Case Study 

Honoring the Dead: A Digital Archive of the Insane Indian Asylum / Stacey Berry

 

This case study describes the development of a digital collection focused on a federal detention facility for Native Americans, where the project managers were not from a Native American background. They describe their process of working closely with representatives from the Keepers of the Canton Native Asylum Story, a group of Native Americans stewarding the history and legacy of the asylum in South Dakota, and how they worked to make sure the digital collection and its display are in service to the Native cultural perspective.
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Community of Practice, Model Project 

June Mazer Lesbian Archives

 

The Archives, originally called the West Coast Lesbian Collections, was founded in Oakland California, in 1981. Six years later it was moved to Los Angeles by Connexxus Women’s Center/Centro de Mujeres. The Archives acquired its present name after the death of June Mazer, in honor of her work as a community activist and invaluable supporter of the Archives.

The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives remains the only archive on this side of the continent that is dedicated exclusively to preserving lesbian history and to guaranteeing that those who come after us will not have to believe that they “walk alone.” The Archives is committed to gathering and preserving materials by and about lesbians and feminists of all classes, ethnicities, races and experiences. Included are personal letters and scrapbooks, artwork, manuscripts, books, records, newspapers, magazines, photographs, videotapes, flyers, papers of lesbian and feminist organizations, private papers, and even clothing, such as softball uniforms from the 1940s and 50s.

Hundreds of lesbians and feminists have been inspired to donate artifacts of their personal and collective histories. The Archives encourages all lesbians to deposit the everyday mementos of your lives so that others can discover them in the future. The privacy of any donor is protected to whatever extent she desires.

In 1989, the archives earned 501(c)(3) nonprofit status and received donated space from the city of West Hollywood, where it remains today. The mission of the Mazer Archives is to collect, preserve and make accessible lesbian, feminist and women’s queer history as a means of providing a link among all generations of lesbians; to develop social activities, educational events, opportunities and programs that promote historical awareness; and to provide research and resource facilities.

The all-volunteer staff of the Mazer Archives not only keeps the doors open, but also helps to make lesbian communities and others aware of our history through speaking engagements, the Archives’ newsletter, In The Life, (no longer in publication), and special programs and exhibits.

Community of Practice 

Values in Design

 

For over twenty years, Values in Design (VID) has been developed as both a theory and a method. VID research has analyzed a diverse set of technologies including human-computer interaction, robotics, mobile technologies, and web technology, and an equally diverse set of values such as privacy, trust, security, safety, community, freedom from bias, autonomy, freedom of expression, identity, dignity, calmness, compassion, and respect. Perhaps more important, VID means taking values into consideration in design practice — making it equally relevant to academics, technologists, and everyday people.

VID is a way of considering human life that explores how the values we think of as societal may be expressed in technological designs, and how these designs in turn shape our social values. In other words, technology is never neutral: certain design decisions enable or restrict the ways in which material objects may be used, and those decisions feed back into the myths and symbols we think are meaningful.

“About Values in Design.” n.d. Values in Design. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/vid/about.html.

See Also:

Bowker, Cory Knobel, Geoffrey C. 2011. “Values in Design.” Communications of the ACM, 2011. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/7/109899-values-in-design/fulltext.
Flanagan, Mary, Daniel C. Howe, and Helen Nussenbaum. 2008. “Embodying Values in Technology: Theory and Practice.” In Information Technology and Moral Philosophy, edited by Jeroen Van den Hoven and John Weckert. Cambridge England ; New York: Cambridge University Press. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.467.8021&rep=rep1&type=pdf#page=335.

 

 

Community of Practice, Model Project 

WITNESS: See It, Film It, Change It

 

WITNESS identifies critical situations and teach those affected by them the basics of video production, safe and ethical filming techniques, and advocacy strategies, making it possible for anyone, anywhere to use video and technology to protect and defend human rights. Includes guides for activists to archive their work and training materials for activists working in the field.

Model Project, Reading or Video 

Using Coyote to Describe the World / Sina Bahram, Susan Chun, and Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli

 

In November of 2015, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) launched a website with a rare accessibility feature. The website team had committed to making all of the images on the site accessible to the widest possible audience—particularly visitors with vision impairment—through visual description. To do so, the MCA worked with Sina Bahram and his team at Prime Access Consulting to develop a workflow tool, backing service, and API to support a distributed description workflow. The description project, Coyote, is an outstanding illustration of the principles of universal design, which argue that products designed to be useful to one community (in this case, people who are blind or have low vision) are likely to benefit a variety of users, not just those with disabilities. Invented to solve an unresolved need at the MCA and within the community, Coyote has in a short time expanded well beyond its original scope, bringing together a team of expert and poetic describers, passionate accessibility advocates, and open source developers and bringing needed attention to the ways that visual description might become a useful aspect of museum practice. In addition to discussing the policy, institutional, and technical implications around large-scale image description, (including both short and long descriptions), we also plan on presenting the latest enhancements, made possible by a museum technology grant from the Knight Foundation, to Coyote. These include a greatly enhanced representational model that can track visual descriptions of real world objects in addition to images, integration of concepts from the semantic web to facilitate rich search, the development of an organizational model that is used to offer a centralized Coyote instance to multiple institutions in a cloud-hosted version of the software, and enhancements to the Coyote API to facilitate broader third-party access such as Coyote being used for a treasure-hunt-like game based on visual descriptions.

Bahram, Sina, Susan Chun, and Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli. 2018. “Using Coyote to Describe the World.” In . Vancouver, Canada. https://mw18.mwconf.org/paper/using-coyote-to-describe-the-world/.
Community of Practice 

Training for Change

 

Training for Change  creates training and capacity-building resources for activists and other groups working on equity and social justice issues. Training material topics include Diversity and Anti-Oppression resources, Meeting Facilitation, Team-Building, and Organizing Strategies.

“Training For Change | Movement and Capacity Building at the Grassroots.” n.d. Accessed January 22, 2019. https://www.trainingforchange.org/.
Community of Practice, Model Project 

DLF Organizer’s Toolkit

 

The Digital Library Federation’s Organizer’s Toolkit is a wiki-site with general organizing strategies and procedures for establishing and promoting a working group, as well as information about how to start a new initiative or group within the DLF. The Organizer’s Toolkit builds upon the DLF’s commitment to building effective communities of practice.

Digital Library Federation. 2016. “DLF Organizers’ Toolkit.” DLF Wiki. 2018 2016. https://wiki.diglib.org/About_DLF_and_the_Organizers%27_Toolkit.