Digital Humanities Commons^™

The Neighborhood Stories Indexing Project, Elena Abou Mrad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Neighborhood Stories Indexing Project is part of the Neighborhood Stories project, an oral history initiative by the NYC Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS). My capstone is an attempt to solve the problem of information overload and that of access with an online application that allows DORIS to publicly share their oral history interviews and to make them easily searchable. The purpose of the indexing project is to increase the use of and improve access to the collections, without sacrificing the nuance and complexity of lived experiences in NYC. By allowing users to navigate the interviews as audio …

The Afterlives Of Government Documents: Information Labor, Archival Power, And The Visibility Of U.S. Human Rights Violations In The “War On Terror”, Rachel Daniell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about access to information.

It examines the different ways that access to U.S. government records related to the “War on Terror” is generated through the intersection of law, bureaucratic policy and procedure norms, and the everyday work of archivists and transparency advocates. I argue that, both through their labor pushing for access to government records via complex records searches, Freedom of Information Act requests, and legal action, and also through their labor layering those records with new forms of metadata in public digital circulation platforms, these individuals, in the context of their organizations, generate new forms of …

Textframe: Cosmopolitanism And Non-Exclusively Anglophone Poetries, Michael N. Scharf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project proposes a replacement for some institutional-archival mechanisms of non-exclusively anglophone poetry as it is produced under racial capitalism and archived via its universities and grant-bearing nonprofits. The project argues specifically for the self-archiving of non-exclusively anglophone poetry, and by extension of poetry, in a manner that builds away from US-dominated, nationally-organized institutions. It argues that cosmopolitanist norm translation, as advocated by various critics, can function as part of a critique of institutional value creation used in maintaining inequalities through poetry. The US-based Poetry Foundation is currently the major online archive of contemporary anglophone poetry; the project comprises a …

Visualizing Archives And Library Collections, Thomas Cleary

Publications and Research

Archivists and special collections librarians have struggled for a long time with how to show patrons what we have in our holdings. Collections have been made accessible through container lists, finding aids, and collection and content management systems such as ArchivesSpace, Islandora, and CONTENTdm. Each of these documents and systems also has its own learning curve and different functions, but even then the scale of some topics in collections or the connectedness between collections is not always apparent.

This article showcases two projects the author has worked on to assist in creating data visualizations in a library/archives context. The GLAMViz …