Download or read book Urgent Archives written by Michelle Caswell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-19 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urgent Archives argues that archivists can and should do more to disrupt white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy beyond the standard liberal archival solutions of more diverse collecting and more inclusive description. Grounded in the emerging field of critical archival studies, this book uncovers how dominant western archival theories and practices are oppressive by design, while looking toward the the radical politics of community archives to envision new liberatory theories and practices. Based on more than a decade of ethnography at community archives sites including the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), the book explores how members of minoritized communities activate records to build solidarities across and within communities, trouble linear progress narratives, and disrupt cycles of oppression. Caswell explores the temporal, representational, and material aspects of liberatory memory work, arguing that archival disruptions in time and space should be neither about the past nor the future, but about the liberatory affects and effects of memory work in the present. Urgent Archives extends the theoretical range of critical archival studies and provides a new framework for archivists looking to transform their practices. The book should also be of interest to scholars of archival studies, museum studies, public history, memory studies, gender and ethnic studies and digital humanities.
Download or read book No Archive Will Restore You written by Julietta Singh and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2018 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thief, desire -- No archive will restore you -- the body archive -- The inarticulate trace -- Other women -- The ghost archive.
Download or read book Archiving the Unspeakable written by Michelle Caswell and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roughly 1.7 million people died in Cambodia from untreated disease, starvation, and execution during the Khmer Rouge reign of less than four years in the late 1970s. The regime’s brutality has come to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners taken at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of “enemies of the state” were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. In Archiving the Unspeakable, Michelle Caswell traces the social life of these photographic records through the lens of archival studies and elucidates how, paradoxically, they have become agents of silence and witnessing, human rights and injustice as they are deployed at various moments in time and space. From their creation as Khmer Rouge administrative records to their transformation beginning in 1979 into museum displays, archival collections, and databases, the mug shots are key components in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering. Winner, Waldo Gifford Leland Award, Society of American Archivists Longlist, ICAS Book Prize, International Convention of Asia Scholars
Download or read book Rogue Archives written by Abigail De Kosnik and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how nonprofessional archivists, especially media fans, practice cultural preservation on the Internet and how “digital cultural memory” differs radically from print-era archiving. The task of archiving was once entrusted only to museums, libraries, and other institutions that acted as repositories of culture in material form. But with the rise of digital networked media, a multitude of self-designated archivists—fans, pirates, hackers—have become practitioners of cultural preservation on the Internet. These nonprofessional archivists have democratized cultural memory, building freely accessible online archives of whatever content they consider suitable for digital preservation. In Rogue Archives, Abigail De Kosnik examines the practice of archiving in the transition from print to digital media, looking in particular at Internet fan fiction archives. De Kosnik explains that media users today regard all of mass culture as an archive, from which they can redeploy content for their own creations. Hence, “remix culture” and fan fiction are core genres of digital cultural production. De Kosnik explores, among other things, the anticanonical archiving styles of Internet preservationists; the volunteer labor of online archiving; how fan archives serve women and queer users as cultural resources; archivists' efforts to attract racially and sexually diverse content; and how digital archives adhere to the logics of performance more than the logics of print. She also considers the similarities and differences among free culture, free software, and fan communities, and uses digital humanities tools to quantify and visualize the size, user base, and rate of growth of several online fan archives.
Download or read book A Matter of Facts written by Laura A. Millar and published by American Library Association. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The safeguarding of authentic facts is essential, especially in this disruptive Orwellian age, where digital technologies have opened the door to a post-truth world in which "alternative facts" can be so easily accepted as valid. And because facts matter, evidence matters. In this urgent manifesto, archives luminary Millar makes the case that authentic and accurate records, archives, data, and other sources of documentary proof are crucial in supporting and fostering a society that is respectful, democratic, and self-aware. An eye-opening treatise for the general public, an invaluable resource for archives students, and a provocative call-to-arms for information and records professionals, Millar's book explains the concept of evidence and discusses the ways in which records, archives, and data are not just useful tools for our daily existence but also essential sources of evidence both today and in the future; includes plentiful examples that illustrate the critical role evidence plays in upholding rights, enforcing responsibilities, tracing family or community stories, and capturing and sharing memories; and examines the impact of digital technologies on how records and information are created and used. With documentary examples ranging from Mesopotamian clay tablets to World War II photographs to today’s Twitter messages and Facebook posts, Millar’s stirring book will encourage readers to understand more fully the importance of their own records and archives, for themselves and for future generations.
Download or read book Beyond Free College written by Eileen L. Strempel and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Free College outlines an audacious national agenda—consistent with, but far more comprehensive than, the current “free college” movement—that builds on the best of US higher education’s populist history such as the G.I. Bill and the community college transfer function. The authors align a wide constellation of higher education trends—online learning, prior learning assessment, competency-based learning, high school college-credit— with a rapidly shifting student transfer environment that privileges college credit as the pivotal educational catalyst to boost access and completion. The book’s agenda seeks greater productive investment in postsecondary education by privileging a single metric—lower-cost-per-degree-granted—as the animating driver of a transfer pathway that will fulfill the potential of its historical, progressive innovators. Beyond Free College’s goal is as simple as it is urgent: To galvanize higher education advocates in an effort to reorganize, reorient, and reignite the transfer function to serve the needs of a neotraditional student population that now constitutes the majority of college-goers in America; and in ways that advance completion, not just access to higher education.
Download or read book Ghosts of Archive written by Verne Harris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-21 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghosts of Archive draws on the discourses of deconstruction, intersectionality and archetypal psychology to mount an argument that archive is fundamentally and structurally spectral and that the work of archive is justice. Drawing on more than 20 years of the author’s research on deconstruction and archive, the book posits archive as an essential resource for social justice activism and as a source, or location, of soul for individuals and communities. Through explorations of what Jacques Derrida termed ‘hauntology’, Harris invites a listening to the call for justice in conceptual spaces that are non-disciplinary. He argues that archive is both constructed in relation to and beset by ghosts – ghosts of the living, of the dead and of those not yet born – and that attention should be paid to them. Establishing a unique nexus between a deconstructive intersectionality and traditions of ‘memory for justice’ in struggles against oppression from South Africa and elsewhere, the book makes a case for a deconstructive praxis in today’s archive. Offering new ideas about spectrality, banditry and archival activism, Ghosts of Archive should appeal to those working in the disciplines of archival science, information studies and psychology. It should also be essential reading for those with an interest in social justice issues, transitional justice, history, philosophy, memory studies and postcolonial studies.
Download or read book Archives and Special Collections As Sites of Contestation written by Mary Kandiuk and published by Library Juice Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays interrogates library practices relating to archives and special collections.
Download or read book Book Traces written by Andrew M. Stauffer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-02-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In most college and university libraries, materials published before 1800 have been moved into special collections, while the post-1923 books remain in general circulation. But books published between these dates are vulnerable to deaccessioning, as libraries increasingly reconfigure access to public-domain texts via digital repositories such as Google Books. Even libraries with strong commitments to their print collections are clearing out the duplicates, assuming that circulating copies of any given nineteenth-century edition are essentially identical to one another. When you look closely, however, you see that they are not. Many nineteenth-century books were donated by alumni or their families decades ago, and many of them bear traces left behind by the people who first owned and used them. In Book Traces, Andrew M. Stauffer adopts what he calls "guided serendipity" as a tactic in pursuit of two goals: first, to read nineteenth-century poetry through the clues and objects earlier readers left in their books and, second, to defend the value of keeping the physical volumes on the shelves. Finding in such books of poetry the inscriptions, annotations, and insertions made by their original owners, and using them as exemplary case studies, Stauffer shows how the physical, historical book enables a modern reader to encounter poetry through the eyes of someone for whom it was personal.
Download or read book Producing the Archival Body written by Jamie A. Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-21 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Producing the Archival Body draws on theoretical and practical research conducted within US and Canadian archives, along with critical and cultural theory, to examine the everyday lived experiences of archivists and records creators that are often overlooked during archival and media production. Expanding on the author’s previous work, which engaged archival and queer theories to develop the Queer/ed Archival Methodology that intervenes in traditional archival practices, the book invites readers interested in humanistic inquiry to re-consider how archives are defined, understood, deployed, and accessed to produce subjects. Arguing that archives and bodies are mutually constitutive and developing a keen focus on the body and embodiment alongside archival theory, the author introduces new understandings of archival bodies. Contributing to recent disciplinary moves that offer a more transdisciplinary emphasis, Lee interrogates how power circulates and is deployed in archival contexts in order to build critical understandings of how deeply archives influence and shape the production of knowledges and human subjectivities. Producing the Archival Body will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of archival studies, library and information science, gender and women’s studies, anthropology, history, digital humanities, and media studies. It should also be of great interest to practitioners working in and with archives
Download or read book The Silence of the Archive written by David Thomas and published by Facet Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreword by Anne J Gilliland, University of California Evaluating archives in a post-truth society. In recent years big data initiatives, not to mention Hollywood, the video game industry and countless other popular media, have reinforced and even glamorized the public image of the archive as the ultimate repository of facts and the hope of future generations for uncovering ‘what actually happened’. The reality is, however, that for all sorts of reasons the record may not have been preserved or survived in the archive. In fact, the record may never have even existed – its creation being as imagined as is its contents. And even if it does exist, it may be silent on the salient facts, or it may obfuscate, mislead or flat out lie. The Silence of the Archive is written by three expert and knowledgeable archivists and draws attention to the many limitations of archives and the inevitability of their having parameters. Silences or gaps in archives range from details of individuals’ lives to records of state oppression or of intelligence operations. The book brings together ideas from a wide range of fields, including contemporary history, family history research and Shakespearian studies. It describes why these silences exist, what the impact of them is, how researchers have responded to them, and what the silence of the archive means for researchers in the digital age. It will help provide a framework and context to their activities and enable them to better evaluate archives in a post-truth society. This book includes discussion of: enforced silencesexpectations and when silence means silencedigital preservation, authenticity and the futuredealing with the silencepossible solutions; challenging silence and acceptancethe meaning of the silences: are things getting better or worse?user satisfaction and audience development. This book will make compelling reading for professional archivists, records managers and records creators, postgraduate and undergraduate students of history, archives, librarianship and information studies, as well as academics and other users of archives.
Download or read book Community Archives Community Spaces written by Jeannette Bastian and published by Facet Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-19 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the trajectory of the community archives movement, expanding the definition of community archives to include sites such as historical societies, social movement organisations and community centres. It also explores new definitions of what community archives might encompass, particularly in relation to disciplines outside the archives. Over ten years have passed since the first volume of Community Archives, and inspired by continued research as well as by the formal recognition of community archives in the UK, the community archives movement has become an important area of research, recognition and appreciation by archivists, archival scholars and others worldwide. Increasingly the subject of papers and conferences, community archives are now seen as being in the vanguard of social concerns, markers of community-based activism, a participatory approach exemplifying the on-going evolution of ‘professional’ archival (and heritage) practice and integral to the ability of people to articulate and assert their identity. Community Archives, Community Spaces reflects the latest research and includes practical case studies on the challenges of building and sustaining community archives. This new book will appeal to practitioners, researchers, and academics in the archives and records community as well as to historians and other scholars concerned with community building and social issues.
Download or read book Running Out written by Lucas Bessire and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force. Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.
Download or read book The Book of Archives and Other Stories from the Mora Valley New Mexico written by A. Gabriel Meléndez and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, New Mexico’s Mora Valley harbors the ghosts of history: troubadours and soldiers, Plains Indians and settlers, families fleeing and finding home. There, more than a century ago, villagers collect scraps of paper documenting the valley’s history and their identity—military records, travelers’ diaries, newspaper articles, poetry, and more—and bind them into a leather portfolio known as “The Book of Archives.” When a bomb blast during the Mexican-American War scatters the book’s contents to the wind, the memory of the accounts lives on instead in the minds of Mora residents. Poets and storytellers pass down the valley’s traditions into the twentieth century, from one generation to the next. In this pathbreaking dual-language volume, author A. Gabriel Meléndez joins their ranks, continuing the retelling of Mora Valley’s tales for our time. A native of Mora with el don de la palabra, the divine gift of words, Meléndez mines historical sources and his own imagination to reconstruct the valley’s story, first in English and then in Spanish. He strings together humorous, tragic, and quotidian vignettes about historical events and unlikely occurrences, creating a vivid portrait of Mora, both in cultural memory and present reality. Local gossip and family legend intertwine with Spanish-language ballads and the poetry of New Mexico’s most famous dueling troubadours, Old Man Vilmas and the poet García. Drawing on New Mexican storytelling tradition, Meléndez weaves a colorful dual-language representation of a place whose irresistible characters and unforgettable events, and the inescapable truths they embody, still resonate today.
Download or read book Dark Archives written by Megan Rosenbloom and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy—the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world’s most famous libraries and museums. Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, and indigents whose lives are sewn together in this disquieting collection. Along the way, Rosenbloom tells the story of how her team of scientists, curators, and librarians test rumored anthropodermic books, untangling the myths around their creation and reckoning with the ethics of their custodianship. A librarian and journalist, Rosenbloom is a member of The Order of the Good Death and a cofounder of their Death Salon, a community that encourages conversations, scholarship, and art about mortality and mourning. In Dark Archives—captivating and macabre in all the right ways—she has crafted a narrative that is equal parts detective work, academic intrigue, history, and medical curiosity: a book as rare and thrilling as its subject.
Download or read book Perspectives on Women s Archives written by Tanya Zanish-Belcher and published by ALA Editions. This book was released on 2013 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women's archives hold a significant place in the historical record, illuminating stories of individuals who had an impact on our past in both powerful and quiet ways. The history of the archives themselves and the struggle to achieve equal representation within the historical record also tell a valuable story, one that deftly examines American culture and society over the past few centuries. In Perspectives on Women's Archives, 18 essays written by noted archivists and historians illustrate the origins of a women-centered history, the urgent need to locate records that highlight the diverse experiences of women, and the effort to document women's experiences. The essays also expose the need for renewed collaboration between archivists and historians, the challenges related to the accessibility of women's collections, and the development of community archives. Ultimately, archival relevancy is reinforced, not diminished, by sharing resources and exposing absences. This book inspires new thinking about the value of women's archives and how to fill the gaps in our recordkeeping to move toward a more diverse and inclusive future.
Download or read book In the Freud Archives written by Janet Malcolm and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2002-11-30 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes an afterword by the author In the Freud Archives tells the story of an unlikely encounter among three men: K. R. Eissler, the venerable doyen of psychoanalysis; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a flamboyant, restless forty-two-year-old Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst turned virulent anti-Freudian; and Peter Swales, a mischievous thirty-five-year-old former assistant to the Rolling Stones and self-taught Freud scholar. At the center of their Oedipal drama are the Sigmund Freud Archives--founded, headed, and jealously guarded by Eissler--whose sealed treasure gleams and beckons to the community of Freud scholarship as if it were the Rhine gold. Janet Malcolm's fascinating book first appeared some twenty years ago, when it was immediately recognized as a rare and remarkable work of nonfiction. A story of infatuation and disappointment, betrayal and revenge, In the Freud Archives is essentially a comedy. But the powerful presence of Freud himself and the harsh bracing air of his ideas about unconscious life hover over the narrative and give it a tragic dimension.
