Archive Project Research Articles

The Global Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda

The Iberarchivos program, which is a financial fund for the implementation of archival projects, is a benchmark of archival cooperation in Ibero-America for archival development. Based on the perspectives of culture as a pillar of sustainable development advocated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Quadruple Bottom Line (QBL), the aim of this study is to present the contributions of the Iberarchivos program to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Methodologically, it is an applied, exploratory, and descriptive study in terms of objectives, as well as bibliographic and documentary research in primary sources as technical procedures. After a critical reading of each strategic plan for the Ibero-American partnership (PACCI) for the period of 2019 to 2026, all the initiatives related to the Iberarchivos program for the achievement of sustainable development will be identified and described to map the existence of sustainable practices and actions intended for the Ibero-American archives in their activities. This work has identified efforts and movements that highlight the relevance of guaranteeing the right of access to information, culture, and memory for citizenship and the objectives of the SDGs of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, as well as mobilization with other social sectors for the development and monitoring of cultural public policies. The conclusion of this research is that the contributions of the Iberarchivos program are essential for achieving the SDGs, consolidating the QBL, and, above all, the richness and diversity of Ibero-American culture in building sustainable knowledge for society in general and the archival community, as well as democratizing access to culture.

The Status of Nationwide Implementation of Integrative Medicine Programs by Japanese Local Government from a “Social Model” Viewpoint

Background: The world's demographics are transitioning, prompting governments globally to adopt diverse health promotion and disease prevention programs to enhance people's quality of life. While several integrative medicine (IM) programs, including traditional or alternative medicine, may be in place, the level of implementation nationwide is unknown. This research represents the first nationwide study in Japan, conducted in 2018 before local government health programs were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study examines the use of IM by local government in Japan and its safety and effectiveness as a “social model.”Methods: IM programs for disease prevention and health promotion of all 1,944 Japanese local governments in 2018, were retrieved the using the Web Archive Project of the National Diet Library, which is a maintained website repository for all Japanese local government including IM and health programs.Results: A total of 1,739 IM programs were implemented in 537 local governments (27.6% among all Japanese local governments). These included programs for Yoga (1,242; 71.4% of the projects), Qigong (211; 12.1%), and Aromatherapy (145; 8.3%). Among the providers of the programs, only 16 (0.9%) were national medical-related license holders. The purpose of disease prevention or health promotion was not described with scientific basis (safety and effectiveness).Conclusion: Japanese local government conduct health-promoting IM programs, but untrained providers administer many of them. There needs to be more evidence to support the alleged health promotion objectives. Local governments require better support and evidence-based planning to rectify this situation.

The Palantir Files: public interest archives for platform accountability

ABSTRACT Platforms designed for data integration and analysis introduce unique challenges for understanding the social implications of data management in public services. Researchers who study such platforms in the public interest must negotiate limited access to proprietary systems and the firms that make them but can create accountability through openly available data. This paper introduces an approach to researching a data integration and analysis firm, Palantir Technologies, through what we call ‘public interest archives for platform accountability.’ The paper begins by introducing data integration and analysis platforms as an emerging sector of the platform economy, followed by a summary of academic researchers’ challenges. We then provide a literature review of Palantir research, public interest archives, and contemporary archival projects for platform accountability. Then, we present our Palantir case study and describe our methods for document tracking to build a corpus (n = 2807), including court documents, privacy impact assessments, press releases, contracts, Freedom of Information Act requests, non-governmental organization reports, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and patents. We end with several vignettes that help researchers understand this material’s significance to platform accountability.

History Uploaded: Digital Archives After Thirty Years of Democracy

ABSTRACT This article provides an overview of digital archival projects and online databases developed by scholars and archival practitioners in South Africa since the early 1990s. It sketches key shifts in theory and practice over this period, including the economic and practical perils of digital conservation as heritage and of increasing civic archival activism. It shows that the outlook, aims, and successes of these projects have changed in tune with shifts in the state’s archival legislation, changing publishing economics, decreasing cost of digitisation and equipment, and widening access to the internet. Recent archival projects, such as the Five Hundred Year Archive and EMANDULO Project, illustrate a pioneering trend in South African digital archival practice and are suggestive of the formation of a distinct digital epistemic culture. The article argues that South African scholars and archival practitioners have often been at the forefront of key turns in debates taking place in digital archival practice globally and in Africa.

Lymph node metastasis prediction and biological pathway associations underlying DCE-MRI deep learning radiomics in invasive breast cancer.

The relationship between the biological pathways related to deep learning radiomics (DLR) and lymph node metastasis (LNM) of breast cancer is still poorly understood. This study explored the value of DLR based on dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) in LNM of invasive breast cancer. It also analyzed the biological significance of DLR phenotype based on genomics. Two cohorts from the Cancer Imaging Archive project were used, one as the training cohort (TCGA-Breast, n = 88) and one as the validation cohort (Breast-MRI-NACT Pilot, n = 57). Radiomics and deep learning features were extracted from preoperative DCE-MRI. After dual selection by principal components analysis (PCA) and relief methods, radiomics and deep learning models for predicting LNM were constructed by the random forest (RF) method. A post-fusion strategy was used to construct the DLR nomograms (DLRNs) for predicting LNM. The performance of the models was evaluated using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and Delong test. In the training cohort, transcriptome data were downloaded from the UCSC Xena online database, and biological pathways related to the DLR phenotypes were identified. Finally, hub genes were identified to obtain DLR gene expression (RadDeepGene) scores. DLRNs were based on area under curve (AUC) evaluation (training cohort, AUC = 0.98; validation cohort, AUC = 0.87), which were higher than single radiomics models or GoogLeNet models. The Delong test (radiomics model, P = 0.04; GoogLeNet model, P = 0.01) also validated the above results in the training cohorts, but they were not statistically significant in the validation cohort. The GoogLeNet phenotypes were related to multiple classical tumor signaling pathways, characterizing the biological significance of immune response, signal transduction, and cell death. In all, 20 genes related to GoogLeNet phenotypes were identified, and the RadDeepGene score represented a high risk of LNM (odd ratio = 164.00, P < 0.001). DLRNs combining radiomics and deep learning features of DCE-MRI images improved the preoperative prediction of LNM in breast cancer, and the potential biological characteristics of DLRN were identified through genomics.

How to see the South African black people in Santu Mofokeng’s image-text archive?

South African artist Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950 (1997) displays black people’s photographic portraits and text through a slide projection. For this archive project, he collected, restored, and re-contextualized the old portraits and added text. The presented figures depict the black South Africans who lived at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of them are well-dressed and take a pose in a European studio. Different from the well-prepared photographic representation, pieces of text include a disorder of alphabets, varied size of letters, inconsistent ground color, and misprinting effect. In a sense, the ambivalent mode of images and text seems to appeal the black people’s inner conflicts between being modernized versus colonized. In fact, Mofokeng once said that such a middle-class of black people did not exist in his education. Thus, this research analyzes the ways in which intertextuality of images and text in The Black Photo Album fills with the incomplete part of South African history. Reconsidering the functional limits of the TRC(Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1995) in South Africa, this research argues that Mofokeng’s archive project delivers emotions of memories of the black people, which were not registered in the nation’s history.

Podcast confessional: Punk and post-punk archiving, history and ‘afterlife’ conversations on the C86 Show

Among the recurrent preoccupations of punk and post-punk is a critical consideration of the individual’s relationship to society. The emergence of podcasts in which hosts and musicians engage in historically contextualized conversations therefore presents an intriguing turn of events that will be of interest to punk and post-punk scholars. This article considers the possibilities of conversational podcasts via a discussion of the C86 Show, a popular UK-based podcast featuring interviews with punk, post-punk and indie musicians of the 1980s. Aided by the empathic interviewing style of its host, David Eastaugh, the show’s long-form, in-depth conversations connect musicians’ experiences and memories to historical contexts associated with the Thatcher era. Engaging two main fields of research – audio studies and punk and post-punk scholarship – I argue that the C86 Show offers listeners a rich window into punk, post-punk and indie during that time. By inviting musicians to reflect on their pasts (and their lives since the 1980s), the show sheds light also on how these musical movements and genres are remembered today. No less important, the show’s online collection of over one thousand interviews represents a significant archiving project that will be of interest to punk and post-punk scholars.

Digging the Archives in Composition Stretch Pedagogies: Reclamation of Historical Rhetorics to Support Chicanx Emotions of Belonging

Initiating a transdisciplinary composition stretch pedagogy, I examine students’ excavations of archives to advance epistemological freedoms in support of rhetorical sovereignty in student writings. Grounded in Latinx studies first-year composition, I analyze archival projects wherein Chicanx students seek rhetorical inheritances, questing to locate textual homes and emotions of belonging.

The Art of Memory: Archiving Street Art using the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model

This paper presents a detailed discussion of the data modelling and functional implementation of a semantically-enabled knowledge base related to the creation, digitisation and archiving of large-scale public art works. Based on principles of international best practice, standards and interoperability, the paper focuses on the use of the CIDOC-CRM ontology used in conjunction with the Arches Digital Cultural Heritage data management system to model street art-related entities and their semantic relationships. The work presented here is an extension of the work of the mementoArtem Digital Street Art Archive Project being carried out in conjunction with the INSYTE-Cooley Research Laboratory (I-CRL), South East Technological University (SETU), Waterford, Ireland.

ТЕМПОРАЛЬНІ ПЕРЕМИКАННЯ СВІТІВ У ТРЬОХ РІЗНОЖАНРОВИХ ТЕКСТАХ

Application of the principles of Text World Theory to texts of diff erent genres gives us a clearer idea of the diversity of roles performed by the same discourse technique. In this study, we look into the technique of changing temporal parameters of the basic text-world which can involve the appearance of new entities and the relocation of setting in discourse. The analysis shows that temporal world-switches in three texts of diff erent genres – an excerpt from a novel, a free verse poem, and an archival project review – transfer a reader mostly to the past. Yet in each text, temporal world-switches are put to a diff erent purpose. In the excerpt from a complex psychological detective novel they are aimed at foregrounding the role and place of a particular enactor in the network of motives and events; in the free verse poem they serve to convey the theme; in the review of archival papers, temporal world-switches bind together the facts of the past and their contemporary interpretation. The results of the current study suggest that temporal world-switches are polyfunctional, their role depending largely on the genre of writing. Key words: discourse, genre, temporal world-switch, the past, time-zone.

Like Water, We Re-Member: A Conceptual Model of Identity (Re)formation through Cultural Reclamation for Indigenous Peoples of Mexico in the United States

Background: Diasporic Indigenous peoples of Mexico living in the United States continue to survive and reclaim their cultures despite multiple disruptions to identity formation resulting from systematic violence and cultural silencing enacted through white settler colonialism in the United States and Mexico. Honoring Indigenous survivance, the authors present a conceptual model of Indigenous identity healing and reformation that mirrors the dynamic qualities of water for Indigenous Mexican peoples living in the United States. Methods: The conceptual model arose from a ceremony-based, participatory, digital archiving project documenting Indigenous oral histories. The model is illustrated through case analysis of three Indigenous Mexican individuals living in the United States whose stories holistically represent the model’s components. Results: The case narratives illustrate how Indigenous Mexican identities are (re)formed by moving through the model components of Rift (disconnection from land, culture, and community), Longing (yearning to find what was lost), Reconnecting (reclaiming cultural practices), and Affirmation (strengthening of identity through community), via Reflection (memory work which propels movement through each stage). Conclusions: Findings suggest that identities can be (re)formed through reclaiming cultural practices and reconnecting with the community. This conceptual model may be useful for further understanding Indigenous Latinx identity development and healing.

Protecting and Accessing Indigenous Peoples’ Digital Cultural Heritage through Sustainable Governance and IPR Structures - the case of Sámi Culture

This article addresses the clash between Western and Indigenous understandings of how cultural heritage should be governed, protected and treated through law, especially in the digital environment. Specifically, the focus is on the ways in which the Western intellectual property rights (IPR) system often stands in contrast with Indigenous practices and ethics. This problem is approached through a single, intrinsic and descriptive case study related to the digital cultural heritage of the Sámi people: the Digital Access to Sámi Heritage Archives project. The article shows how the current IPR framework governing Indigenous cultural heritage is often misaligned with Indigenous worldviews. However, the study reveals that there is room to develop more sustainable, just and inclusive practices by complementing the existing legal rules with soft-law mechanisms, such as norms and customs, co-created with Indigenous communities.

Ancient Art and its Commerce in Early Twentieth-Century Europe: The John Marshall Archive. A collection of essays written by the participants of the John Marshall Archive Project

Ancient Art and its Commerce in Early Twentieth-Century Europe: The John Marshall Archive. A collection of essays written by the participants of the John Marshall Archive Project

Outside the Locus of Control: Palestinian Digital Archives Resist Israeli Settler-Colonial Erasure

This article examines Palestinian digital archiving in the context of the Israeli regime’s settler-colonial suppression and erasure of Palestinian knowledge. Looking closely at the efforts of three digital archives, the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive, the Palestinian Oral History Archive, and the Palestine Poster Project Archives, it argues that Palestinian digital archival projects, despite structural and technical limitations, serve to safeguard Palestinian knowledges and histories from Zionist violence. Noting examples of Israel’s looting, destruction, and closure of physical Palestinian archives, the author posits that researchers should use digital archives in tandem with materials accessed in Israeli colonial archives to challenge dominant and distorted Zionist narratives, and to fill in the knowledge gaps in the long arc of the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Pioneers in Maltese archives and libraries: people, contexts and institutions in 20th-century Malta

ABSTRACT This contribution shares the first findings and methodological approaches emerging from a research project aiming at exploring how 20th-century archives and libraries in Malta were perceived and in turn shaped by people who engaged and dedicated their lives to their mission. The project also intends to reconstruct the early embryonic development of the profession in Malta, provide a better understanding of the custodial history of archival and library collections on the island, and contribute to the recent local development of university-level archival and library education. To retrace the steps of this pathway through the lens of the changes that are currently happening in Maltese holding institutions, extensive archival research and semi-structured interviews are held in collaboration with the community archive project Memorja (National Archives of Malta). The project will also lay the foundations to trace back the history of Maltese archives and libraries through the 19th century.

Collections from Colonial Australia in Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde and the Challenges of Data Accessibility

German-speaking naturalists working in southeastern Australia in the mid-19th century relied heavily on the expertise of First Nations intermediaries who acted as guides, collectors, traders and translators (Clarke 2008, Olsen and Russell 2019). Many of these naturalists went to Australia because of the research opportunities offered by the British Empire at a time when the German nation states did not have colonies of their own. Others sought to escape political upheaval at home. They were welcome employees for colonial government agencies due to their training in the emerging research-oriented natural sciences that the reformed German universities offered at a time when British universities were still providing a broad general education (Home 1995, Kirchberger 2000). Wilhelm von Blandowski (1822–1878 ) and Gerard Krefft (1830–1881 ), who both worked in colonial Victoria and New South Wales, are among this group. Throughout their work, they corresponded extensively with naturalists in Berlin, exchanging specimens and ideas. But the preserved Australian animals, plants and rock samples, as well as the written and drawn records of animals and landscapes now held at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN), are much more than objects of scientific interest. They also contain information about Australia's First Nations. The collections provide evidence of their role in collecting as well as their knowledge of the natural world, which has long been overlooked and, at least in part deliberately, made invisible by Western knowledge systems (e.g., Das and Lowe 2018, Ashby 2020). People data have been recognised as crucial for linking such collection objects with expeditions, publications, archival material and correspondence (Groom et al. 2020, Groom et al. 2022). It can thus potentially help reconstruct invisibilized Indigenous histories and knowledge. However, while the MfN keeps information about European collectors and other non-indigenous agents associated with their specimens in internal catalogues, databases and wikis, Indigenous actors remain largely absent from these repositories, which reproduce the colonial archive 'along the archival grain' (Stoler 2009). With this in mind, we discuss in our presentation the complexities of using persistent identifiers and tools, such as Wikidata, to improve the integration and linkage of people data in the work currently being undertaken by the MfN and the Berlin's Australian Archive project to digitise and make accessible the museum’s collections. Drawing upon the guidance provided by the FAIR*1 and CARE*2 principles for data (Wilkinson et al. 2016, Carroll et al. 2020), and learning from the 2012 ATSILIRN Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services*3, the 2019 Tandanya Adelaide Declaration and the 2020 AIATSIS Code of Ethics*4, we address the potential of these efforts in terms of collection accessibility, and also highlight the challenges and limitations of this approach in the context of colonial collections.

Global Ireland and the Digital Footprint: The Abbey Theatre Archives in the Digital Repository of Ireland

While digital technologies were initially seen as harbingers of globalization, scholars increasingly acknowledge their role in the rise of nationalism. This paper argues that the policies and practices of the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) simultaneously resonate with national as well as global opportunities in light of the vision of Global Ireland 2025. As a trusted national digital repository for Ireland’s humanities, the DRI can be a celebration of the Abbey Theater collection as a prototype of these national and global opportunities. This paper outlines the earlier attempt of the Abbey Theater Digitizing Archive Project at the National University of Ireland, Galway’s library (NUIG) and its limitations, as well as the policies and Practices of open access, collaboration, and metadata management in the Digital Repository of Ireland. In doing so, the paper draws on the conceptual framework in light of Global Ireland's objectives and the publications of some of the stakeholders and directors of the DRI, such as Sha- ron Webb and Aileen O’Carroll. The outcomes of this paper are that the DRI globally contributes to representing the national position of Abbey Theatre by ingesting and visualizing the scenes that express the Irish struggle for freedom and identity, illuminating the importance of Irish literary discourse over time and place. Also, the use of the interdisciplinary approach uncovers how the use of digital tools highlights the opportunities that the DRI can offer to disseminate, discover, and visualize the dramatic performances of Abbey Theatre as an Irish literary heritage and as an essential part of the Irish national canon.

Listening With/in Context

Despite increasing attention to the preservation and development of sound archives in academic research and cultural heritage institutions, they are yet to be more substantially embraced in larger theoretical debates on archival theory and practice. Fraught with contested histories through the legacy of ethnomusicology, rooted in the enterprises of colonial imperialism, now in the era of mass digitization and distribution, many sound collections are attempting to develop ethical and empowering methodologies that support community involvement and a vigorous remediation between sound and visuality. Addressing this confluence of concerns, this article considers the ways in which contemporary digital sound archival projects are encouraging an engagement with cultural history and memory in innovative and complex ways, mobilizing the affordances of digital tools and community-based support material with careful attention to the negotiation between its sonic and visual constituents. Through an analysis of two case studies – The Roaring ‘Twenties and Smoke Signals Radio Show Archive – this article examines how contemporary digital archival projects activate and remediate sonic documents and their contextual counterparts to invite a diverse, multifaceted, and multi-sensory encounter with history, memory, knowledge, and the past.

Interpretation of x‐ray spectral data using self‐organising maps and hierarchical clustering: A study of Vilhelm Hammershøi's use of painting materials

AbstractThe goal of the Vilhelm Hammershøi Digital Archive project of the National Gallery of Denmark is to understand the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi's painting methods by compiling a comprehensive amount of data on his use of materials and working methods through visual and technical examination of a large number of his paintings, and to make this information available to researchers and the public in an open access digital resource. A clear understanding of the full suite of pigments across the paintings requires determination of which materials comprise the palettes of the ground and paint layers. Scanning electron microscopy/energy‐dispersive x‐ray spectroscopy and macro x‐ray fluorescence spectroscopy were selected as the key analytical techniques due to their ability to yield chemical information at the elemental level. This article presents a method that combines unsupervised machine learning and cluster analysis techniques, to automatically reduce the large x‐ray spectral data to sets of distinct clusters that share similar spectra, making it possible to identify materials more precisely. The proposed method allowed the grouping of materials by chemical composition, which enabled an optimal understanding of the pigments used in the ground layers sampled from a large number of paintings as well as in the paint layer examined at the surface of one selected painting. The method performed well when compared with other well‐established data mining techniques, and it helped reduce the time necessary for the interpretation of the analytical results significantly. Through this approach, a basis for a more nuanced view of Hammershøi's artistic idea and technical development will be generated.

Tradição, Família e Propriedade (TFP), anticomunismo e a comunidade de inteligência dos EUA

The following article investigates the positions of the United States intelligence community in terms of the potential alignment, or not, between the Brazilian fundamentalist Catholic group with anti-communist leanings, Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP) and the anti-communist crusade led by Washington during the period of the Cold War (1947-1991). Selected sources of investigation are documents declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) available from the agency itself and the US Department of State, which were published by the Opening the Archives project at Brown University. The sources were approached according to the method of document analysis and from the theoretical prism of Mannheim’s interpretation of styles of thought. As a result, we identify that the American declassified documents recognize the TFP’s potential to indirectly meet the US’s needs in Brazilian territory, despite the fact that the organization was deemed by the American intelligence Community to be incompatible with Brazilian Catholicism’s world view and its sometimes irrational actions were also not aligned with the anti-communist standards proposed by Washington.