Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies
For at least half a century, catalogers have struggled with how to catalog and classify Native American and Indigenous peoples materials in library, archive, and museum collections. Understanding how colonialism works can help those in the field of knowledge organization appreciate the power dynamics embedded in the marginalization of Native American and Indigenous peoples materials…
Read MoreDoes 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,…
Read MoreIndigenous Knowledge, Intellectual Property, Libraries and Archives: Crises of Access, Control and Future Utility
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Read MoreActive Collections
The Active Collections website serves as both a community of practice and a core reading. The website’s goal is to “generate discussion and action across the history museum field to develop a new approach to collections, one that is more effective and sustainable.” The Active Collections Manifesto is an excellent place to start, but the website…
Read MoreAffective 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…
Read MoreThe Treatment of the American Indian in the Library of Congress E-F Schedule / Thomas Yen-Ran Yeh and Eugene T. Frosio
This historical reading from 1971 critiques the Library of Congress Classification system’s treatment of indigenous peoples, highlighting issues such as segregating American Indians from the United States, arranging American Indian history with bias, and representing American Indians as “savages.” Yeh offers proposals for improving the classification system, which is followed by comments and rebuttal from…
Read MoreResearch Ethics for Students & Teachers: Social Media in the Classroom
The Research Ethics for Students & Teachers: Social Media in the Classroom resource, developed by a FemTechNet initiative called the Center for Solutions to Online Violence, suggests basic guidelines for how to ethically study and use of social media in classrooms. It also includes a list of questions to pose to researchers and educators preparing to engage…
Read More#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics / Moya Bailey
Moya Bailey shares her experience collecting Tweets using the #girlslikeus hashtag and how she incorporates ethical practices when researching vulnerable communities, specifically trans women of color. Although this is not specifically a code of conduct, Bailey provides an explicit case study for how to be respectful, collaborative, and center a community’s needs over the researcher’s…
Read MoreLEEDh: Leadership in Engaged and Ethical DH Projects #d4d / Giordana Mecagni
Based off of discussions and her own contributions during the Design for Diversity Opening Forum, Mecagni produced these guidelines for Digital Humanities (and other disciplines) projects to work ethically and responsibly with communities, particularly marginalized communities. [zotpress items=”{1341761:QBZRIAGA}” style=”chicago-author-date”]
Read MoreOpening Archives: Respectful Repatriation / Kimberly Christen
This article highlights the importance of partnerships in digitization projects in relation to indigenous communities. While digitization and the advent of technologies that make information and items widely available, the groups, in this case indigenous communities, should always be consulted before items are made widely available in an effort to ensure that the item should…
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