Disrupting Standards, Remaking Interfaces

Duration: 00:57:03; Aspect Ratio: 1.778:1; Hue: 43.017; Saturation: 0.128; Lightness: 0.351; Volume: 0.177; Cuts per Minute: 0.175

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hadassah Damien on Open Source Software

Q&A

Pad.ma requires JavaScript.