Asher Schubert to Roger Malina to Asher
Started Nov 3, 2024
CONTEXT:
in response to: Nov 1 email: Dr. Malina, I have come across a journal from the American Historical Review discussing the creation and application of digital archives. Just the first couple pages have contained invaluable insights of the nature of digital archiving for both born-digital and analogue materials. If you have time, I highly recommend giving it a read https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/126/3/1102/6421763
Sincerely, Asher Schubert Undergraduate | Erikson Johnson School of Engineering and Computer Science, Student Assistant | Office of Research Information Systems
Abstract: Given the blurring of boundaries between historians and archivists in the digital realm, this article urges historians to pay more attention to discussions surrounding digital records and archival practices emerging from critical archival studies. More specifically, this article identifies and summarizes seven key themes and corresponding debates about digital records in contemporary archival studies scholarship: (1) materiality, (2) appraisal, (3) context, (4) use, (5) scale, (6) relationships, and (7) sustainability. A deeper knowledge of digital archival theory and practice—how records came to be in digital archives, the infrastructures that maintain them, and the tools necessary to provide access to and context for them—is not ancillary to historical work but provides important context to do digital history better.
The article begins: The following situation will sound familiar to those working in an academic archival setting: A student or faculty member comes in for a research consultation with an archivist and begins by stating they want to start a “digital archive.” The archivist might first ask a few questions and give a general overview of what building digital archives actually entails, from decisions around long-term digital preservation, to the creation of metadata, to the ethics of online access. Realizing the enormity of the tasks behind building and maintaining digital archives, the student, independent researcher, or faculty member may leave feeling overwhelmed but also, ideally, more intent on giving their project plan more detailed consideration.
Process
I annotated the article.
Page 1102: context to do digital history better
P1102 This I think is a crucial framing for our project
More specifically, this article identifies and summarizes seven key themes and corresponding debates about digital records in contemporary archival scholarship: (1) materiality, (2) appraisal, (3) context, (4) use, (5) scale, (6) relationships, and (7) sustainability.
P 1104 What historians may refer to as “digital archives” encompass two different types of collections of records in the minds of archivists: (1) born-digital records (such as emails, Word documents, and tweets) that have been selectively collected by archival institutions or organizations and preserved and (2) analogue records (such as those created in paper, analogue film, and other nondigital formats) that have been selectively digitized, selectively collected by archival institutions or organizations, and then selectively preserved.
This caught my attention, why? Lastly, Carbajal identifies as a US Latina born into the New Orleans Central American diaspora and a daughter to Honduran parents of working-class backgrounds. Michelle Caswell is primarily a scholar of archival studies who teaches master’s degree students training to be professional archivists in a department of information studies. She is also the cofounder of South Asian American Digital Archive, an independent community-based online-only digital archives that brings together and makes available digitized and born-digital materials relating to South Asians in the US.
Does the personalities of the researchers affect what we choose to archive? yes surely. Should we document the personal histories of our team members?
Archival Silences: p1108 Archival silences are magnified in digitization projects. Decisions about which analogue records to digitize and, conversely, which not to digitize are dictated by the resources (in terms of staffing, infrastructure, and ongoing digital preservation treatment) that administrators and funders allocate to digitization projects. These decisions, while often unmarked, add yet another layer of silence to the records that make their way into digital archives.
Multi-cultural need: This seemingly monocultural monolingual profession has resulted in most cases in the privileging of a select group of creators, subjects, languages, and perspectives. Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, for example, discusses the difficulty of working with non-English records and accompanying metadata, much of which include diacritic glyphs not commonly found in English-only data.
Ther artscilab seeks to be multicultural, generational, disciplinary etc.
What would a multigenerational method entail in digital archiving? roger is in his seventies, asher in his 20s. So?
Read up on MUKURTU p1112 https://mukurtu.org/Mukurtu (MOOK-oo-too) is a grassroots project aiming to empower communities to manage, share, narrate, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically minded ways. We are committed to maintaining an open, community-driven approach to Mukurtu’s continued development. Our first priority is to help build a platform that fosters relationships of respect and trust.
Slow archives Kim Christen and Jane Anderson These proposed practices, influenced by Indigenous scholars’ call to work slower, have recently been conceptualized in archival studies—namely, in Kim Christen and Jane Anderson’s discussion on “slow archives.”
For millennia in the dominant Western paradigm, the placement of records in archives assumed a transfer of custody; records were physically moved from where they were created or stored to an archival repository where they were preserved and made accessible. This transfer of custody assumed a transfer of ownership.
In these post-custodial arrangements, the relationship between repository and record is shifted from one of custodianship to one of stewardship. As Joel Wurl writes, “A stewardship ethos encompasses a very different set of relationships between stakeholders and materials. It is characterized by partnership and continuity of association between repository and originator. In a stewardship approach, archival material is viewed less as property and more as a cultural asset, jointly held and invested in by the archive and the community of origin.
Memorialization roger has written extensively on the concept of ‘dis-remembering’, or intentionally remembering otherwise”. See https://www.facebook.com/p/disremembering-100078130350805/ Dialogues between memories, works, un-learnings from the works/life of Gyorgy Kepes-this project started as a collaboration between Roger Malina, Ivaana Rungta and Thom Kubli and shall continue to gather new tracks, interlocking-random warps and curves.
And much discussion on the text on the carbon footprint of archives.
Reparative Archives
The Reparative Archival Description Working Group (RAD; previously the Reparative Archival Description Task Force) is charged by the Archives Advisory Group (AAG) with creating recommendations regarding principles and practices for reparative archival description work. Reparative archival description aims to remediate or contextualize potentially outdated or harmful language used in archival description and to create archival description that is accurate, inclusive, and community centered.
Asher: so, this is my view from above of the article. What is yours.