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…
Read MoreAn 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…
Read MoreQueering 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…
Read MoreSocial 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.…
Read MoreTribal 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…
Read MoreThe 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…
Read MoreDiverse 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…
Read MoreFeminism 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.,…
Read MoreWhat’s Gender Got to Do with It? A Critique of RDA 9.7 / Amber Billey, Emily Drabinski, and K. R. Roberto
The RDA catalogues gender according to the male/female binary. The authors argue for a removal of gender cataloguing, especially when the controlled vocabulary falls into this binary; part of the problem with labeling gender is the choices are based on physical and name markers. This cataloging which reinforces problematic notions of gender as stable and…
Read MoreFeminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design / Shaowen Bardzell
Bardzell uses examples from feminist theories and practices in disciplines that revolve around design and user experience (i.e., architecture, gaming, etc.) as catalysts to think further about how feminist theory can be implemented in and ultimately change human-computer interaction (HCI), especially in theory, methodology, user research, and evaluation. Bardzell comes up with a “constellation of…
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