Disrupting Standards, Remaking Interfaces

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Digitizing Disruptive Archives: Open-source software as one answer to absence in humanities documentation

Hadassah Damien

The goal of this presentation is to examine an archive of previously absent or invisibilized, “disruptive” materials with a focus on discussing the interaction between the use of technology to catalog and the politics of a collection. Interference Archive [IA] is a Brooklyn-based, public, political archive, art, and resource center which explores relationships between cultural production and social movements. The self-selected user base interacts with its collection's materiality through a preservation through use mandate and the logic of archiving interfaces with a clear politic as well as an artistic process of activating cultural and social histories, instigating a techno-social praxis. Like a growing number of GLAM organizations, IA has implemented an open-source software called CollectiveAccess to build their digital collection. As a radical historian and open-source developer, Damien has worked and theorized as part of the Interference Archive’s team tackling the issue of digitizing its previously undocumented, invisibilized, ephemeral, and otherwise absent texts and cultural ephemera using processes and digital strategies that are politically aligned with the archive's content. We conclude by comparing open source software and preservation through use, and critique a colonizer gaze on the disruptive content of the IA.

Intersectional Feminist Archives: Ethics Into Practice

Jenna Freedman

A Platform for Radical Archival Description

Anne Gilliland

Certain individual archives, especially those that are consciously self-projecting as community, independent or oppositional archives, have been practicing forms of radical description, or at the very least, “non-canonical” description of their holdings for a long time. There is also a growing body of critical professional literature that acknowledges the role that mainstream metadata can play in imposing classificatory categories, privileging specific notions of authorship, depoliticizing established or delegitimating local authority forms, and supporting dominant historical narratives. However, there has been little systematic contemplation of the concerns and rationales underlying radical archival description and how they might be more broadly acknowledged and addressed in practice and in concept, especially given the pressure to “normalize” that comes when such archives use wider information systems to disseminate archival descriptions and digitized material. This paper will extend the idea of structural violence as advanced by scholars such as anthropologist Akhil Gupta to examine the ways in which today’s digital descriptive infrastructures (including descriptive standards and their promulgation by funding agencies, authority forms and files, shared databases of archival finding aids and digitized content, transnational collaborations to describe and put archival materials online, and Information Retrieval approaches) that aspire to expose and provide enhanced access to materials by and about minority, marginalized and oppressed groups and experiences instead can have the effect of systematically and cumulatively de-radicalizing, homogenizing, assimilating and sentimentalizing community and cultural expressions and heritage, as well as submerging power inequities. Waterton and Smith have argued that as dominant political and academic practice have become more engaged with expressions of community such as identity and heritage, different understandings of and assertions about heritage are eclipsed with the net result being “the virtual disappearance of dissonance and more nuanced ways of understanding heritage.” Drawing upon examples from the author’s research with community archives as well as with archives and recordkeeping in nations that have emerged following the ethnic and religious conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the paper will propose a platform for advancing radical digital description and reforming existing descriptive frameworks and structures. The platform is built around five facets (Acknowledging, Respecting, Enfranchising, Liberating and Protecting) and addresses issues of co-creation, the power to name, the right to self-identify, the right to respond, layered disclosure and community and individual security as these relate to both creators and end users of archival materials.

xZINECOREx Metadata for DIY media

Eric Goldhagen

This presentation will be an overview of the effort to design xZINECOREx, a metadata standard for Zines based upon Dublin Core as well as a Union Catalog/Linked open data system to aggregate and share data among different institutions. I'll discuss the decision to create a new standard instead of using existing ones; software choices; current progress and the next steps in the process.

Identifying Radical Memory Practices in Archival Infrastructures

Zack Lischer-Katz

This research begins to develop a morphology of radical archival gestures, with implications for archival theorists, practitioners and activists in better understanding the range of radical archival practices and their role in disrupting archival infrastructures. Shifting focus to infrastructures and practices offers a complementary perspective to investigations that tend to foreground the contents of archives. Analysis of the social and technical means of collecting and preservation reveals how collecting institutions serve particular social purposes that may be at odds with the goals of radical groups. Archiving, taken broadly, covers a variety of practices that seek to maintain meaningful matter over time. Archiving is both material and discursive, legitimizing particular selections of objects as authoritative “documents,” “memories,” “records,” etc. through inclusion in an archival order. The meaningful dimensions of these objects, in turn, support the legitimization of a particular social order. To overcome the apparent contradiction between radical change and the effects of archival order, this presentation offers the concept of “radical archival gesture.” Radical archival gestures have symbolic and material dimensions that express and enact disruption, resistance and/or reconfiguration within archival infrastructures. After offering a series of illustrations of this concept and its possible applications, this presentation will offer some possible future directions for using this concept within archival studies and other fields.

Digital Approaches to Archival Absence

Martha Teeney

What role can a college archives play in the representation of an institution’s past and present? How can archivists make accessible the history of a place, in all its complex, and often troubling, fullness? Can we avoid tokenization while allowing space for speech from the margins of our past? As Barnard nears its 125th anniversary, the Barnard Archives and Special Collections is embarking on a digital program to provide broader and deeper access to its collections. Canonical narratives about Barnard, recorded in secondary sources and reinforced in the folklore of the college, are necessarily limited, and researchers hoping to find--for example--the early histories of women of color at Barnard are often faced with archival silences--absences instituted during the creation of the records, then reinscribed during archival selection and appraisal. If we digitize according to the same logic of the existing collections, we run the risk of reinforcing these original absences. This talk discusses some potential strategies to surface marginalized narratives in a digital collections environment.

Six years in the Cinema Studies Department in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation. It's good to see some old friends.

Zack Lischer-Katz is a Library and Information Science PhD student at Rutgers University, School of Communication & Information. His research interests include media archives, preservation standards, information practices of preservationists, and the materiality of digital objects. He has taught courses on Digital Libraries for the Masters in Library and Information Science program at Rutgers University, as well as Video Preservation for the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at New York University.

I'm at Rutgers now, so don't hate me for that.

My presentation is called Identifying Radical Memory Practices in Archival Infrastructure.

Within a month of the first official Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Lower Manhattan on September 17, 2011, academics and collecting institutions were already hard at work putting into place systems with which to archive the documents of this nascent social movement.

A variety of academic and cultural heritage institutions began to develop workflows, best practices, policy documents, and licensing agreements through negotiations with Occupy protesters.

While students, faculty, and library administrators were concerned with setting up a system for collecting Occupy Wall Street for collecting this movement, participants initially voiced concerns about dominant cultural institutions taking possession of their materials.

What this tension illustrates is that understanding the radical dimensions of archives involves both what is collected, that is the materials of radical left social movement, but just as critically, how it is collected, including the social and technical systems in place that organize and preserve, as well as the larger social institutions that archives work to stabilize and legitimize.

So I'll just throw up an interesting picture.

Uh, as systems that reproduce particular regimes of knowledge and offer sources of stabilized information to support other institutions, archives can be seen as fundamentally conservative infrastructures.

The analytic term infrastructure, taken in its relational sense, helps to draw attention to the particular social and technical systems that support the production of archival orders.

A focus on infrastructure and a turn to materiality help to open up new avenues of analysis for considering the systems of archives.

As infrastructure, we can look at the technical level of archives, ranging from the level of storage media, file formats, even acid-free paper, for instance, uh, to the information technology systems, networks, power supplies, heating and cooling systems that support physical and digital preservation efforts.

Or we can study the social dimensions of infrastructure. The construction and the legitimization of particular archival practices of collecting, appraising, arranging, the cultural meanings and values attached to those practices.

So the educational systems and organizations that help to train and acculturate archival professionals, as well as the ways in which individuals work with and against the systems of archival order in everyday life.

In this presentation, my goal is twofold. First, to conceptualize archival infrastructure as a rich site of inquiry, guided by an analytic framework based on the sociology of knowledge. And secondly, to illustrate the utility of a novel analytic category that I've made up, which I term radical archival gestures, that may be useful for thinking about radical practice in archival orders.

I conceptualize archival here very broadly, uh, to include sites of sedimentation that depend upon the persistence of meaningful matter over time, often supporting other social institutions.

Any archive effectively works to classify the world at a very basic level, dividing it up into inside and outside the archive, to be preserved and to be destroyed, or more perhaps, uh, left to decay.

This process of selection can be embedded within non-human actors, as well, policy documents, algorithms, automated recording systems, etc. While archiving has a ritualistic performative dimension that contributes to social legitimation and offers a range of tropes and communicative modalities for cultural expression and textual production, the persistence of meaningful matter over time constitutes a fundamental characteristic of archival order.

The tendency of archival orders to support existing institutions makes the collecting of radical materials particularly problematic.

To archive radical materials within dominant social institutions is to place trust within and continue to legitimize the institution's radical, uh, movements may be calling into question. Thus not only is preservation itself a conservative act of placing objects within regimes that resist change, uh, both organizationally and at the level of documents, but inclusion in archives may legitimize and reproduce dominant social structures and epistemologies.

We saw concerns over this possibility in the initial resistance offered by Occupy Wall Street protesters in having their materials collected by academic institutions.

Uh, this tension produces an impasse. A radical social movement that is not archived cannot be represented within traditional historiographic regimes, yet making a social movement archivable reproduces the knowledge regimes that support the various social structures that may be implicated in the movement's call for radical change.

As an alternative approach to get around this impasse, so to speak, uh, for considering the radical within archives, I would like to shift focus to the range of practices that could be considered as radical insofar as they seek to resist, disrupt, or reconfigure existing archival infrastructures.

Uh, this term that I've already mentioned, radical archival gestures, uh, produce material effects within the systems of archival order and also in their enactment produce statements in themselves.

I'll give a brief set of examples so we can start to conceptualize what radical archival gesture might mean and how it might be useful for looking at memory practices in a variety of cultural and historical context.

So, this first, uh, variety of radical archival gesture I'll call occlusion. Uh, this describes the acts that constrain the speed, scope, or density of information flow through a particular channel of storage and retrieval.

This is a radical move that reconfigures a record's capacity to offer evidence, replacing information access with a retentive gesture that holds back portions of text and evidence from being fully known.

These examples of redacted documents procured through Freedom Information Act requests show how the striking out of text occludes the flow of particular pieces of information.

Uh, these two versions of the same document were received in 2010 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through two separate FOIA requests. Looking at these images is apparent that each gesture of redaction is unique, implicating the hand of the author within the act of occluding the channel of information access.

The striking out of text in this manner reveals the symbolic and material dimensions of radical archival gestures. In this case, the radical gesture disrupts the archival order of access while simultaneously preserving and protecting higher level structures of power and control.

Thus, radical gestures, in this sense, directed at archives, even as they disrupt the archival system itself of storage and retrieval, can serve to, uh, maintain dominant social orders.

My, uh, second type of, uh, radical gesture is program decay. Uh, a good example of this is the case of the limited edition art book, uh, William Gibson's poem Agrippa. Um, this, the history of this book has been well documented, documented by Matthew Kirschenbaum, so I won't talk about too much, but I do want to draw your attention to how the use of disappearing inks problematizes the preservation regime of book collecting and librarianship.

The original plan of having special light-sensitive inks change the imagery of the book over time was scrapped in favor of using uncured toner, uh, to print the images, which would, would smudge with the turning of each page.

Thus, the imperatives of material preservation and intellectual stability, including the development of preservation-grade acid-free paper, which we all rely on these days, stable inks, and the stability of bibliographic identities are all radically disrupted.

As Kirschenbaum has noted, that the diskette, which you can see there in the book, uh, which contains the digitally encoded poem of Agrippa, was programmed so that it would self-encrypt and become irretrievable after a single reading.

So the tension between preservation and access, which is a significant concern in the archiving community, is radically staged. To read the text, either the physical or electronic elements that constitute it, is to destroy the text.

The construction of this artist's book can be seen as a radical gesture that disrupts the stability of printed text and throws a wrench into the mechanisms of preservation that have been established.

Okay, so next, uh, gesture is erasure. The, the, um, the desire to overturn existing social orders and, and impose new ones, and this ties back to all these, um, social movements, particularly in Egypt, that have been talked about.

Um, so the desire to overturn existing social orders and impose new ones may also lead to the material destruction of symbolic monuments, libraries, and archives. An emergent social order may be fearful that the traces of the old order will peek up through time, pricking the present.

The case of the giant Buddhas of Bamian in Afghanistan here, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, illustrates how destroying monuments can be seen as a radical gesture. The time and effort that went into destroying these huge statues posits the revolutionary spirit of this branch of iconoclastic Islam and the individual devotion of the individuals involved, as well as physically producing a gestural gap.

This is reiterated by the gesture of the man in the photo, pointing to the ongoing process of destruction. Of course, the weight of the Buddha itself, as mon, as monument of past devotional ideologies and geological, and the geological formation of the cliffs, resists this radical gesture, producing a gap that is still filled by its ghostly image.

Recent work to start to restore the statues is radical in a different way. This scaffolding shows recent efforts taken to reconstruct the Buddhas, or at least to protect their remnants while Afghan officials in the world community figure out, a reasonable plan of restoration.

The restoration of what has been lost is a gesture in itself.

It shows how radical gestures are always relational to particular orders. What was once radically produced often becomes a new stabilized order. Thus, the restoration of the giant Buddhist statues could be seen as radical, subverting the powerful gaps and absences produced by the Taliban's own radical gestures of erasure.

Now the following examples are drawn from the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Germany, which I visited in March of this year.

The curation of the exhibit, which everyone should check out if you're in Berlin, the curation of the exhibit attempts to reconstruct the stories of a selection of families who are victims of the Holocaust through the assemblages of recovered documents.

What is most striking about the exhibit from an archival standpoint is the ways in which resistance to the Nazi regime are enacted at the level of documents and documentation. Both in the use of non-traditional writing materials, such as writing in the margins of books or on scraps of paper, as well as through the recoding and counter-archiving of documents, resistance to the Nazi documentary regime took place through a range of practices.

The first example of this is what I'm terming recoding.

The example I have here is of a survivor writing a list in complete sentences that describe personal relationships between, sorry, personal relationships to the deceased from his family, fully articulating the grief of each death in relation to the individual's experience and his genealogy.

This is juxtaposed in this exhibit. I'll go back. This is what's next to it. This is juxtaposed in this exhibit with a variety of documents used by the Nazi regime to keep track of the living and the dead.

The recoding of this deadly order into the gestural pen strokes of a survivor enumerating his lost loved ones and reestablishing their relationship to him positions the living individual as the center of a web of memorialized family bonds.

Rather than dehumanized units that may be shuffled and processed in a spreadsheet, entries are recoded to produce an alternative manifest of personal grief.

The whole collection produced of the Nazi bureaucracy is radically transformed from an administrative spreadsheet to means for recovering genealogical memory and legal evidence.

Counter archiving is another important practice that both records the individual lived experience of the victims but also gives chilling testimony that serves as a catalog of crimes and a reclaiming of the traces of bodily erasures.

Thus the Nazi database of death was undermined even as it was methodically enacted through its program by an accumulation of statements in a parallel counter archive.

This picture depicts a photographer archiving the Nazi's documents of oppression. In this case, this man Mendel Grossman is photographing the currency that was provided for use in the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland.

The images and testimonies produced through these radical gestures circulated through Europe and became an important way for transmitting knowledge detailing the atrocities within the annex territories.

I will close with a more contemporary and less macabre type of radical gesture.

We may be familiar with copying and distributing information beyond prescribed limits can also constitute a radical gesture. Depending on the archival infrastructures being resisted, in cases surrounding the copying and distribution of public knowledge as well as scholarly publications, we can observe a range of radical archival gestures that push back against legal and technical systems that seek to regulate access to particular collections.

We see this in resistance to such regulatory regimes as copyright, digital rights management, and proprietary file formats. The recent leaking of NSA documents by Edward Snowden, the work of WikiLeaks, as well as the late Aaron Schwartz's gestures of free knowledge distribution illustrate how overcoming restrictions on access to information have symbolic and material consequences.

A whimsical example of copying beyond acceptable limits is Kenneth Goldsmith's art project, printing out the entire internet. The multiplication of documents through the crowdsourced printing of seemingly arbitrarily selected web pages does produce an anarchic collection that seeks to overwhelm the potential for archival order.

However, it seems to support rather than resist the ordering structures and aesthetic and monetary concerns of the art gallery space as an institution. I will leave it to the audience to decide whether this counts as a radical gesture or not.

As we have seen from the selection of examples, radical archival gestures can support a range of political imperatives. The usefulness of the term then lies in its ability to enable us to look at the ways in which particular practices may resist, disrupt, or reconfigure our particular archival regime.

Radical archival gestures are enacted in relation to an existing configuration of collection, storage, and retrieval.

In this presentation, I have sought to outline a conceptual framework that I hope will be applicable to multiple levels, sites of analysis within archival orders, however broadly or narrowly we wish to define them for our purposes.

Using the analytic of radical archival gesture, I hope will be useful for both activists and archivists in conceptualizing their work in regards to archives, as well as for researchers that study the memory practices of individuals and communities.

Thank you.

Anyone else's comments? Okay.

Well, maybe we'll go back to the beginning then. Since there's been a lot of talk about the relationship between archives, archivists, and the individuals or communities they serve and whose lives they represent, I'm wondering if you could talk specifically about your work in Croatia and Bosnia, I believe.

Alexander Provan is the editor of Triple Canopy, a magazine and publishing platform based in New York. He is also a contributing editor of Bidoun, a magazine of the arts and culture of the Middle East and its diaspora. His writing on digital culture, aesthetics, literature, and politics has appeared in The Nation, The Believer, n+1, Bookforum, Artforum, and Frieze, among other publications. Triple Canopy has recently participated in exhibitions and organized public programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City) as part of the 2014 Whitney Biennial; the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 (New York City); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Provan is a fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics for 2013–2015.

And if you could speak to how the social aspect of these kinds of archival projects might be articulated in the technical aspects of the archive.

Anne Gilliland is Professor and Director of the Archival Studies specialization, Department of Information Studies, and Director of the Center for Information as Evidence, at the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She also directs the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) that is led by a consortium of eight U.S. universities. Her teaching and research interests relate to the design, evaluation and history of recordkeeping, cultural and community information systems; metadata creation, management and archaeology; and community-based archiving and social justice concerns. Her most recent work is examining the role of records and recordkeeping in post-conflict recovery in the former Yugoslavia. Dr. Gilliland is a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists.

I think maybe that's a little bit putting the cart before the horse because what I'm trying to do at the moment is to understand what kinds of records people need to reconstruct their lives and move on and then to think about the archival services, the systems, the records officers, procedures that will help them to do that.

But one of the big issues is the affect issue. So trying to understand both the kinds of records people need, but the kind of processes that are tied up with getting to these records, if the records even exist, which is a whole other issue about absent records, hidden records, just selectively destroyed records.

But people have incredibly traumatized relationships to the records. So at the moment, what I'm doing is ethnographic work where I'm gathering stories about people and records. And I'm also looking at literature, contemporary literature that's coming out of that region that also figures records, record keeping processes.

And then from there, because the other part of this is that the archivists themselves also lived through the wars and are also dealing with recovering their own lives and coping with their own traumas and coping with each other at the same time.

And the archives have been – they're being reconstructed, they're in very difficult positions, they're under-resourced. In some countries, they're resistant to standards, but the records are distributed across countries.

So, you know, that's the kind of work that I'm doing at the moment. It involves doing – trying to figure out exactly what the immediate issues are and what the – in particular, what the affective issues are in order then to be able to design both systems, which is, you know, the sorts of things that Eric's been talking about, but also services that deal with real-life people whose lives are completely and utterly tied up with these records, not somewhere down the line, but right now.

The other thing that you cannot avoid is the fact that there's over a hundred years of conflict that keep showing up in terms of when you try to deal with something immediate. It has really long roots, and it's very, very complicated, and a lot of archival processes protect people alive or dead for maybe 70 years or so, but in fact, these roots are so much longer than that.

And a hundred years ago, it was still incredibly present in people's lives, and you've got to cope with that at the same time.

Does anybody want to respond directly to that? Okay. Well, maybe – I'm also just curious about how the principles you laid out evolved and how, you know, the degree to which they evolved from conversations with the people you're working with.

But also, you know, I'm curious about how those principles might actually be instantiated. You know, you can have agreed-upon principles, but you might – it seems like in many of these cases, you also might require an archivist or some kind of mediating figure to ensure that these principles are being followed.

And that seems to relate to questions of resources as well. So, I'm – yeah, I'm wondering if that is going to bear on the work. I think – you know, when we look at the community archives movement and – and we've done a tremendous amount of work in California with all sorts of different kinds of community archives, particularly with queer archives, but with all sorts of also immigrant field worker archives, labor movements as well.

The first tension is whether people get to archive themselves and address their immediate needs or whether there's a bigger institution going out there and collecting their material. Those are two totally different strands to work with.

We tend to work with the grassroots movements and what we're trying to help people do. And we have to figure out how we place ourselves into that. And by we, you know, I'm an academic. My students are going to be practitioners or they're going to be academics where they place themselves in relation to these movements without colonizing these movements, without turning them into something else.

But the first – and we are also a school, like Hadassah was saying, we're a school with a social justice mandate. So, we're trying to figure out where does our knowledge and expertise come in here in enabling people with really immediate needs, victims of human trafficking, field workers with, you know, huge healthcare issues, all sorts of, all sorts of issues like this.

And, you know, are we really what's needed at all? So, we have to – one of the things we've been doing is completely restructuring our educational system and thinking about how we actually prepare people to do this kind of work.

We embed students in grassroots organizations for service learning purposes for them to get a much better sense of what is needed and whether they are the right people and what kind of skills they should have.

If you look at several of these archives and you look at the kinds of principles that they are enunciating, many of them are saying, we don't want professional archivists in the mix at all. We believe we should be doing it ourselves and we should do it for as long as we need it.

And when we don't need it, you know, then maybe the archives will go away because the classic traditional archival response is sustainability, sustainability. But this is about what we need to think about those archives as political instruments in the actual moment, not about what happens in the future.

And those are two completely and utterly different paradigms. And I think, you know, the big question is where the professional community fits in there at all. Now, what we do know is over time, a lot of those grassroots archives will not sustain themselves into the long term, either because they can't do it, they just don't have the capacity or the movement evolves into something else or achieves its aims.

And at that point, those materials often do get in one way or another ingested into bigger repositories. And the other issue then that starts to come up is about the way that those archives protected their own people disappears when that happens because these archives become subject to mainstream archival practices.

And part of the argument is, and this is what does show up in post-conflict countries, I think, is that people who've taken over the archives don't always understand what the long-term implications are for protecting vulnerable people.

And they're vulnerable people after many generations, not just immediately. There are also people who put their material in these archives, and they're in garages and attics and all over the place, who specifically did not want them going to mainstream organizations.

And yet, that's where they end up. When people aren't alive any longer, those archives can't sustain themselves.

Well, so I know the Interference Archives serves a pretty different audience or public, but I'm curious how you might feel about the Interference Archives' usefulness disappearing at a certain point 10 or 20 or 50 years into the future, and how that relates to questions of an archive like this being subsumed by a larger institutional archive, which has quite a different orientation, a different public, and which reorients the materials and their historical purpose or their purpose as documents.

Hadassah Damien is a technologist, catalog software developer, and digital communications specialist at Openflows Community Technology Lab. She has collaborated on digital collection sites for John Jay library, The Interference Archive, and more. As a community organizer who also implements technology to help activists succeed, and a multimedia artist who also builds digital archives, her work intersects functionality with agility, practicality, and the democratic politics of open-source cultures. She is the Resident Scholar at the Interference Archive researching a book on the history of raised fists in political art. The digital catalog for this project can be seen here. She holds an MA in American Studies, and a Certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy from the CUNY Graduate Center.

It's interesting. Anne, as you were speaking, thank you so much for your comments, so much to think about. I was thinking about the relationship between archivists and this idea of sort of radical or archiving from the bottom or disruptive archiving and the urge for participatory art and socially engaged art and the sort of the parallels between the two, especially when you were speaking about how how individuals either insert themselves.

Lots of these involve art. Yeah, so many, so many do. And I'm thinking of that because that's a practice I'm involved in, and this question of, you know, are we participating as, you know, is it us or is it other, right? Is it us or is it them? And is it our archive, you know, in this little space, or is it going to this bigger space where it will be othered, or how will it be cared for? I think it's a really challenging question.

And in terms of the interference archive, you know, can I predict the future? Will, in 30 years, will we all still be here? NASA recently said no, so maybe that's not an issue to worry about.

That's not funny. But in terms of like actually, you know, what, what this archive is going to do, when, and if, and how it moves hands. I mean, I'm glad these conversations are happening now, and there are, there are thoughtful people.

I mean, we have people like, like Jenna, you know, in an institution, you know, working very, very hard to try to hold some of what the, the urges of the creators of the content want. So I think it is possible.

You know, does it always happen? No. I think we have to also problematize that whole us and them thing too, because the archival community traditionally has come, been drawn from people who are not the same people who are doing the grassroots activities.

And, and if you look globally around the world, this is happening all over the place. But, but the people who are now coming into archival education, we, we are now seeing people specifically coming in from these communities wanting to go back into the communities and build capacity.

And that raises lots of interesting questions about whether we're actually creating little cultural germs that we're sending out that are actually going to pollute that environment. Because what do you teach people? Do you teach them canonical practices to go in and, and which will ultimately de-radicalize those environments? Um, or do we change, you know, does it actually change what's going on inside the university? And the university starts to think differently and the educational process works differently.

Uh, you know, we graduate also doctoral students in this area and what, they're going to be academics, most of them. What are they going to do vis-a-vis these movements? What's their role there? You know, and, and, and when you are doing work where there are immediate human consequences to this work, absolutely immediate human consequences, how do you stand back and just observe that? And it's a problem with doing ethnography, I think, as opposed to trying to get in and help in some, you know, that your, the kind of help you can provide is a much longer, um, so a much longer lead time.

And so I think one whole big piece of this is about reflexivity on the part of whoever the we is who's involved, and a lot more transparency also and reflexivity about the processes that are involved, um, and not just assume that they're all benign, because they're, they're not all benign, or at least they're not all, nothing is unvalue-laden.

Yeah, I mean, perhaps related, I'm, I'm interested in the, uh, the ways in which archivists are accountable to the institutions, uh, for which they work. Um, I mean, BART is a, is a pretty interesting example, it seems, because of course it's not, I mean, it's difficult to define as an institution.

Martha Tenney is Barnard’s first Digital Archivist. She comes to Barnard from the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, a digital archives that partners with organizations worldwide to digitize and make accessible important and vulnerable records of human rights struggles. She has also worked in digital archives at Democracy Now! and the Franklin Furnace Archive.

So, um, I, I'm wondering how you conceive of your responsibility or accountability to, um, to Bard and, and relatedly, um, you know, as you're doing this work specifically related to race and Bard history, it seems like there's this strange balance between, uh, wanting to provide a corrective account and wanting to locate materials that are absent versus, um, potentially wanting to preserve the absence that is, uh, constitutive of this archive, because that seems to be an essential part of this institution's history as well.

Um, so yeah, I'm wondering about your relationship to Bard and that question in particular. Sorry. Um, so I guess, uh, I could answer that in saying that I think that within the structure of the archives at Barnard, um, Barnard, sorry.

No, it's a show, it happens a lot. It's so much easier to say Barnard. Also not Baruch. Um, yeah, but Barnard is a women's college that is affiliated with Columbia, um, but is in some ways, uh, institutionally and financially separate from Columbia at the same time.

So it is actually an interesting institution to, um, look at in terms of its archives. I see, um, within the archives and within the school, I don't, I don't really feel pressure to present like a, um, like clean narrative of Barnard's history.

Um, I, I think that comes a lot from the, the great guidance and, um, management that I have in the archives. So that's Shannon also. Shout out to Shannon. Um, and also within the library as a whole.

So like Jenna is there and a lot of other people are there who are working on radical projects within, within an institutional framework. Um, I see it more as my responsibility to actually, um, surface these narratives that for so long were completely submerged or, um, in some ways silenced by, um, by omission.

Um, and it's kind of, it's kind of fascinating when you look at the larger narrative of, of women's colleges and, um, especially the seven sisters, how prevalent this history of racism is and how how intense this history is.

And I, I think that those things are, are like really important to surface. Um, it's something that I've been thinking about a lot, but I'm not really sure exactly how it happens and thinking about preserving the fact that there is an absence while making a narrative apparent is also a really interesting paradox, I suppose.

Do you have a sense of what the institution's stake in doing this work is? Well, I don't know. I think institutions are maybe moving more towards doing this work. I guess you saw Brown did a big project a few years ago investigating its, um, the way that it benefited from the, from the slave trade.

Um, and then Ebony and Ivy. It's like, if there was any question about whether these institutions benefited from a, a very intense reliance on the slave trade and on, on intellectual subjugation of non-white people, it's completely out there now.

Like people have done the research again and again and, and showed that it exists. I think maybe more showing, um, instead of just only a history of absence, a history of racism, trying to privilege the narratives and the, and the lived experience of people of color who have, um, moved to these institutions particularly earlier in their history, I think that becomes what I'm interested in, but not doing it somehow not doing that in a tokenizing way, even though there were token numbers, literally token numbers of, of black women at Barnard Early in its history.

So how do I do that without, um, yeah, being insensitive to the ways that I'm representing? And, and relatedly, I, I was interested in the, uh, the possibilities you mentioned for creating these, these narratives, um, specifically, uh, sharing objects between collections and different uses of metadata and recollection or recollection, uh, which would be the creations of collections by users.

So, I mean, I, I'm, I guess I'm particularly interested in database design and the, um, the ways, the ways in which certain kinds of databases and interfaces allow you as archivists and also, um, users or, uh, or the, uh, non-professionals in the, uh, in the public to, uh, to create and to visualize different intersecting relationships between documents and between collections.

Um, so I, I, I'm not sure how much you all thought about this. I know collective access offers certain tools for doing that. So, um, um, I guess I, I'm wondering if, if you could elaborate on those possibilities, uh, and which ones people you and others have actually experimented with and maybe, Eric, you could also offer some insights into the possibilities of creating narratives via connections between documents that are not so static and, um, and the ways in which archivists as well as users can, uh, form those relationships and make them legible.

Well, I think a lot of work has been done on this within digital humanities kind of field. So, um, like the legacy of digital humanities is these kind of like giant, beautiful projects that require so much work, um, by like hand coding TEI or like hand coding relationships between letters and then visualizing on a map.

And it's like, you know, represents thousands of hours of labor probably on the part of very lowly paid graduate students or, you know, like it's, it's like a untenable system labor wise, I think. So, I think the next question that we have to think about within this field is, um, like, uh, archives need to join the rest of the internet.

And this is, like, like we have, um, it's something that's possible and that has been shown to be possible within, um, like almost any website that you visit, like that you can curate your own collections of objects and that, um, you can expose connections through linked open data so that don't require like the individual work of a person or of an institution to do that.

Um, so I think it's more about like capitalizing on these existing technologies, I guess. Um, and spreading out, spreading out the work so that it doesn't, yeah, it doesn't just become the work of one, one group or one person.

Uh, yeah, I just, there, there are a lot of tools that have been built or are being built to try to address these things. Um, we've mentioned collective access a bunch today.

Eric Goldhagen is a technology worker with a background in print production. He has been working with Openflows for the past 13 years bringing innovative technology solutions to non-profit, educational and political organizations. Eric has been working worked on Collective Access based projects for QZAP, the Interference Archive and The Loyd Sealy Library at John Jay College. As part of his work with QZAP, Eric is helping to design xxZINECORExx, a metadata standard and union catalog for Zine archives.

In my opinion, it's one of the strongest foundations to build on at this point, um, because it does, it, it, it's data model allows for, uh, very interesting connection between documents and people, people and people, documents and historic events and places, um, in a way that allows those connections to be drawn.

And I think the, that has a lot to do with your ability to build modules on top of the existing system, right? Um, yeah. And also just the core database structure, um, and that I don't want to get into too much technical detail, but there, the, the core of the system is metadata.

Um, and those connections that you're going to draw between objects and other things are going to be drawn via metadata. And linked open data systems are essentially about what people call the semantic web or something.

All that really is, is your markup is metadata. That how you mark up a document has meaning. And so those connections can be drawn. So the fact that its foundation is about that metadata makes it a strong system for doing that.

Um, and I, I do believe that these systems need to be built, uh, on free software licenses, that the necessity of institutions collaborating, using each other's code, uh, and being allowed to modify those systems and share those modifications is critical to making the best use of those little pieces of limited labor that each institution has.

Um, and just to tangent a sec, just what you were talking about earlier in the, the list of rights you laid out really, uh, I found really exciting because it seems that you're, you're thinking this out.

There's a real parallel there to the GPL free software license focusing on the, as I was saying before, the rights of the end user of the software and thinking about flipping it to the rights of the creator.

And, um, yeah, I, I, I, I need to look into that more because it seems you've really consolidated a lot of those thoughts in a, a very simple list and I just think that's great. Yeah, I think, and it's not just the rights of the creator.

I think it's the rights of the people who are implicated in the material. I mean, one of the really interesting things I think about linked data is it has this potential to do some things that we, it's very, very difficult to do manually through the archives in terms of, of putting together things to build a picture of people who are otherwise really very much invisible in the archive.

But it had, you know, it's always a double-edged sword because it has also the potential to, to expose people who are vulnerable in various ways because manually moving through one archive, even more so manually moving through multiple archives that are distributed across a lot of locations.

It's very difficult to do, to piece together a picture. You can piece together a picture to empower people, but you can also piece together a picture to identify people, to target them in various ways.

And when you start to use things like data visualization techniques, um, suddenly you see, often if you're relating even photographs and who's in photographs, for example, interesting connections that suddenly pop up that people didn't realize certain people knew each other in particular, and there they are standing side by side at a particular moment in a particular event.

And this, you know, I'm really interested in this issue of protecting vulnerable populations, or what do you do when, you know, it pops up that somebody two generations back, um, in your own family was maybe a perpetrator, you know, not just a victim, but a perpetrator.

You know, how do you cope with that kind of knowledge coming out in a really public way that people, other people could also, um, reproduce that information? And, and of course that pertains to your common activist as well, not just the, the kind of vulnerable populations with which you work.

I mean, Zach, you were talking about what it means to make a radical movement archivable and the tensions around this kind of institutional ordering of political activity and the ethos of groups like, uh, Occupy Wall Street.

But, I mean, this suggests that one might be equally fearful of any information about oneself and one's political activities being captured and ordered in such a way as to be representable to, uh, a public, much less a government.

Um, so, I mean, have you, have you come across these concerns much in your, in your work? Um, I mean, my own sort of philosophy behind it is that we need to take into account, um, the right to, to, to sort of be forgotten, which is some legislation that's going on in the EU is actually something that was brought up.

So, um, what I'm interested in is how people do re do act, whether intentionally or unintentionally, uh, to resist these regimes. So, I'm not necessarily, I don't have any sort of empirical data on that.

I'm just sort of, I'm sensitized to that and I'm trying to see moments where people are resisting that at this point. And I think it's really goes back to, you know, if you think about totalitarian states and, and the bureaucracies that support things like genocide, that's big data, you know, and not to be alarmist, but, you know, it's, it's part of the whole, the whole ethical debate that's ongoing.

And there's, there's not going to be an answer, but I think being able to delete things that you're implicated in is important too. Okay.

Um, I have one, one last question about open source software.

Hadassah Damien on Open Source Software

Um, I mean, Hadassah, when, when you were talking about, uh, the ideals represented by the Interference Archive and the way in which they correspond to, um, open source software, both to the ways in which it's used and improved over time.

And also to the, the core values of the open source software movement, if you could identify a single such movement. Um, but you know, like of course adopting open source software does not automatically, uh, mean you achieve these ideals of openness, collaboration, dialogue, and, and, uh, you know, a broader investment in the project.

So, and there, there is a lot of, um, instruction that happens in quite often these, these projects, um, fail to achieve those ideals because they are in fact, you know, it is in fact quite difficult to, um, to get others to sign on to this kind of project.

So I'm, I'm wondering if, if you have, if you and others have specific experiences related to the, uh, potential gaps between these ideals and what one might actually achieve.

Yeah. Um, oh, thank you. Yeah. I think that's actually a really great point. It's not just because something is open source. Does it make it, uh, you know, radical and collaborative? It's not, you can't just, you know, slap a circle a on something and have it be anarchist either, right? Like the, like, that's not just the, uh, the patina of the thing is not the thing itself, as we all know.

Um, and just for example, like look at Drupal, right? Drupal sort of started off as this like, like, you know, very, like more community-minded open source project that's now like Forbes 500 level situation.

Um, you know, which is helping some people a lot. Uh, moving on from that, I think for the Interference Archive, um, part of the reason that our implementation of, of using open source software, um, has really worked is because of the, uh, diverse group of people in the cataloging crew.

I see at least two of us in the room, um, that there are, uh, there's librarians, there's historians, there's artists, there's technologists, um, uh, there's archivists. So it's, I think it is actually the, the group of people trying to use the software together, um, kept each other committed to working on the project.

Um, uh, it kept it interesting, it kept it alive, and I think it also, you know, goes back to this affective idea of when small archives or small groups of anything are attempting to get something done, you know, what is the, what's the urge to do it? Is there, uh, you know, um, in, in terms of, um, you know, what is the, what, why are we doing this? You know, why are we working for this archive? Um, and it's not as, uh, you know, critical or urgent issue as, uh, trying to, you know, rebuild someone's identity or historicize after, um, a war or genocide event.

Um, you know, but it is, you know, this sort of, like, social movement, uh, irresistibility that I was talking about, this idea that, you know, if we create historical, multiple historical, historical, queer historical instances, um, that we're actually creating something valuable to be used in the future.

Um, and I, I think that that actually, you know, actually helps move things along. And there is the fact that with open source communities and open source software, some are better than others, and there's also, you know, there's a much more friendly user base that I found people I can ask questions to, you know, uh, information, wikis, um, you know, it actually, you know, it's not quite as, um, uh, you know, it might not be as, um, what am I trying to say? Easily documented as Microsoft Access, but then I never have to ever touch Microsoft Access.

I can, in fact, do something more, uh, interesting and, um, more useful with the data that I'm trying to create. So it's, it's a push and pull in there. Um, maybe I should ask now if there are any questions from the audience since we have a little less than 15 minutes left.

Q&A

Um, is there a microphone or should people come up here or? Okay.

Um, maybe we can just start at the front.

Yeah, I wanted to get a sense for how responsive are institutions to artists who need advice so that if we're running our own community archive and doing some of the things that you were talking about, you know, um, how do we then reach out for support from the institutions? Is that a question? Well, NYU actually has some good resources for archives, uh, of artists, uh, especially media archives.

Um, so I just thought I would throw that out there.

I don't know. It depends on the institution. I think it depends on the institution. To be discussed afterwards, maybe, in the halls. I think that's an issue. Yeah. I think that's actually really an issue.

Um, maybe, maybe we could take two at a time since, go ahead. Hi, I'm an archivist and I work for a big institution, but I would just find a person in an archive, um, like myself to talk to about getting support and advice about running a community archive rather than trying to, um, you know, cross a barrier of a big institution.

First, just find somebody like a friendly face first and then, you know, you can, you can kind of set the boundaries that, that you need for, for your own archive.

Does that make sense? Yeah, go ahead.

Often, if you talk to an institution, they will tell you, well, that's not how we do archives. And so I was responding more to what Anne was talking about, is that if you already have an archival process that's working in terms of retaining information and, and instituting change within your community, then how, if you need just the recognition from the institution, how, are there channels within institutions where we have a way to contact? So it's not this fishing expedition where you need to find a friendly arch, archivist.

I mean, you, you know, you can't just walk in and say, well, I'm looking for a friendly archivist. You know, it's, I think there's a little bit of a disconnect there. So when you were saying you were studying these, you know, and considering, well, how do we intervene? And I'm wondering, well, is the, are the institutions considering, well, how can we be available? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really interesting question.

And I think it's, it's a moving target. Because, and you know, again, I can't speak for a collecting institution, because I'm an academic, I'm not, I'm not on that side. And I think there are people here from UCLA, who probably be talking about some of this later, this afternoon, because they've been some very interesting community archives, institutional partnerships happening in Los Angeles, at UCLA, at USC, as well.

But I do know that in terms of preparing future archivists, which is something that I'm involved in doing, we actually require every single student to be, they are actually inserted in service learning positions with often very small, and sometimes very marginal organizations.

And they're there not as interns, like we classically have internships as well, but they are there, in part as consultants, and in part to raise their own consciousness about the fact that there are, what I guess you could call indigenous systems at work, and then to reflect on those and think about whether in fact, those are more effective and more appropriate in those settings, than the sorts of things that we would canonically teach.

And the idea is, over time, you know, that we will, we will change the toolset that archivists have available to them, because they'll be more aware of the fact that you can do things in different ways, and more aware of when they go into an environment, not just to go in, in order to say, oh, you're doing it all wrong, you should be doing it this way, because there are systems that do work.

But then, but to have the meta skills, then to be able to interface between different systems, so that you can empower, help organizations to self-empower to the level that they want to, without obliterating what they're doing there at the same time.

And I think the other thing that we're really interested in inculcating is the ethic of service and the ethic of volunteerism as well. And I know that, you know, there are some other people also here over the next couple of days who graduated out of our program, who are doing a lot of this work, and they could talk about it.

But some of it is about, you know, moving beyond your institutional boundaries. Personally, I think it's time for us to start breaking down that total sort of bond between the archivists and their own institution.

Archivists, there are very, very few, except I think you see it in the human rights arena of archivists who are separated out from an institution. Archivists directly work for the interests of their own institution.

And one of the things that happens when community organizations come to some major archives, libraries, special collections and say, well, we have, you know, we need some help with what we're doing. The response they get is, why don't you just donate the stuff to us and we'll take care of it.

And, you know, if it's a living, empowering archive that's actually meeting immediate needs in the community, that's not going to be the answer that helps the community. There are times when that is the answer for the community, but it's not in many cases.

So I think we just have a few minutes left, so maybe we can take three questions at a time, and then we can fight over them up here.

I was interested in the preservation through use concept, and I was wondering what does that actually look like? Does it mean that the users are part of the putting into some sort of preservation method? I just, I mean, I get sort of the idea of it, but I want to understand what, how that actually works.

And is there another question that's somewhat related to preservation through use or tangentially? Or maybe just one more question so we can add it on.

So I work on an independent zine archive with a digital presence, and one of the issues that we've been grappling with is that the intellectual content is privileged in the digital realm, because that's kind of what all of the metadata categories relate to.

So I was wondering if, either for Jenna or Eric, the physicality, the method of creation, the tools and media used in the process of creation, if you're working on trying to capture that digitally.

Maybe you two could address that one, and then we could talk about preservation through use, and then finish? I'm not at all interested in digitizing zines, so I'll give that one to Eric.

Okay. I will leave the issue of digitizing zines to the archivists at QSAP. There's a policy of digitizing things, but asking people. But in terms of those other issues, like the descriptors and that stuff, I do hope that the zine core standard does have the fields that would be applicable to that, where you could say, this one is cardboard, hand-stitched.

Yeah, those things are important. So yeah, it's part of this larger challenge, and I hope the answer is yes. Do we have one minute? One minute.

So the preservation through use, I think, speaks directly to the idea of print culture and zines and other ephemeral items that are not necessarily meant to be archival. So the, you know, interference archive, we don't necessarily expect that our items will be around in 100 years.

That would be great, but we're talking about things that are made cheaply on the fly, posters, you know, mostly posters that are made to advertise political events and actions. And so because these things are all made from a sense of political urgency or affective, you know, calls for change, you know, there's information, there's requests, there is asks, right? There's in the ephemera, in the stuff in the archive itself, and it's that that we're trying to preserve through use, that history, that those, you know, the seeking of liberation for whatever specific or intersectional request that that item has is what we're trying to preserve through the reuse of things in that archive.

Does that make sense? So it's the, you're tracking usage, which is what is... We're not tracking usage.

Preserving the meaning of the materials in as much as they exist through circulation, uh, and it would seem that their continued preservation and use enriches that meaning, uh, as, as those networks expand, right? Yeah, I love it.

Thank you.

Um, okay, well, thanks very much to everyone on the round table, especially, and to you all, thank you very much.

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