Archive Project Research Articles

Life on the Outskirts: Making Sense and use of a Creative Life

Life on the Outskirts is a digital archiving project being undertaken in collaboration between the Helen Storey Foundation and Kingston University. Helen Storey studied Foundation and Fashion at Kingston Polytechnic before her varied career as a fashion designer in Italy and London and as a social artist collaborating with scientists on projects including Primitive Streak, Catalytic Clothing and Wonderland. Robert Knifton uses his work with the Helen Storey Foundation to discuss key issues around digital archiving such as ‘born digital’ artefacts, digital barriers to materiality and ritualized material encounters in the archive, multivocality of digital archival artefacts, and the educational uses of the digital archive, and the great potential of the performative digital archive space.

Native Sovereignty and the Archive: Samson Occom and Digital Humanities

AbstractThis essay describes The Occom Circle, a scholarly digital edition of documents held at Dartmouth College by and about Samson Occom (1723–92), a Mohegan Indian, Presbyterian minister, political activist, and the foremost Native writer in eighteenth-century North America. In its content and method, The Occom Circle puts Native space and activities closer to the center of our early history. Framing this digital humanities project with the themes of Native sovereignty, the politics of archives, and the affordances of the digital, the essay considers how scholars can maintain a feminist and post-/non-colonial approach to the uses of technology to advance what scholars have labeled “ethnic archives” and public-oriented archival projects in the digital age. It argues that Native intellectual sovereignty is processional, that archives can reveal and preserve the often-ephemeral affective structures of colonial relations, and that digital technology can offer methodologies that embrace the evolving nature of knowledge.

Lecture of "Michinoku-Shinrokuden" : Digital archive project of the 2011 Great East Japan, awarded commendation by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology

Lecture of "Michinoku-Shinrokuden" : Digital archive project of the 2011 Great East Japan, awarded commendation by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology

Remarks on a failed film archival project

Abstract This brief article assesses an ongoing infrastructural research project focusing on filmarkivet.se, a website devoted to historical Swedish non-fiction film. As a collaboration between film researchers and film heritage institutions, the project has to date failed to overcome conflicting archival interests. Film scholars in general need open online archives and contextual resources, while some heritage institutions seek to give access solely to a curated filmic past. While cooperation between the heritage sector and scholars is regularly envisioned as being mutually beneficial, it also faces difficulties that need to be addressed and overcome.

Native Sovereignty and the Archive: Samson Occom and Digital Humanities

Abstract This essay describes The Occom Circle, a scholarly digital edition of documents held at Dartmouth College by and about Samson Occom (1723–92), a Mohegan Indian, Presbyterian minister, political activist, and the foremost Native writer in eighteenth-century North America. In its content and method, The Occom Circle puts Native space and activities closer to the center of our early history. Framing this digital humanities project with the themes of Native sovereignty, the politics of archives, and the affordances of the digital, the essay considers how scholars can maintain a feminist and post-/non-colonial approach to the uses of technology to advance what scholars have labeled “ethnic archives” and public-oriented archival projects in the digital age. It argues that Native intellectual sovereignty is processional, that archives can reveal and preserve the often-ephemeral affective structures of colonial relations, and that digital technology can offer methodologies that embrace the evolving nature of knowledge.

Seamless Synthetic Aperture Radar Archive for Interferometry Analysis

Abstract. The NASA Advancing Collaborative Connections for Earth System Science (ACCESS) seamless synthetic aperture radar (SAR) archive (SSARA) project is a collaboration between UNAVCO, the Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and OpenTopography at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to design and implement a seamless distributed access system for SAR data and derived interferometric SAR (InSAR) data products. A unified application programming interface (API) has been created to search the SAR archives at ASF and UNAVCO, 30 and 90-m SRTM DEM data available through OpenTopography, and tropospheric data from the NASA OSCAR project at JPL. The federated query service provides users a single access point to search for SAR granules, InSAR pairs, and corresponding DEM and tropospheric data products from the four archives, as well as the ability to search and download pre-processed InSAR products from ASF and UNAVCO.

Canonizing Homophile Sexual Respectability

This essay considers the archival practices, historiographic habits, and political orientations that might explain the resistance to or rejection of the notion that sex radicalism, defined broadly to include various challenges to sexual respectability, was an important component of US homophile activism in the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, the essay asks why important historical and archival projects, including the early work of Jonathan Ned Katz and John D'Emilio and the recent EBSCO LGBT Life digitized database, have paid little attention to Drum, a widely circulating homophile movement periodical that promoted gay sexual liberation, and instead have highlighted the significance of more respectable periodicals such as ONE, Mattachine Review, and the Ladder. In exposing the historical erasure of North America's most popular homophile movement periodical of the 1960s, this essay suggests new ways of thinking about gay and lesbian history, queer memory, and sexual archives.

The firm: towards a study of 400 football gangs

The essay looks at how to conduct better contemporary research into football hooligan gangs in the light of flawed media reporting of the phenomenon and a general move away from the rich tradition of ethnography in sociology, physical cultural studies and criminology in recent years. The essay explores some theoretical and methodological issues arising from conducting a research project into football hooligan writings. It looks at the project's utility for longer term ethnographic and historical research into the many hundreds of football hooligan gangs that can be identified in a longitudinal cultural mapping of the field. The essay presents material from a sustained archival research project where one copy of each item of a genre known as football hooligan memoirs was archived, and authors and publishers were interviewed. The essay is an audit for a contemporary and possible future study of football hooligan gangs.

Researching the Wertheim Collection at the Harvard Art Museums

The Harvard Art Museums have led a two-year, joint conservation and archival project on the Wertheim Collection, a group of 43 French paintings, sculptures, and drawings that was bequeathed to the museum in 1951 and has been on view in a separate gallery since 1974. Recent investigations into certain aspects of this important collection at private and institution's archives have revealed new information about Maurice Wertheim's collecting practices, the origins of some of the paintings’ frames, and the exhibition of the Collection before its arrival at Harvard. Archival documents have also contextualized and helped to advance the examinations and treatments of these singular objects by the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. This project has been critical for the preparation of the rehanging of the Collection at the renovated Harvard Art Museums, which will open in 2014.

The People's Contest: A Civil War Era Digital Archiving Project

Journal Article The People's Contest: A Civil War Era Digital Archiving Project Get access http://peoplescontest.psu.edu/. Created and maintained by the Richards Civil War Era Center and the Penn State University Libraries. Reviewed March 2014. Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 2, September 2014, Pages 676–677, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau429 Published: 01 September 2014

‘OUT OF HIS ELEMENT’: MR JOHNSON, SIR JOSEPH BANKS AND TATTERSHALL CASTLE

During research for the Tattershall Castle Conservation Plan for the National Trust, a set of framed drawings of the castle was found in the storeroom of the great tower. Examination of the Curzon correspondence deposited by the National Trust in the Lincolnshire Record Office revealed that these had been commissioned in 1783 by no less a person than Sir Joseph Banks (of nearby Revesby Abbey), President of the Royal Society and Council member of the Society of Antiquaries. With the help of the Sir Joseph Banks Archive Project, and piecing together materials in Aberystwyth, Cambridge, Lincoln, London and New Haven, Connecticut, a story has emerged of antiquarian endeavour in the 1780s when, amidst a frenzy of scientific activity, rampant balloon mania and the care of an ailing turtle, Sir Joseph commissioned the most detailed survey yet undertaken of a medieval monument in the British Isles, entrusting the task to the hitherto unremarked J L Johnson, surveyor and draughtsman, a figure who deserves belated recognition and a place in the history of medieval archaeology for his pioneering efforts.

The Collaborative Study of Archival Metadata Mapping in Taiwan

National Science Council (NSC) of Taiwan had been in charge of the National Digital Archiving Project (NDAP) from 2002 to 2012. Over the 10 years, many important institutions had participated in NDAP, including Academia Historica, Taiwan Historica, Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, and the Taiwan Provincial Consultative Council. The digitized collections are from Ming Dynasty, Ch’ing Dynasty, Japanese Occupied Period (1895-1945), and the period of Republican China (1912- present). The total number of digitized items in the project is over 1.4 million. In this study, digitized items with metadata elements designed by Metadata Architecture and Application Team (MAAT) were analyzed and compared to find core elements of each level according to their metadata requirements specifications. The outcomes may serve as reference for future design of metadata elements, and permit contextualized export of archival metadata as the foundation for next generation archival description.

Living through the legacy: the Apartheid Archive Project and the possibilities for psychosocial transformation

The Apartheid Archive Project is an ongoing, collaborative research project that focuses on the collection of personal stories and narrative accounts from ordinary South Africans about their experiences of racism during apartheid. The primary aim of this initiative is to provide a forum for differing sectors of South African society to share and reflect on their past experiences, in the hope that these will offer us an array of alternative entry points into the past, in addition to the accounts of historians and other scholars. Crucially, the project aspires not merely to record these accounts—in itself an important act of remembering different histories—but also to engage thoughtfully and theoretically with them. In these ways, the Apartheid Archive Project encourages both a commitment to personal and collective remembering, and a joint intellectual and political commitment to interrogating stories and narratives rather than simply accepting them at face value. An intellectual and political cornerstone of the project is to contribute to a form of critical psychosocial mnemonics. Critical psychosocial mnemonics is interested in engaging with those mechanisms and processes that facilitate individual and collective remembering; how these memories intersect with lived experiences and various histories; what they can temporally reveal about the past, the present and an imagined future; how they reflect and/or construct the psychological and social subject, intersubjectivity and intergroup relations; and how they may allow us to make critical, analytic commentaries about the social world and its psychological inscription.

Fabricating: Facts and fiction in the work of the Atlas Group

The Atlas Group, both an elaborate archival project and an “imaginary foundation” established by Walid Raad, aimed to document the Lebanese civil wars. The Group produced and acquired a series of documents, photographic images, video footage, objects etc., which were meticulously organized under the Atlas Group Archive. In a comparable structure, that of a museum, the Group assembles these artefacts into a manifold archival project which refers to the Lebanese wars and the contemporary history of Lebanon. In examining the Atlas Group Archive, it becomes apparent that the documents constituting this archive transcend their face value as historical artefacts manifesting into signifiers of fictional stories, ambiguous historical and mnemonic devices. Through this scheme, the work questions the process, politics, authenticity and mechanisms of historical documentation, of historiography and historians themselves. Raad, through his fictional foundation, the Atlas Group, functions in a sophisticated, somewhat subversive way, as a historiographer and a curator of this archive, in a quest to examine the authority and authorship of historical events relating to the trauma of war.

Muslim Societies in West Africa: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives in Digital Form

Over the past decade, Matrix, the Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University, has developed digital galleries blending text, sound, and image to portray the history of islamization and the practice of Islam in West Africa with support from NSF, TICFIA, and the NEH. The featured areas have been Ghana (as a Muslim minority country), and Senegal (as a Muslim majority area), as well as Gambia and Mauritania. The emphasis has been on the diversity, tolerance, and pluralism of Islamic practice in historical and contemporary terms, on female and male practitioners, and on laypeople as well as clergy. We have used European archives, Arabic and ajami documents, interviews, and a range of other sources to tell stories and show practices. The portal for this material is www.aodl.org. This article outlines some of the galleries that we have built; others will be added over the next two years. The authors of the galleries are faculty at Indiana University, Michigan State, Harvard, Boston University, and James Madison University. The designer of the galleries has been Catherine Foley, Director of Digital Library and Archive Projects at MATRIX, and the author of “Developing Materials for a Digital Library Gallery” in this issue of Islamic Africa.

Flexible data model for linked objects in digital archives

In this paper is presented a pragmatic data model for creating and managing linked contextual and material objects, the design process and the reasons why it was developed. The model was created to meet the needs of private archives and digital archive services. The design goals were flexibility, cost-efficiency and suitability for daily use. The basis of the model is to use contextual objects to describe the archive objects; should they be text documents, moving image, audio or any other type of content to be preserved. By linking the contextual objects such as events, places, agents and actions, the redundancy of archive data can be minimized. The objects gain more informational value because the linking forms a network of connected objects. The data model was based on the national and international metadata standards as well as best practices from private archives. It was implemented using Fedora Commons' object modeling features as a part of the ongoing Open Source Archive project.

Creating an Online Television Archive, 1987–2013

The growth of television, and in particular television news, has created a challenge in preserving and providing access to the resulting material. At the same time, technology has opened many opportunities to capture this information and make it more widely available. In some ways, it is a race of technology against the speed of content creation. In this paper, we describe a very successful archival project that records, indexes, archives and makes available the totality of the programming of the U.S. based C-SPAN television network, a nonprofit network that telecasts the entirety of the U.S. congressional proceedings, hearings, presidential speeches and other public policy events. As such, it is an archive of unedited primary source events. The use of evolving technology over 25 years has made this archive possible and it exists free on the Internet for world-wide access.

Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine Announces Completion of Archiving Project

The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine (JABFM ) is proud to announce the completion of a project to make all content available on our website. Mr. Phillip Lupo, our Senior Editorial Assistant, in collaboration with HighWire Press, managed this large endeavor, which involved scanning

The Accidental Archivists: Lessons Learned from a Digital Archive Project

This article tells the story of the University of Colorado Law Library's successful effort to develop its first digital archive. The sudden death of the law school's dean was the catalyst for this project, with a goal to unveil the archive at a memorial symposium scheduled nine months in the future. The University of Colorado Law Library staff had never tackled a project of this type or scale before. This article discusses the technological, cataloging, and management issues that were encountered during the project. It also provides advice and tips on how librarians in their own institutions can accomplish such a project.

‘Say nothing’: silenced records and the Boston College subpoenas

How will subpoenas for Boston College's sealed Irish Republican Army oral histories affect future attempts to archive the Troubles and armed conflict in general? To answer this question, the author examines the long-term implications of subpoenaing Boston College's Belfast Project, arguing that the subpoenas present a case study of the little-recognized preservation hazard of silenced or uncreated records. The author situates the case within the context of the two types of wartime preservation hazards: the destruction or obfuscation of extant record and the silencing of records that otherwise would have been created. In order to show subpoenas' grave implications on the archive's mission to record the full story of the Troubles for future generations, the article places the Belfast Project within the context of other Northern Irish and international archival projects. Ultimately, the author intends to demonstrate the relevance of the case to archivists, arguing that the Boston College subpoenas pose a preservation risk as hazardous as any fire or explosion by threatening to silence records that otherwise would have been created and thereby creating irreparable holes in the historical record of the Troubles.