As part of the LDL as Data Grant, the project team launched an online speaker series from October 2020 - February 2021. The series featured digital library practitioners and users from across the country.
All presentations are available on the LDL YouTube channel.
Watch Recordings:
Alex Torres -- Program Director, Humanities Amped
Amplifying the LDL for Educators and their Students
In this talk, Dr. Alex Torres from Humanities Amped will share resources and lesson plans that use the LDL to engage Middle and High School students. These literacy activities will give students a creative opportunity to interact with LDL’s collections.
Dorothy Berry -- Digital Collections Program Manager, Harvard University
Centering The Margins in Digital Project Planning
Digitization and digital scholarship projects are increasingly the primary way patrons chose to interact with special collections material, especially in our current remote learning environment. The materials we choose to digitize become the foundations of future research, but the majority of content available in digital collections across the country has long reflected the historically valorizing ideas bolstering special collections. The presentation will provide practical discussion around selection and planning for digital projects that enhance the historical record by filling in the gaps.
Shared Resources:
Tonia Sutherland -- Assistant Professor, Department of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
November 19, 2020 @ 2pm
Redescription as Restorative Justice
For many archivists and archival institutions, description is at the core of both professional practice and theoretical discourse. Over time, professional discourse on description has attended to the development of descriptive standards as well as the challenges and opportunities presented by new technologies. However, discussions about description theory and practice have remained largely the same: they have focused primarily on the nature and purpose of description, units of descriptive measure, standardization, and notions of control. As the field of Archival Studies has undergone several recent shifts, however, the notion of redescription has begun to emerge as a mode descriptive remediation as a means of archival harm-reduction. In her talk, Dr. Tonia Sutherland will identify some best current professional practices for culturally responsive decision-making with regard to archival redescription. Speaking to questions such as when and why redescription practices are engaged; whether improved access as a result of digitization has a role to play in redescription; how mass digitization results in automated standardization of harmful description at scale; and the ways that aggregation amplifies and legimizes problematic description, Sutherland will address the growing complexities that have arisen at the intersection of description and digitization. Using insights from a pilot survey of US redescription practices, Sutherland will also identify developing redescription practices that model archival harm-reduction such as community-centered archival description and pre-digitization descriptive remediation, making recommendations for culturally responsive redescription in the Louisiana Digital Library.
Jessica Perkins Smith -- University Archivist, Assistant Professor, Mississippi State University
December 3, 2020 @ 1pm
Digitizing Mississippi: Black Voices and White Supremacy
Being a university archivist at a Southern university necessitates facing the history of Jim Crow era racism and finding ways to ensure stories of Black resistance to white supremacy are illuminated. At the same time, it is important for students and researchers studying Mississippi Civil Rights to understand the fear and violence that allowed segregationists to maintain power for so long in the state. This talk will examine that balance by discussing the Citizens’ Council Forum Digital Collection, a CLIR Recordings at Risk funded project to digitize the only complete run of the white supremacist Citizen Council’s long running radio show, which covers topics including resistance to the Civil Rights Act and the fear of Communism. This talk will also highlight a work in progress Omeka exhibit on the first Black student group at Mississippi State University, Afro American Plus. Organized in the years following the campus’ 1965 integration, the group worked systematically to improve the quality of life for Black students, build Black community, but also to push back against white power structures.
Jacqueline Wernimont -- Distinguished Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement, Dartmouth College
December 14, 2020 @ 9:30am
Possibilities and Perils of Collections as Data: Lessons from Eugenic Rubicon
Wernimont will share the ongoing work of a multi-institutional interdisciplinary team creating a digital resource on the history of eugenic sterilization in the United States, Eugenic Rubicon. The project team has grappled with understanding and communicating racialized differentials in sterilizations in the multi-state collection. Protected by HIPPA laws in some cases, sterilization records present an opportunity to deploy quantitative storytelling as part of an ethic of care.
Shared Resources
- Short historical background:
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2016/01/06/when-california-sterilized-20000-of-its-citizens/chronicles/who-we-were/ - Initial project prototype: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/eugenic-rubicon-/index
- Sonification example: https://soundstudiesblog.com/2016/07/18/hearing-eugenics/
Brian Carpenter -- Curator of Native American Materials, American Philosophical Society
January 13, 2021 @ 10am
Developing Community Collaborations in Archival Curation: Before, After, and Besides Digitization
How can archival repositories develop ongoing, collaborative relationships with communities that have unique, direct connections to certain archival materials? How might such relationships influence the digitization and stewardship of those materials? What about instances where these relationships came into formation around materials that have already been digitized? How can such relationships be maintained and cultivated over time after the completion of the initial projects that brought people together? This talk will share stories from the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at the American Philosophical Society (APS) Library & Museum, one of the major repositories of Indigenous archival materials in North America. It will focus on a variety of collaborative relationships of different types and at different stages between the APS and numerous Indigenous communities throughout the continent with whom it has worked over the last decade. In exploring these questions, the talk will also seek to connect these specific experiences to other types of communities with whom other archival repositories may be exploring future possibilities.
Michele Reilly -- Professor and Digital Projects Coordinator, University of Arkansas
January 28, 2021 @ 10am
Assessing Users and Reuses for LDL Practitioners
The presenter will offer tools and approaches (e.g. RIL, log files, google analytics, file naming strategies, etc) to discover who is using digital library materials and for what purposes. The talk will highlight how knowing this information has implications for LDL practitioners, including benefits to content selection decision making and strategies for improving digital image discoverability.
Sharon Leon -- Associate Professor of History and Digital Humanities, Michigan State University
February 11, 2021 @ 10am
From Event to Data Set: Perspective, Structure, and the Problem of Representation in Data-Driven Digital History
Digital historians are well-familiar with the notion that the larger community of historians generally has been skeptical of and cautious about data-driven scholarship. In the wake of the widespread reaction against cliometrics, historians generally have been private about their work with data—presenting only end products, narratives, and summaries, even when that work is data-driven, but not all that computationally sophisticated. Often a small part of a much larger interpretive process, many who do minor work with data never even note that they have a set of spreadsheets or a database that they used to organize and analyze their source materials. This tendency has worked to mask the role that data collection and analysis plays in contemporary historical scholarship, and to undermine the potential that resides in the aggregation and computational engagement with that data.
Taking data seriously as capta, as Johanna Drucker suggests, highlights their constructedness as source materials and places them in an important trajectory in the lifecycle of historical evidence. That trajectory includes the initial creation of the record, its elevation to the status of a piece of information that should be preserved, its preservation, its preparation for research access, its review by an historian, its transformation into structured data, and its publication in a digitally accessible form. In scrutinizing this lifecycle, historians can come to a renewed awareness of the constructed nature of data, and of the individuals who help to shape access to evidence about the past, including record creators, archivists, historians, and technologists. Using records related to the history of enslavement as a case study, this talk will explore the lifecycle of historian-created data and the ways that our insights about the past might be enriched by applying computational techniques.
Code of Conduct
Because the LDL Speaker Series is a cohort member of Collection as Data: Part to Whole project, we follow their code of conduct:
All project activity, both in person and online, aims to foster a welcoming and inclusive experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, nationality, or political beliefs. Harassment of participants will not be tolerated in any form. Harassment includes any behavior that participants find intimidating, hostile or offensive. Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. Please contact any member of the project team if you have concerns.
