Reading or Video 

To Hell With Good Intentions: Linked Data, Community and the Power to Name / Mark A. Matienzo

 

Matienzo explores the argument that metadata, archiving, and linked data are never neutral; naming holds power and can reinforce problematic narratives about gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and more. He specifically challenges the myth about linked data as completely accessible and democratic; linked data can harm the communities which are mis- or under-represented, especially because corporations hold control over linked power and these communities cannot influence change. He offers several articles and projects as models for productive and ethical cultural heritage practices.

Keynote presented at the LITA Forum, Minneapolis, MN.

Matienzo, Mark A. 2015. “To Hell With Good Intentions: Linked Data, Community and the Power to Name.” In . Minneapolis, MN. http://matienzo.org/2016/to-hell-with-good-intentions/.
Reading or Video 

Preserving Social Media Records of Activism / Bergis Jules

 

Jules argues that social media has been crucial for documenting and disseminating social activism, especially for Black communities. After the Watts Rebellion’s 50th anniversary, Jules decided to research how much primary material about specific rebellions were available; the results, not surprisingly, were slim. For the digital #BlackLivesMatter collection that Jules helped spearhead, which was also the beginning of the Documenting the Now initiative, they archived almost 45 million Tweets to document and preserve primary source documents about police encounters. The problem with recording these images, Tweets, videos, and other documenting materials, though, is surveillance culture may put advocates and people who show up to rebellions at risk. Based on a talk presented at Diversity in the Archives: Preserving Ephemeral Activist Culture, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Libraries.

Jules, Bergis. 2015. “Preserving Social Media Records of Activism.” On Archivy (blog). November 24, 2015. https://medium.com/on-archivy/preserving-social-media-records-of-activism-26e0f1751869.

See also “Introducing Documenting the Now“, Ed Summers.

Reading or Video 

An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design / Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, Amy S. Bruckman

 

Fiesler et al. conduct a case study on Archive of Our Own (AO3), an online fan fiction archive website, to demonstrate how to implement Bardzell’s Feminist HCI into practice. Using a series of interviews and exploration of the site, the authors explore how AO3’s design centers around participation, pluralism, advocacy, and more. Although AO3 is not the perfect platform for every user and some of the study’s participants explained why, AO3’s design and careful policy-making reflects feminist values and advocates for empowerment for a diversity of fanfiction writers. This article provides a specific series of design choices that reflect these values.

Fiesler, Casey, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S Bruckman. 2016. “An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design.” In CHI ’16 Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2574–85. Santa Clara, CA. https://caseyfiesler.com/2016/02/09/an-archive-of-their-own-a-case-study-of-feminist-hci-and-values-in-design-chi-2016/.
Reading or Video 

Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction / Emily Drabinski

 

Drabinski looks at activist catalogers who focus on “correcting” certain classifications and knowledge organization systems; the problem with the notion of “correctness,” though, is it reinforces the notion that these knowledge systems are universal and erases the fluidity of knowledges produced by the social, political, and temporal. Drabinski advocates for LIS practitioners to use a queer lens while working with users and information; a “queer perspective on classification structures sees categories as discursively produced and historically contingent” (101). Drabinski offers examples of potential implementations of queer practices into cataloguing. She provides three main recommendations: 1) knowledge systems can be designed for users to both visibly see the constructed-ness of classifiers; 2) LIS practitioners can encourage users to participate in conversations about revising classifications through workshops, conversations, the actual design, or other pedagogical tools; and 3) information science curriculum can focus on classification work as “critical reflection,” not just “correcting.”

Drabinski, Emily. 2013. “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction.” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 83 (2): 94–111. https://digitalcommons.liu.edu/brooklyn_libfacpubs/9/.
Reading or Video 

Social Justice as Topic and Tool: An Attempt to Transform an LIS Curriculum and Culture / Nicole A. Cooke, Miriam E. Sweeney, and Safiya Umoja Noble

 

The GLIS at University of Illinois held a townhall meeting to discuss issues around race and privilege; this townhall meeting led to focus groups and then reading groups, encouraging further discussions about diversity. The main products of the town hall were new extracurricular reading groups and an entirely new course focused around social justice issues. Cooke et al. offer strengths and failures of these additions. For example, unlike a traditional classroom setting, the reading groups were neither scaffolded nor run by a professor; in order to encourage constructive dialogue, the authors suggest that facilitators use “partial intervention.” As for the courses, social justice theory became a foundational theory within the curriculum, which encouraged discussions about power, privilege, and the dynamic between academia and the community. Some students view the course as unpractical or have differing opinions from the theories read; the emotional labor that professors experience needs further exploration.

Cooke, Nicole A, Miriam E Sweeney, and Safiya Umoja Noble. 2016. “Social Justice as Topic and Tool: An Attempt to Transform an LIS Curriculum and Culture.” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 86 (1): 107–24. https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/43561818/Cooke_Sweeney_Noble_LQ.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1544037072&Signature=WwWjWl%2FriTXi6zc4JiKfuwQ9zm0%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DSocial_Justice_as_Topic_and_Tool_An_Atte.pdf.
Reading or Video 

Tribal Archives, Traditional Knowledge, and Local Contexts: Why the ‘s’ Matters / Kimberly Christen

 

Archivist scholars argue that it is not enough for collections to be inclusive of cultures and voices, but we must make “structural changes” in which Indigenous people still have ownership over their texts and stories. This notion of ownership, though, becomes less defined when Indigenous cultural artifacts are collected by institutions; when a non-Indigenous culture “owns” Indigenous artifacts, it is crucial to create a system of ownership that empowers the Indigenous communities. Local Contexts has created the Traditional Knowledge (TK) license which renegotiates ideas of ownership and copyright that is flexible and more individualistic to the needs of particular cultures.

Christen, Kimberly. 2015. “Tribal Archives, Traditional Knowledge, and Local Contexts: Why the ‘s’ Matters.” Journal of Western Archives 6 (1). http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/westernarchives/vol6/iss1/3/.
Reading or Video 

The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa / Verne Harris

 

A foundational article in the field of archival science and critical archives theory, Harris, writing in 2002, argues that far from being a simple reflection of reality, archives are constructed windows into personal and collective processes. They at once express and are instruments of prevailing relations of power. Verne Harris makes these arguments through an account of archives and archivists in the context of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. The account is deliberately shaped around three themes — race, power, and public records. While he concedes that the constructedness of memory and the dimension of power are most obvious in the extreme circumstances of oppression and rapid transition to democracy, he argues that these are realities informing archives in all circumstances. He makes an appeal to archivists to enchant their work by engaging these realities and by turning always towards the call of and for justice.

Harris, Verne. 2002. “The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa.” Archival Science 2 (1–2): 63–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435631.
Reading or Video 

Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum / Ramesh Srinivasan, Katherine M. Becvar, Robin Boast, Jim Enote

 

This article reports on an early project exploring the possibilities of collaborative description of Indigenous belongings held in museums. The authors conducted a collaborative research project on how multiple local expert communities interacted with and reacted to objects held within multiple museums. The ethnographic research conducted in this study demonstrates the need for museums to collaborate with local communities as well as a method for implementing this collaboration. The study showed a disconnect between how objects were presented and recorded and the local experts’ experience and knowledge about the objects (this disconnect is visualized on page 753); the two main disconnects were found in the narrative the Zuni communities and museums constructed about these objects as well as an absence of the use and practice of these objects in the museums. The authors advocate for working within this disconnect to find better ways of representing objects, or viewing museums as “contact zones” in which multiple experts – not only the traditional museum “Expert” – can collaborate. One method for negotiating this disconnect is to make visible the different meaning objects have in different contexts; designing digital spaces to host digital objects allow for this visibility.

Srinivasan, Ramesh, Katherine M. Becvar, Robin Boast, and Jim Enote. 2010. “Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 35 (5): 735–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243909357755.
Community of Practice, Model Project 

Zine Union Catalog

 

The Zine Union Catalog (ZUC) has been a collaborative process from its beginnings at the Zine Librarians (un)Conference (ZLuC) in Seattle in 2009. Zine readers, researchers, and librarians need a unified resource for finding finding and sharing zine metadata and location information. ZineCat will offer a similar benefit to zine librarians, allowing them to share catalog records, metadata, and knowledge. Further, having developed a Zine Librarians Code of Ethics, the zine library community has proved itself thoughtful, loving, and critical, which bodes well for a carefully built tool informed by deep processing and cooperation.

 

Reading or Video 

Feminism and the Future of Library Discovery / Bess Sadler and Chris Bourg

 

Sadler and Bourg argue that libraries are never neutral and, therefore, should do work to problematize and subvert harmful cultural biases and information organization in library discovery. They use Bardzell’s Feminist HCI as a framework to provide suggestions and examples for digital projects and larger projects that incorporated social justice in their design.

Sadler, B., & Bourg, C. (2015). “Feminism and the Future of Library Discovery.” Code4Lib: Special Issue on Diversity in Library Technology, 28.