From Custody to Collaboration: The Post-Custodial Archival Model at the University of Texas Libraries / Kent Norsworthy and T-Kay Sangwand
Despite living in an age of ubiquitous access to digital information, scholars still struggle to access both the physical and digital primary sources needed for research and teaching. This can be due to limited access to physical primary sources (i.e. cultural heritage materials located in another country), lack of resources to make analog primary sources…
Read MoreEncoding Culture: Building a Digital Archive Based on Traditional Ojibwe Teachings / Timothy Powell and Larry P. Aitken
This article addresses how the advent of technology can allow for the inclusion of indigenous stories in American literature history. Thus, this article is rooted in the assumption that may become a part of American literary history. It is the hope that through this integration of Native American culture through oral traditions and artifacts that…
Read MoreDos and Don’ts on Designing for Accessibility / Karwai Pun
The dos and don’ts of designing for accessibility are general guidelines, best design practices for making services accessible in government. Currently, there are six different posters in the series that cater to users from these areas: low vision, D/deaf and hard of hearing, dyslexia, motor disabilities, users on the autistic spectrum and users of screen…
Read MoreAgainst Cleaning / Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz
[T]here is not one single understanding of what “data cleaning” means. Many times the specifics of “data cleaning” are not described anywhere but reside in the general professional practices, materials, personal histories, and tools of the researchers. That we employ obscuring language like “data cleaning” should be a strong invitation to scrutinize, perhaps reimagine, and…
Read More“Free as in sexist?” Free Culture and the Gender Gap / Joseph Reagle
This article is particularly valuable when discussing stereotypical and default modes of collaboration and communication within technical communities. Reagle focuses particularly on gender, but the framework laid out here also has resonance for technical development involving other underrepresented communities. “Despite the values of freedom and openness, the free culture movement’s gender balance is as skewed…
Read MoreDiscrimination in Online Ad Delivery / Latanya Sweeney
A Google search for a person’s name, such as “Trevon Jones”, may yield a personalized ad for public records about Trevon that may be neutral, such as “Looking for Trevon Jones?”, or may be suggestive of an arrest record, such as “Trevon Jones, Arrested?”. This writing investigates the delivery of these kinds of ads by…
Read MoreON NONSCALABILITY: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales / Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
This heavily theoretical piece provides a vital counterweight to the pressure for “scale” in technological projects, and can give cultural heritage project managers a useful vocabulary for questioning demands to follow tightly regulated software development processes when it is not appropriate for community-driven, humanistic work. Tsing shows that while “scalability” is defined as projects that…
Read MoreDecolonizing Ethnographic Documentation: A Critical History of the Early Museum Catalogs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History / Hannah Turner
To inform debates about decolonizing museum records, this article maps the history of cataloging at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when material heritage was collected for museums from Indigenous peoples, the knowledge within those communities was often measured against Eurocentric biases that saw Indigenous knowledge as the…
Read MoreMobilizing records: re-framing archival description to support human rights / Stacy Wood, Kathy Carbone, Marika Cifor, Anne Gilliland, and Ricardo Punzalan.
This article seeks to raise consciousness within the field of archival studies in order to foster a generative discussion about how descriptive practices might be expanded, approached differently, or completely rethought. It brings together crosscutting theoretical issues and provides practical examples of mediation in order to mobilize these records in support of human rights work.…
Read MorePower to the People: Documenting Police Violence in Cleveland / Stacey Williams and Jarrett Drake
Archivists have long recognized the inherent historical and social mandate in preserving stories of those who endured violence at the hands of the state. Examples of this responsibility include archivists who recorded public tribunals in post-apartheid South Africa, documented stories of Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II, and acquired collections of…
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