Encoding 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 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 Moredigitization: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should / Tara Robertson
In this blog post, Robertson takes a critical look at Reveal Digital’s work to digitize On Our Backs (OOB), a lesbian feminist porn magazine that ran from 1984-2004. She points out that there are ethical issues with digitizing and making print collections like OOB available online and that Reveal Digital needs more robust ethical guidelines…
Read MoreMachine Reading the Primeros Libros / Hannah Alpert-Adams
By delving into the material processes of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), as well as the history of OCR tools, this article shows how the statistical models used for automatic transcription can embed cultural biases into the output. This article is particularly relevant to multilingual projects, as it unpacks the effects of OCR software that generally…
Read MoreFrom Archives to Action: Zines, Participatory Culture, and Community Engagement in Asian America
Honma describes the use of zines in an undergraduate classroom to promote alternative pedagogies and incorporate critical inquiry and research skills. By bringing zines into his classroom as research materials, Honma provides an example of how to use archival materials and research to make connections between community archives and community action, and help students view…
Read MoreTeaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives
Caswell provides a framework for combating white supremacy, homophobia, and other harmful and persistent perspectives in the information science classroom. Through this framework, she and her students work to recognize the biases in IS and challenge those biases. This article also provides slides about practical steps and paradigmatic shifts to dismantling white supremacy in the…
Read MoreWampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive
Archives have a long and troubled history as imperialist endeavors. Scholars of digital archives can begin to decolonize the archive by asking, how is knowledge imparted, in what media, by whom, and for what ends? Drawing on a six-year-long ethnohistorical study of Cherokee language and writing, I explore these questions and analyze the epistemological work…
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…
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