archives
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On Sourcery, or the enclosure(?) of remote access
In this post, I try to unpack some of my concerns around Sourcery as raised in my Society of California Archivists keynote, and how they relate to the visibility of archival labor, austerity, and enclosure. -
viebach
This paper seeks to trouble and complicate core assumptions about transitional justice and archives and to critically examine the relationship between them. Records about conflict and dictatorship are like records in general never only a reflection of realities, but they constitute these realities. Following Harris’ plea to find ‘exigencies’ to the transitional justice paradigm it suggests the term transitional archives to highlight the multi-layered afterlife of human rights records. It thereby emphasises the open-ended nature, ‘the in-becoming’, of transitional archives. It argues that by including critical archival studies in our thinking of transitional justice and a violent past, we can push beyond the dominant discourse of healing, closure and reconciliation, and open up space to investigate not only how the past but also transitional justice itself is produced at the intersection of power, memory, narrative and violence. -
saa20rf
One of the things coming out of the #saa20 Research Forum #saa20rf are the net negative structural and strategic impacts of contingent labor on archival practice. It seems to make poor economic, practical, and long-term sense to rely on it further and it’s disheartening to see that we’ve had to. -
Linked Data and Archives
I’ve been involved in modeling archival information as linked data since about 2009. Most recently, this includes work with the ARLIS/NA, RBMS, and SAA Joint Task Force on Art and Rare Materials BIBFRAME Ontology Extension. and Archives and Linked Data Interest Group.
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Comments on revisions to SAA statement on Diversity and Inclusion
The SAA Council has issued a call for comments on the SAA Statement on Diversity and Inclusion. As noted in the announcement, the revision includes changes to expand the statement to cover equity as well. Comments are open on the revisions until March 12, 2020, and what follows are the comments that I’ve submitted.
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2018: a year in gratitude
This year was largely complicated and often felt like a massive garbage fire to myself and my crew. I didn’t accomplish a number of my goals and was inconsistent about others, so recapping awesome things I did doesn’t feel appropriate and also happens to be a soft reminder of either failure or things not going as planned. I also tend to hate “best of the year” lists but I find them helpful to remember about where I found joy or the ability to connect to something outside of myself. I suppose this is an attempt to reconcile those things, or perhaps more in line with the end of year spirit, a way to articulate gratitude to the people and things around me that impacted me.
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ArchivesSpace
ArchivesSpace is an open source archival management system. During the project’s grant-funded phases in 2010-2013, I worked as a technical consultant during the planning phase, and as Technical Architect and product owner during the implementation phase.
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Born digital archives
In my past life, I worked as a digital archivist, focusing on managing born digital collections. Links to some of the past projects I’ve participated in follow.
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Collaboration Before Preservation: Recovering Born Digital Records in the Stephen Gendin Papers
For some, the phrase “born digital resources” may be unfamiliar, but Ricky Erway, Senior Program Officer at OCLC Research wrote a brief essay entitled Defining “Born Digital”, which provides a handy, working definition: “items created and managed in digital form.” Manuscripts and Archives, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Yale University Library overall have had a notable history of working with born digital resources over the past ten years.
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Emotion, Archives, Interactive Fiction, and Linked Data
[Edit (Feb 24, 2013): Thanks to the fantastic work of Tara Robertson, the video of my lightning talk is now available!]
I gave a lightning talk entitled “Wielding the Whip: Affect, Archives, and Ontological Fusion” at the 2013 Code4lib conference in Chicago, Illinois. This lightning talk was one of the most difficult presentations I’ve ever given for a number of reasons, including the emotional aspect of the content itself, as well as the fact that several of the ideas I was trying to articulate weren’t fully baked. I’ve been thinking about this for the four to six months in various capacities and with different focuses, especially as I read more interactive fiction and learn more about it (as well as about hypertext in general). This post serves as an expansion of some of the ideas in my lightning talk and as a way to further the discussion around the following question:
Can we write interactive fiction and (semi-/para-)fictional hypertext that leverages linked data to create an emotional connection to the “real world”?
Mark A. Matienzo