Using Static Sites Technology for Increased Access: The Case of the Shelley-Godwin Archive / Raffaele Viglianti
This case study discusses the key decisions in adopting standards and technologies for a digitization project, in dialogue with ongoing scholarship around minimal computing and minimal editions. It has a specific focus on choices that affect long-term preservation and access, including efforts to enable offline use of the archive in order to increase its availability…
Read MoreDigitizing and Enhancing Description Across Collections to Make African American Materials More Discoverable on Umbra Search African American History / Dorothy Berry
This case study describes a project undertaken at the University of Minnesota Libraries to digitize materials related to African American materials across the Universities holdings, and to highlight materials that are otherwise undiscoverable in existing archival collections. It explores how historical and current archival practices marginalize material relevant to African American history and culture, and…
Read MoreRepresenting Normal: The Problem of the Unmarked in Library Organization Systems / Emily Drabinski
This case study analyzes the status of marked and unmarked binaries related to social identities in Library of Congress Subject Headings. The problem of bias in library classification and cataloging structures has been well documented and analyzed. Efforts to intervene in these systems have largely taken the form of advocating for different language or additional…
Read MoreTerp Talks: Designing a Schema to Describe Interpretive Sign Language Videos / Sarah Sweeney
This case study describes the development of a custom metadata schema to support the description of 65 educational videos used to help teach sign language. The creators of this special collection had specific access and discovery needs that were not served by standard vocabularies, and the custom schema developed methods to describe information like the…
Read MoreMurkurtu
Mukurtu (MOOK-oo-too) is an open source platform and content management system for digital community archives. The name is a Warumungu word meaning ‘dilly bag’ or a safe keeping place for sacred materials. This grassroots project seeks to empower communities to manage, share, narrate, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways. [zotpress…
Read MorePlateau People’s Web Portal
The Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal is a collaboratively curated and reciprocally managed archive of Plateau cultural materials. The materials in the Portal have been chosen and curated by tribal representatives. Each item has one or more records associated with it as well as added traditional knowledge and cultural narratives to enhance and enrich understanding to…
Read MoreIntroducing Documenting the Now / Ed Summers
In this introduction to Documenting the Now collaborative project, Summers provides background about the urgency and need for this type of open source application, especially for the Black community. He outlines two main goals of the DocNow project: 1) Create an open source app “that will allow researchers and archivists to easily collect, analyze, and…
Read Moreeverwhere, every when / Bethany Nowviskie
Nowviskie begins this talk by asking the question “where and when do Black lives matter?” in information sciences; she looks at Afropolitanism (space) and Afrofuturism (time), focusing on Afrofuturism; it is “self-possessed” and centers around the past, present, and future of blackness and locating/telling stories of the future while never forgetting the past. She advocates…
Read MoreWhy Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation / Tara McPherson
McPherson reflects on two experiences that reflect the disconnect between digital humanities and other modes of inquiry around race, gender, class, etc; instead of focusing on how to rupture oppressive infrastructures, conversations around tool-building and coding focused on how to build infrastructure. The answer to why the digital humanities are so white lies in this…
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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