Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Archiving “Sensitive” Social Media Data: ‘In Her Shoes’, A Case Study, Lorraine Grimes Dr, Kathryn Cassidy Dr, Murilo Dias, Clare Lanigan, Aileen O'Carroll Dr, Preetam Singhvi

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Social media play an increasingly significant role in activist and social movements around the globe. Archiving social media is a relatively new phenomenon and an area which needs greater clarity, understanding and uniformity. When it comes to archiving and cataloguing sensitive social media collections, such as personal abortion stories, the process is even more ambiguous. The campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment (a constitutional ban on abortion) in Ireland saw many such stories shared through online media, particularly in the lead-up to the 2018 referendum. Using the ‘In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth’ Facebook dataset as a case study, …

Review Of Fundraising For Impact, Meredith R. Evans Ph.D

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In Fundraising for Impact, Kathryn K. Matthew uses soundbites from more than 100 interviews she conducted with practitioners from libraries, archives and museums from around the world to share ways they increased their funding. This work emphasizes frameworks that help reveal an institution's value and the impact of community, partnerships, investing and fundraising.

Review Of Bitstreams: The Future Of Digital Literary Heritage, Kara Watts-Engley

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Literary production has always been tied to specific developments in technology. This has become all the more apparent since the advent of personal computing and our digital media age. How might an awareness of technology’s impact then affect the future of literary creation, critique, and preservation? For Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage, this is among the core questions of literary, archival, and bibliographic studies in the contemporary digital media age.

Review- Archives And Human Rights, Alexandra Pucciarelli

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Archives and Human Rights edited by Jens Boel, Perrine Canavaggio, and Antonio González Quintana utilizes seventeen case studies to examine the role archives and archivists can play in international justice after human rights violations. The cases include but are not limited to; Rwanda, Spain, and Cambodia.

Archiving Blackness: Reimagining And Recreating The Archive(S) As Literary And Information Wake Work, Jamillah R. Gabriel

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

“…we, Black people everywhere and anywhere we are, still produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing: we insist Black being into the wake.”

– Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (2016)

In this paper, I introduce Christina Sharpe’s conceptualizations of wake and wake work, as they pertain to archiving the experiences of Blackness to better understand how the archive and archives are vital for those living and working in the wake of slavery. I am particularly interested in the wake work conducted both in literary works (speculative fiction) and at information sites (archives). To that end, …

Community Oral History To Widen The Path: The Jewish Mobile Oral History Project, Deborah Gurt

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article presents the case study of the Jewish Mobile Oral History Project of the McCall Library at the University of South Alabama as an example of a participatory archival practice. With goals to build a collection centered on a minority experience, to engage with community members, and to foster inter-communal dialogue, the project highlights affect as one vital consideration for archival record keepers, users, and subjects.

Toward A Crip Provenance: Centering Disability In Archives Through Its Absence, Gracen M. Brilmyer

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Using the records that document the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition as a case study, this article discusses the messiness and unknowability of provenance. Drawing attention to how the concept of provenance can emphasize the reconstruction of a fonds when records have been moved, rearranged, and dispersed, this article draws attention to the ‘curative’ and ‘rehabilitative’ orientations of established notions of provenance. Put in conversation with disability studies scholarship, which critiques rehabilitating, curing, and restoring, this article outlines the theoretical scaffolding of a crip provenance: a disability-centered framework of resisting the desire to restore and instead meets records where they are …

Artists’ Studio Archives Managing Your Studio Practice & Building A Creative Legacy Revised Edition (2022): A Comprehensive Guide For Artists & Their Assistants, Heather Gendron, Neal Ambrose-Smith, Joane E. Beaudoin, Eumie Imm-Stroukoff

Library Staff Publications

This guide is based on real-life scenarios and best practices in managing an art studio archive. It will aid artists in every career stage, from emerging artists to late-career artists; the yet-to- be-discovered and the well-established. Increasing productivity in the studio with good documentation helps artists better prepare to sell work and secure grant funding, as well as manage better the legal and financial aspects of an artistic practice.

Greening The Archive: The Social Climate Of Cotton Manufacturing In The "Samuel Oldknow Papers, 1782-1924", Bernadette Myers, Melina Moe

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article re-examines the records and correspondence of Samuel Oldknow, a late eighteenth century textile manufacturer, within the context of the environmental humanities. Oldknow’s papers, a portion of which are held at Columbia University, are most often used by economic historians to date the beginnings of the factory wage labor system. We highlight, instead, the environmental implications of Oldknow’s cotton enterprise by juxtaposing documents related to the global reach of Oldknow’s empire with evidence of his transformation of the local landscape of northern England. This process of re-scaling captures a sense of what we call the “social climate” of the …

The Suffrage Postcard Project: Feminist Digital Archiving And Transatlantic Suffrage History, Ana Stevenson, Kristin Allukian

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article introduces The Suffrage Postcard Project (SPP), a feminist digital humanities project that utilizes digital tools to explore how transatlantic suffrage postcards and feminist digital humanities practices engender new historical narratives of the suffrage movement, especially in the United States and Britain. This article uses our Omeka-based digital archive of suffrage postcards to discuss the history of the postcard, the significance of a postcard archive to digital archival studies, and the significance of the digital postcard archive to digital history.

Our project uses feminist DH methodology in coding, tagging, and data visualization to better understand how gender, and intersecting …

Blood At The Root, Jarrett Martin Drake

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

What is the sound of silence and what is the sight of absence? The following essay situates itself along those two questions by devoting close ethnographic attention to the lives and afterlives of seven people—Delia, Renty, Jem, Alfred, Fassena, Drana, and Jack—whose reflections resonate and resound throughout the world of archives. I argue that a theory of archival power must consider the role of process and place in the shaping of modern memory practices. The article begins by narrating the story of how these seven people came to occupy the center of the archival universe. Next, it traces a tale …

Archives Of Human Rights And Historical Memory: An Analysis Of Archival Practices ‘From Below’ In Four Ngos In Colombia, Claire L. Taylor, Lucia Brandi, Cecilia A. Acosta Sánchez, Marcelo Díaz Vallejo

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article centres on four Colombian NGOs who focus on victims of conflict, paying particular attention to the substantial body of material which they collect and curate related to their work, their activities, and the victims that they represent, and which thus comprise a form of unofficial, grassroots archives of the Colombian conflict. The article details the process undertaken by the research team in engaging with the NGOs to examine the current state of their archives, and the problems and issues they have encountered. Firstly, we provide an overview of the context in which the four selected NGOs are working, …

Modeling Black Literature: Behind The Screen With The Black Bibliography Project, Brenna Bychowski, Melissa Barton

Library Staff Publications

The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) plans to produce a bibliographic database of printed works by Black writers from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. With the support of the Beinecke Library and a grant from the Mellon Foundation, project co-PIs and codirectors Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill collaborated with a team of librarians from Yale to develop the data model for their database. Drawing on Beinecke’s James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection to pull case studies, the team of librarians developed a Linked Data model for BBP in an instance of Wikibase and trained and supported a group of graduate student …

Support Services At Yale University For Teaching With Primary Sources: An Exploration Of Instructor Rationales And Needs, Melissa Grafe, David Hirsch, Bill Landis, Sara Powell

Library Staff Publications

Between October and December 2019, investigators participating in an Ithaka S+R study interviewed fifteen Yale instructors who teach with primary sources in humanities and humanities-leaning social science disciplines. The conversations focused on the interviewees’ background, training, and experience utilizing primary sources in their undergraduate teaching at Yale, as well as their pedagogical goals, strategies, successes and challenges, and perceived needs as practitioners of primary source-based instruction.

Interviewees were eloquent in articulating the wide variety of pedagogical goals that motivate their work to incorporate primary sources in all formats into their syllabi and teaching practice. Very few cited any formal training …

Review Of Feminist Histories And Digital Media, Biz Gallo

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The edited volume, Feminist Histories and Digital Media, sets out to explore the ways in which the field has grown and changed since the advent of the first reminist archival research projects 20 years ago. Intended as a signpost by the editors for future research in the field, the volume succeeds in informing, inspiring, and inciting researchers to move forward with using digital archives in feminist scholarship.

Review Of Ethical Questions In Name Authority Control, Itza A. Carbajal

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Ethical Questions in Name Authority Control is a new and thoughtful addition to the metadata and cataloging field of study and practice. Consisting of eighteen essays written by a number of libraries, archives, and information scholars, this edited volume investigates and responds to a number of ethical questions regarding name authority control.These include topics such as the privacy of the creator, use of geographic names for contested lands, critique of the use of gender in authority control systems, as well as considerations around multilingualism, to name a few. While the title mostly appeals to a particular field of work and …

Review Of Making Things And Drawing Boundaries, Greta K. Suiter

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Jentery Sayers’s edited volume moves forward long-standing debates within the Digital Humanities. This collection of essays increase the reader’s general understanding of what the digital humanities are and will leave the reader with more questions around who the digital humanities are. Many of these essays work against expected disciplinary norms and assumptions and the reader is given multiple viewpoints to consider. Topics such as invisible labor and the value of labor, collaboration and inverting expertise expectations, and digital artifacts and how humanists study and/or create them, are given ample room for exploration and are examined from multiple perspectives with many …

Exploring Rockingham County’S Past: Recapturing Local History And Promoting Accessibility, Kayla Heslin

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In 2018 Exploring Rockingham’s Past (ERP) launched. ERP is an online repository created to house local records from the Rockingham County, Virginia circuit court. Just a little over a year before its launch, Clerk of the Court, Chaz Haywood entreated facility and graduate students within the history department of James Madison University to help develop community access to the records housed within his institution. Sadly, over the decades the records of the courthouse had fallen into disarray, rendering them useless. Seeing this as a significant loss of culture and heritage, Haywood and James Madison University began developing a platform that …

Economic Provenance: The Financial Analysis Of Art Historical Records, Amy C. Whitaker

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The Leo Castelli Gallery launched pivotal mid-twentieth-century artistic careers, including those of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Although well-studied for its artistic impact, the Castelli archives—as well as those of other gallery artists such as Frank Stella and early collectors such as Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine—include a curious trove of artists’ financial records and related correspondence. This paper argues that these records form an “economic provenance” that is important both to both art market analysis and art history. This economic context is sometimes overlooked because of the contested relationship between art and markets. In this context, the archive can …

Curating Care: Creativity, Women’S Work, And The Carers Uk Archive, Alice Hall, Hannah Tweed

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article analyses the previously unexplored archives of the British charity, Carers UK, and its predecessor organizations, from its formation in 1965 to the present day. We argue that the archive is a valuable resource for social, political, and economic histories of care in the home, women’s work, feminist campaigns, and charitable organizations in the UK and beyond. It gives voice to traditionally silenced populations of carers through a strikingly diverse range of letters, edited collections of fiction, minutes of meetings, video diaries, newsletters, and anthologies of creative writing. As a case study, the Carers UK archive provides an important …

Lessons From The 1800s: Creating The Miss Porter's School Digital Archive, Deborah Smith

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

College preparatory (“prep”) schools have their roots in the New England region of the United States; many predate the nation's most illustrious colleges and universities. The archives at these schools contain items of importance to American history in the 1800s. However, few schools have trained archivists managing their physical collections and even fewer have created digital archives to increase access. Founded in 1848, Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut was one of the first independent schools devoted to the education of young women. This article reviews the creation of the Porter's digital archive in 2018 and examines issues specific to …

Low-Cost 8mm/Super 8 Film Digitization Using A Canon 9000f Ii Flatbed Scanner And Photoshop: A Case Study, Kenneth Eckert

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

For some fifty years, 8mm/Super 8 movie film was a widespread format for home movies and amateur hobbyists; yet the films and projection or telecine transfer equipment are now aging and obscure, presenting a difficulty for archivists and filmmakers. Online DIY solutions usually involve photographing the film with a DSLR and macro bellows, requiring a high degree of expertise and expense. This case study examines typical problems and proposes a simpler and low-cost solution involving using a Canon flatbed scanner with a transparency adapter and improvised film holder, and more importantly, describes technical solutions and script code to straighten and …

Review Of Things Great And Small, Lydia Tang

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Things Great and Small: Collections Management Policies, 2nd edition, by John E. Simmons is a helpful overview and guide for crafting museum collections management policies.

Humanizing The Enslaved Of Fort Monroe’S Arc Of Freedom, William R. Kelly Jr.

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Fort Monroe, located in Hampton, Virginia, was a United States Army post until its deactivation in 2011. President Barack Obama proclaimed Fort Monroe a national monument due to its complex history, including its ties to slavery and emancipation. This paper outlines an ongoing research project designed to identify and humanize both the enslaved who helped build the fort and those who were declared as contraband there during the American Civil War. Housed in the National Archives and Records Administration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the United States Army Engineer Records from 1819 to 1866 is the main area of focus for this …

Review Of Retroactivism In The Lesbian Archives, Jolie Braun

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures considers how materials documenting lesbian life and culture can impact identity, shape narratives, and build community. This review provides an overview of each chapter and thoughts on author Jean Bessette’s ideas about archives and archival work.

Review Of Archiveology: Walter Benjamin And Archival Film Practices, Kristen E. Muenz

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Catherine Russell explores the impact of Walter Benjamin’s ideas on filmmakers who use archival film footage in their works. With thorough and compelling analysis, Archiveology is a thought-provoking read for any archivist interested in the transformative power of archival material.

Jean-Étienne Despréaux, Bibliophile, Dominique Bourassa

Library Staff Publications

This paper delves into the life and career of Jean-Étienne Despréaux (1748-1820), as read through a catalogue of his library. The catalogue, the earliest known detailed record of books owned by a dancing master, was printed after Despréaux’s death to announce the sale of his library in a 3-day auction. It reveals Despréaux’s wide-ranging reading interests and his desire to build a comprehensive collection of books about dance—a collection that would anticipate the modern notion of a canon of historical dance monuments. The most interesting book in the collection is a copy of the 1589 edition of Thoineau Arbeau’s Orchésographie …

Review Of Nonbinary Gender Identities: History, Culture, Resources, Chris Babits

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

McNabb introduces the definitions, histories, and cultures of nonbinary individuals and provides scholars, archivists, librarians, and teachers with an array of resources to research the history and contemporary experiences of nonbinary people. Although the text privileges gender variance in Western nations and could have included more on gender theory, McNabb offers a strong introduction to the topic of nonbinary gender identities. Researchers will especially appreciate the comprehensive list of resources.

Lessons From The Treblinka Archive: Transnational Collections And Their Implications For Historical Research, Chad S.A. Gibbs

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In work for his 1979 book The Death Camp Treblinka, Alexander Donat began the process of locating survivors of the camp and recording their histories. In a telling testament to the lethality of this place, he could identify only sixty-eight survivors. Analysis of Donat’s early findings—emerging six years prior to the publication of any major academic monograph on the subject—offers a window into the difficulties of conducting research on this Nazi extermination camp and its widely-scattered witnesses.

Treblinka’s disembarkation ramp was effectively the eye of a transnational needle through which so many passed and so few emerged. Victims of …

Review Of Participatory Heritage, Allyson E. Smally

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This review of Participatory Heritage, edited by Henriette Roued-Cunliffe and Andrea Copeland, focuses on the book's relevance to the archives field. It highlights some of the chapters that will be most relevant to archivists, provides overviews and highlights of each of the book's three sections, discusses some of the main themes that come up throughout the book, and mentions a few strengths and drawbacks to the book’s approach. It addresses some ways the book relates to important topics in the archives field today and what areas of the field it has particular relevance for. The review concludes that Participatory …