Browsing by Subject "Archives"
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Item "A" is for "archive": a case study in the American long poem(2007) Nelson, Thomas J. ǂq (Thomas John); Bremen, Brian A.; Heinzelman, KurtLong poems like Ezra Pound's The Cantos, William Carlos Williams's Paterson, and Louis Zukofsky's "A" collect and preserve cultural documents, much in the manner of archives. Long poems of the so-called "Pound tradition" are arrangements of discrete passages, including direct citations from sources such as letters, historical texts, and other often "non-poetic" documents. Acting as an archivist, the poet selects material for preservation. Critics have used various frames, notably the epic, the sequence, and the collection, to interpret twentieth-century long poems. Though similarities to archives have been noted, an archival frame has not been fully developed. This dissertation draws on the disciplinary practices of the archivists as well as critical imaginings of archives to develop a frame for interpreting long poems as archives. After establishing the parameters of the archival frame, the bulk of the dissertation concentrates on Zukofsky's archival tendencies. Zukofsky worked as an archivist for the Work Projects Administration's Index of American Design project, where he developed strategies for using an archive as a communicative form. He crafted and marketed his own literary archive as a means of establishing a literary reputation and as an alternative means of publication. But not only did he develop pragmatic uses of archives, he also applied his understanding of archival principles to the construction of his long poem "A". The difficulties of reading "A" parallel those of working the Zukofsky archive. Readers are overwhelmed with hermetic details, documents of personal and public incidents, and records that we are unable to relate readily to surrounding material. Reading "A" as an archive, we must respond to the documents that are the component parts of the poem, to each document's situated context, and to the relationships among the parts that make up Zukofsky's "poem of a life."Item Accession the Web : preserving access to online cultural heritage(2012-05) Tenney, Martha Sarabeth; Winget, Megan Alicia; Clement, TanyaThe Web is now recognized as a cultural artifact worthy of preservation and study; however, the rhizomatic, dynamic nature of online production, the accelerating rate of innovation of the live Web, and the sheer quantity of online records all pose challenges to preserving access to online cultural heritage. Moreover, whole-Web archiving efforts such as the Internet Archive frequently miss sites that are not linked to well from other sites—including the marginalized and fringe materials that are most important in building a thick cultural history of online life. This paper argues that archives and other collecting institutions are uniquely poised to preserve online heritage in the form of cultural subject Web archives. Such institutions have the intellectual capital and the technical capabilities, as well as the cultural responsibility, to create collections that reflect the diversity of online life and that best serve potential future users. In order to build these collections, archivists and other information professionals will need a new set of skills. This paper proposes some theoretical and technical approaches to selection and access for cultural Web collections, with helpful tools and model projects to guide the discussion.Item The aleph in the archive : appraisal and preservation of a natural electronic archive(2008-05) Esteva, María, 1962-; Galloway, Patricia KayThis research explores whether digital records created and used in environments without explicit record-keeping rules provide evidence of the organization that creates them and can be preserved in the long term. I studied the formation process of a digital archive that belonged to a philanthropic organization in Argentina. This archive originated in the late 1980s and was added to until 2005, a period during which, as information technologies were being massively adopted in the work-place, new problems were compounded by the nature and conditions of its electronic records and database systems. The study revealed knowledge about the information technologies and social practices used in the archive's development, providing an understanding of the path from its past to its present form and insights about how to preserve it. The attributes characterizing this archive led to developing the concept of a natural electronic archive. To determine whether the records in the natural archive reflect the organization that created them I devised an inductive appraisal method that uses text mining, social network analysis, and visualization methods. I calculated the similarity between the text records created, gathered, and shared by them within frameworks of time and provenance as a measure of the strength of the relationships between staff members and the functions that they represented. Results of mining electronic text records belonging to 10 years of activities in the organization indicate that it is possible to observe changes in work-dynamics and roles in a way that goes beyond the typical organizational chart. The process and challenges involved in developing and validating the appraisal method are reported in this dissertation. Studying the archive's formation process allowed gaps in the technical documentation to be filled and suggested a preservation strategy. The goal of the strategy is to preserve the structure and context in which the electronic records and databases were created and used, while moving them into a new and compatible technical environment to allow continuous access. From a practical perspective the strategy allows studying the effects of hardware and software migration on file formats and databases present in the digital archive. From a broader perspective it aims to provide a theoretical understanding of the relationship that exists between digital information creation and use and preservation strategies.Item Archival landscapes: crossings of theory and practice in institutional repositories(2015-12) Varner, Alana Victoria; Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole Marie; Roy, LorieneInformation Studies and the humanities have different theories of the archive, causing these two fields to talk past one another. These gaps in discourse have the potential to further silence histories that have been traditionally left out of the archival record. Using recipe materials in collections as a point of interrogation, I address the theory-practice gap, and propose feminist ways of reading the archive that can be useful for those left out on the basis of gender, race, class, gender, and sexuality. I focus on two case studies from the University of Texas Austin’s libraries. The first examines the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas materials in the Harry Ransom Center, whose mediated inclusion in the archive speaks to both the failures of descriptive practices to sufficiently incorporate LGBTQ materials, and the further exclusion of racialized queer bodies in prestigious institutions. The second case study analyzes Gloria Anzaldúa’s papers in the LLILAS Benson Latin American Collections. I argue that these papers reflect histories of racism and oppressive practices in archives in general, and hegemonic power structures more broadly. Recipe materials in Anzaldúa’s papers provide liberatory approaches to reading the archive that exceed the strict parameters of the institution. My thesis argues that reading the gaps between theoretical and practical understandings of the archive offers a more socially conscientious approach to the archive for those who were never meant to be included.Item Collaborative practices employed by collectors, creators, scholars, and collecting institutions for the benefit of recorded sound collections(2014-12) Vanden Dries, William Robert; Clement, Tanya ElizabethThere is a long history of collaboration between private collectors and collecting institutions. Literature that discusses collaboration between these two groups typically focuses on the donation or sale of a private collection to an institution. Existing research focuses less often on the collaborative practices these two groups use to create, preserve, and access their recording collections. Furthermore, there is no scholarly work that aggregates known public-private collaborative practices. As a result, these additional practices are consistently underdeveloped and underutilized. For the first time, this thesis compiles a list of collaborative practices employed by private collectors and collecting institutions. Data was gathered through a literature review and a series of semi-structured interviews with private collectors and information professionals working with recorded sound collections. The constant comparative method of qualitative analysis was used to analyze the data. This thesis finds and discusses twelve collaborative practices employed by private collectors and information professionals. This study also discusses factors that encourage and discourage the use of these collaborative practices, the potential for their continued use, and ways in which future studies can extend the exploratory research of this study. This study’s findings contribute to the efforts of both private collectors and collecting institutions to preserve and provide access to the vast body of sound recordings documenting the multitude of historic and cultural perspectives necessary for scholarly and personal research.Item The evolved radical feminism of spoken word : Alix Olson, C.C. Carter, and Suheir Hammad(2013-05) Rozman, Rachel Beth; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne)Radical feminism is often associated with the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. Although powerful in its goals of solidarity and coalitions, the movement is often criticized for its lack of attention to intersecting systems of power. However, several contemporary feminist spoken word poets are reconceptualizing radical feminism in their political projects, using the theories and activist strategies while paying attention to race, class, and sexuality. This piece traces some of the history and literature of radical feminism, Woman of Color feminism, contemporary Islamic feminism, and spoken word poetry. Using these frameworks, I close-read three poems: "Womyn Before" by Alix Olson, "The Herstory of My Hips" by C.C. Carter, and "99 cent lipstick" by Suheir Hammad to discuss the manner in which each uses coalitions. Olson's poem provides an analysis of the performative and textual aspects of the poem as a way to envision an activist project grounded in old social movements. Carter's poem connects history and archives, using a Woman of Color framework, and through Hammad, the structural critiques of an unjust system that disadvantages minority youth are seen through lenses of Women of Color and Islamic feminism. While these poets gain some knowledge from radical feminism, they interpret it in their poetry in ways that address the intersections of identity.Item Facebook forever : privacy, preservation and social networking records(2013-05) Blaha, Craig Erben; Doty, PhilipFor the first time in history one billion subscribers are creating records using a single software platform: Facebook. Subscribers create historically significant Facebook records every day, yet there is no concerted effort to preserve these records. Archivists do not agree on whether or how these records will continue to exist, nor do they agree on the best way to preserve these records. At the same time, privacy advocates are concerned that social networking records will continue to exist "forever" and therefore have serious privacy implications. In this study I examine the seemingly opposing viewpoints of privacy scholars and archivists. I find that privacy scholars are concerned that the lack of subscriber control over social networking records threatens privacy over time. Archivists address this lack of control through the concepts of donor agreements and the trusted digital repository, but the application of these concepts to the long-term preservation of Facebook records depends on who will preserve these records. I explore four different ways Facebook records may be preserved. I examine whether the U.S. federal government can and should play a role in encouraging Facebook to preserve records. I find that the U.S. federal government is unlikely to take action. I take a first step in empirically examining the likelihood that individual Facebook subscribers will preserve their own records using both an online survey (n = 144) and focus group to ask Facebook subscribers what they expect to happen to their Facebook records. I find that Facebook subscribers do not trust Facebook, do not think about preservation when they use Facebook, and do not expect their Facebook records to exist forever. This research makes four contributions to existing literature: a discussion of the value of social networking records and whether they should be preserved, a close examination of the differing opinions of archivists and privacy scholars about these records, a discussion of the role public policy might play in the preservation of Facebook records and privacy in the United States, and an empirical exploration of the attitudes and behaviors of a small group of Facebook subscribers related to preservation and privacy.Item Investigations Into Using Machine Learning Models to Automate the Sorting of Digitized Texas State Publications(Texas Digital Library, 2023-05-16) Rikka, PraneethOver the past ten years the UNT Libraries has been digitizing Texas State Publications it receives from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission as part of the Texas State Depository program. During this time, over 19,000 items have been digitized and made available in The Portal to Texas History’s Texas State Publications Collection (https://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/TXPUB/). Each year, batches of publications are sent to a digitization vendor, digitized, and sent back to UNT where each publication is sorted so that similar items are grouped together to assist in metadata creation. This sorting usually happens with sets of over 1,000 publications at a time. The manual sorting process is time consuming and requires expert knowledge of the subject matter. Recent advances in machine learning offer an automated approach to this manual sorting of documents. This poster presents a research project to build and test a classification model to assist librarians in the sorting of digitized Texas State Publications into groups. It discusses the labeled dataset that was created to test different machine learning approaches and presents the findings of text-based and image-based classification models. We hope that this poster encourages others in two specific ways, first to build datasets that highlight specific problems in the library and archives space that can be worked on by students interested in real world problems, and second, to think about processes that exist in their institution that might benefit from judicious use of machine learning to complement human decisions in making resources available for users.Item It's all for naught : avant-garde cinema, regional history, and the South(2015-05) Malin, Sean Lowel; Frick, Caroline; Hutchison, ColemanAt the margins of cinema history are films that defy traditional strategies of production, narrative, and aesthetics. These "experimental" works are the subjects of their own histories concomitant to those in "mainstream" film studies. Media scholarship by the likes of David James and P. Adams Sitney has attempted to implement the avant-garde into wider filmmaking narratives. But histories and critical studies alike widely marginalize experimental works made outside of expected cosmopolitan centers, particularly when fringe films and their makers hail from the American South. This project argues that the near-elimination of the region's avant-gardists from media history prevents works of cultural import from disseminating into the national narrative. Through an interdisciplinary study of local experimental communities, with direct focus on New Orleans, it also contends that recovering these works is essential to more inclusive and thus emancipatory regional media narratives. The thesis concludes with an original taxonomy of archives and interviews for future critical Southern media scholarship.Item No bad memories : a feminist, critical design approach to video game histories(2014-05) Weil, Rachel Simone; Lee, GloriaCertain unique sights and sounds of video games from the 1980s and 1990s have been codified as a retro game style, celebrated by collectors, historians, and game developers alike. In this report, I argue that this nostalgic celebration has escaped critical scrutiny and in particular omits the diverse experiences of girls and women who may have been alienated by the tough, intimidating nature of a twentieth-century video-game culture that was primarily created by and for boys. Indeed, attempts to attract girls to gaming, such as the 1990s girls' game movement, are usually criticized in or absent from mainstream video-game histories, and girly video games are rarely viewed with the same nostalgic fondness as games like Super Mario Bros. This condition points to a larger cultural practice of trivializing media for girls and, by extension, girlhood and girls themselves. My critical design response to this condition has been twofold. First, I have recuperated and resituated twentieth-century girly games as collectible, valuable, and nostalgic, thereby subverting conventional historical narratives and suggesting that these games have inherent cultural value. Second, I have created new works that reimagine 8-bit style as an expression of nostalgia for twentieth-century girlhood rather than for twentieth-century boyhood. This report contains documentation of some relevant projects I have undertaken, such as the creation of a video-game museum and an 8-bit video game called Electronic Sweet-N Fun Fortune Teller. In these projects and in future works, I hope to disrupt dominant narratives about video game history and nostalgia that continue to marginalize and trivialize girls' and women's experiences and participation in contemporary game cultures.Item The re-mediation of the archive : situating new media in moving image archives(2010-05) Jannise, Stephen Tatum; Frick, Caroline; Winget, MeganThis thesis outlines the changing landscape of moving image archives in light of the emergence of new media. Whereas, in the twentieth century, these archives were once responsible for the preservation of endangered films and television programs, I argue that, in the twenty-first century, moving image archives will redefine their value to society not through preservation but through the decisions they make, which will affect not simply the intellectual community but the culture at large. The ways in which moving image archives situate new media materials and extend cooperation between institutions will determine, in large part, the discourse surrounding moving images throughout the upcoming century.Item Session 3E | This Is Fine: Pressing On With Planned Changes Amid Ongoing Unplanned Ones!(Texas Digital Library, 2022-05-25) Dodd, Samantha; Negraru, AdaTexas Archival Resources Online (TARO) is a consortium of over 70 archives, museums, and cultural heritage centers throughout Texas that provides a mutually-supported website for member repositories to upload archival finding aids. For over two decades, TARO has served as a free and open resource visited by hundreds of thousands of researchers per year. However, its twenty-year-old website was long overdue for holistic redesign and enhancement. Funded by a NEH Planning Grant (2015-2016) and a subsequent NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation Grant (2019-present), the project started in the Spring of 2020 with a complete overhaul of the website from the administrative aspects of accounts, security and file uploads, to the public interface and search functionalities. Upon overcoming challenges such as the global pandemic and a week long winter storm, TARO’s Steering Committee and numerous volunteers, alongside its institutional home, the University of Texas Libraries, launched the Beta administrative site in May 2021, followed by the public facing Beta website in July 2021. After months of planning, development, testing, and continued enhancements, the final website debuted in October 2021. This presentation is a follow-up to last year’s reports, and will document the final stages of project development and implementation, collection of stakeholder feedback, usability testing, retiring the legacy website, and project wrap up thoughts. Also included will be ongoing and potential future challenges for the TARO Consortium.Item Un/Mediated : access to human rights records in context(2015-05) Darnall, Kathryn Irene; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 1957-; Trace, Ciaran B.This thesis, based upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the Guatemalan National Police Archive in Guatemala City (AHPN), explores how knowledge of archival context is instantiated within the AHPN's reference processes. The AHPN, an archive that has re-created the original record keeping of the National Police, has also created specific tools and behaviors that allow archivists to successfully search through the archive. By focusing upon tacit decision-making processes of reference archivists in the completion of responding to information requests, I demonstrate how archivists translate discrete pieces of information into the hierarchical structure of the Guatemalan National Police Archive. By placing the work processes of the reference archivist within the larger context of the archive, I demystify the processes of searching for information while firmly establishing the value of archival context in creating meaning from the archive. Within this thesis, I highlight key elements of archival context that aid reference archivists in their search for documents, with the intention of opening up opportunities for users to employ these same methods within their own research projects.Item What is Digital Librarianship? An Interview with Rachel Winston(Texas Digital Library, 2021-11-29) Coleman, Misha; Gunnells, Ali; Santiago, ChloeItem "Whatever you say, you say nothing" : archives and the Belfast Project(2012-05) George, Christine Anne; Trace, Ciaran B.With a subpoena in one hand and a donor agreement in the other, what choice should an ethical archivist make? Since the legal battle over the Belfast Project—a collection of oral histories from Northern Irish paramilitaries about their involvement in the Troubles—at Boston College erupted in 2011, such a scenario has become a reality. With U.S. attorneys demanding access in the name of truth and justice, and historians advocating denial for the sake of scholarship and honor, the archival profession is facing some troubling legal and ethical issues. Regardless of the ultimate fate of the Belfast Project, the archival field will have to adapt to a new reality. This reality will have to consider the effects of the law and oral history practices on archives. Should archives be granted privilege recognized within the legal system? Should there be oversight for oral histories? Should archives offer privacy protections for third parties? How can the archival community address these issues? This thesis will use the Belfast Project to analyze legal and ethical issues facing archivists and explore what this means for the future of the profession.