The SHN is part of a network of individuals, communities, and institutions who work together to provide each other with digital tools and preservation assistance. We call this: Collaborative Stewardship.”

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“The Sustainable Heritage Network.” n.d. Accessed October 8, 2018. https://sustainableheritagenetwork.org/.
Model Project 

Murkurtu

 

Mukurtu (MOOK-oo-too) is an open source platform and content management system for digital community archives. The name is a Warumungu word meaning ‘dilly bag’ or a safe keeping place for sacred materials. This grassroots project seeks to empower communities to manage, share, narrate, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways.

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Murkurtu. n.d. “About Murkurtu.” http://mukurtu.org/about/.