Toronto's libraries are under threat of privatization. Tell city council to keep them public now.
Published on 23rd Jul 2011 by Wendy | 25 reactions and 0 Comments
Hey Toronto. If you believe in ideals like, oh… I don’t know, the notion that everyone should have access to information regardless of race, class or creed, then can you please sign this petition to tell the Fords that you don’t want them to sell our libraries to the highest (or friendliest) bidder. Thanks.
And I would encourage all to read this.
(via dropouthangoutspaceout)
Published on 8th Jun 2011 by Wendy | 15 reactions and 0 Comments
“And whether we deem Twitter a text-based mechanism of orality, as the scholar Zeynep Tufekci has suggested, or of a ‘secondary orality,’ as Walter Ong has argued, or of something else entirely (tweech? twext? something even more grating, if that’s possible?), it almost doesn’t matter. The point is to acknowledge, online, a new environment — indeed, a new culture — in which writing and speech, textuality and orality, collapse into each other. Speaking is no longer fully ephemeral. And text is no longer simply a repository of thought, composed by an author and bestowed upon the world in an ecstasy of self-containment. On the web, writing is newly dynamic. It talks. It twists. It has people on the other end of it. You read it, sure, but it reads you back.”— “Is Twitter Writing, or is it Speech?”
I feel like this makes a significant part of Derridean thought irrelevant, but no doubt any serious Derridean would say I know nothing of his work.
This is really good. It also kind of reminds me of the infamous Fry and Laurie sketch about language. I like it, though, and it does raise some key issues that archivists have been grappling with.
(Source: marathonpacks)
Published on 5th Jun 2011 by Wendy | 22 reactions and 0 Comments
~ The Boston Traveler, April 5, 1923
via Jeudi
The dangers of premarital spooning!
Published on 5th Jun 2011 by Wendy | 48 reactions and 0 Comments
“Scholarly books shouldn’t have to be bestsellers, but they’d better damn well try to speak to a broader audience than just a scholar’s immediate colleagues. Moreover, scholars have a responsibility to act as public servants to a degree, no matter if their institutions are public or private. We ought to think in public. We ought to be expanding our spheres of influence and inspiration with every page we write. We ought to be trying to influence the world, not just the blinkered group that goes to our favorite conference. And that principle ought to hold no matter your topic of interest, be it Proust or videogames or human factors engineering or the medieval chanson de geste. No matter your field, it can be done, and people do it all the time. They’re called “good books.””—
Ian Bogost -WRITING BOOKS PEOPLE WANT TO READ
Thoughts, Internet?
Word. Wish more people in my field did this, and I really admire the ones who do.
ShortFormBlog: On libraries, a concept that would be difficult to sell today
Published on 16th May 2011 by Wendy | 1510 reactions and 0 Comments
“If someone suggested the idea of public libraries now, they’d be considered insane. If you said you were going to take a little bit of money from every taxpayer, buy a whole load of books and music and games, stick them on a shelf and tell everyone, ‘These are yours to borrow…I’m reblogging this from my phone as I lay in bed, so I can’t explicate this, but oh god, this is the narrative I try to put forth to the undergrads I teach, although I try to conclude it with “and libraries still matter and you can help make them better.”
(Source: jingc)
Published on 9th May 2011 by Wendy | 37 reactions and 0 Comments
~ Pros and Cons: A Newspaper Reader’s and Debater’s Guide to the Leading Controversies of the Day, John Bertram Askew, 1899
(click to enlarge)
Published on 8th May 2011 by Wendy | 0 reactions and 0 Comments
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
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Archivist/filmmaker/tech historian Jason Scott on CBC Radio’s Spark today (the URL links to the full, uncut interview), talking about long-term digital preservation in light of Google’s recent decision to migrate its user videos to YouTube.
Published on 21st Apr 2011 by Wendy | 4 reactions and 0 Comments
No, that’s not Andy Samberg, but rather the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Stephen Harper, during his university days — courtesy of a deliciously cheeky little blog called Vintage Voter. It features archival photographs and television stills of Canada’s federal party leaders alongside snarkful captions.
I’m a strong advocate for archives as bastions of democracy and accountability, and while this may not be exactly what I had in mind when considering ways to use archival records to influence the democratic process, I’ll certainly take the silly alongside the more serious stuff. After all, we are in the final throes of an election campaign over here, so a generous dose of hilarity is much welcomed.
Archivists and other purveyors of vintage paraphernalia should send your photographs of the leaders to vintagevoter@gmail.com. And fellow Canucks, remember to vote May 2nd.
Published on 28th Mar 2011 by Wendy | 65 reactions and 0 Comments
Credit: Los Angeles Times, 1970/UCLA Digital Collections.
I love how tumblr becomes a place to experience the archive. I’ve been thinking about archival environments online for years now, but I find it so striking when I see a picture like this, taken from an institutional collection, then shared and loved really organically.
Hear, hear! Despite all the recent scholarly and professional attention lavished on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and on the more well-known blogging platforms, I have always suspected that Tumblr would become a key interface for people to engage with archival documents online. Ease of reblogging (especially photo/music/video posts), along with the built-in “notes” system that essentially traces the secondary provenance of an item as it makes its way through cyberspace, permits its networked publics to, in the words of Michael Warner, process the passing appeal of the archive and perform its extension. And for those who worry about the decontextualizing entropy of the Internet, Tumblr’s architecture makes it so that the original item can be easily traced back to its origin with a single click, as in the case of the above photo.
There’s a paper in here somewhere — but all this dry prattle kinda takes away from the organic fun and pleasure of Tumblr, doesn’t it? Carry on…
Mandela archive to go online: Google is to digitise trove of documents for global, instant access to all
Published on 20th Mar 2011 by Wendy | 1 reactions and 0 Comments
Mar 20, 2011 12:00 AM | By BOBBY JORDAN
Mandela’s chief archivist, Verne Harris, this week said the team of experts from Google would arrive this month to offer their expertise on how to digitise a treasure of documents linked to the former president. (more…)
Published on 18th Mar 2011 by Wendy | 3 reactions and 0 Comments
"In thinking about how archivists and scholars can be “mediators” building institutional relationships with and between communities, they must also seek to re-imagine and re-define activism by considering activists as archivists and activists as scholars. These efforts to create new definitions must also include the importance of teaching and professional alliances and partnerships that leverage mutual resources. Culturally, institutionally and academically speaking, now is an opportune moment for such re-definitions and alliances, as those working in cultural curating and literary studies are thinking so critically and creatively (in an age of shrinking budgets) about method and opening up objects of inquiry."
—Notes from “The Radical Politics of Hidden Archives” with Steven Fullwood and Jillian Cuellar, from the NYU Workshop in Archival Practice. This is so relevant to my thesis research right now. I wish I could expound more on this, as they’ve opened up so many inroads for further investigation and discussion, but I’m a bit spent at the moment since my home was engulfed in toxic smoke from a mammoth fire that took out several beloved local businesses, left a bunch of people homeless and prompted the evacuation of hundreds of others yesterday. And disaster on a much wider scale is of course very much on our minds as our thoughts and empathy are with Japan. (And Libya…) Anyway, I’d like to return to this piece later. It’s a thought-provoking summary of many of the issues those of us in the archives-for-justice movement are facing.
Published on 16th Mar 2011 by Wendy | 8 reactions and 0 Comments
"The challenge before the TRC in establishing the National Research Centre (which many agreed was a less-than-inspired name) is monumental. As the debates about the permanent homes of the International Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia have shown, location is a deeply symbolic, contested, and political decision, even in the digital age when access may be widely dispersed. There are tensions in the understanding of whom it’s for; the need for First Nations communities to own and control their stories, culture, and heritage, versus the imperative to make knowledge of the residential schools a part of every Canadian’s history. The very definition of ‘archives’ must be opened outward to include all vehicles of meaning and memory: oral traditions, stories and names, dance and art, deerskin and landscape. As with all human rights archives, there is a need to balance privacy against access and education, and to address the risk of revictimization. In the words of survivor Eugene Arcand: “We’ve been studied to death; we’ve been archived to death."
—Grace Lile’s account of a recent international forum convened in Vancouver for Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Sharing Truth,” posted at the Archiving Human Rights WITNESS Blog.
Published on 11th Mar 2011 by Wendy | 755 reactions and 0 Comments
"According to press accounts, on Saturday March 5 Egyptians opposed to the government of ex-President Hosni Mubarak stormed the headquarters of Amn Al-Dawla, the State Security Police, in Nasr City about 30 miles south of Cairo, to halt the apparent destruction of police and intelligence documents. Similar demonstrations took place at police offices in Alexandria and in the province of Sharkia, northeast of Cairo. Protesters seized thousands of records containing evidence of a wide-reaching campaign of surveillance, secret detention and torture targeting opponents to the Mubarak regime. In addition to intelligence files, many of them partially burnt in the attempt to hide the evidence of human rights crimes, activists say they found clandestine detention cells, compromising audio and videotapes of well-known Egyptians for use in blackmail, and instruments of torture, including devices used to apply electric shocks to prisoners."
—Kate Doyle, “Egyptians Seize Secret Police Files,” UNREDACTED (The National Security Archive blog)
Vermont archivist Sanford honored
Published on 15th Feb 2011 by Wendy | 5 reactions and 0 Comments
Gregory is, literally and figuratively, a giant among archivists. (Seriously. He’s only about, what, seven feet tall?) It’s awesome to see him honoured for his archival work.
About
Hi, I'm Wendy, a reporter by training and MA student in Archival Studies interested in documentation, justice and the politics of remembering. I spent the summer of 2010 in South Africa on an internship in Nelson Mandela's personal archives. Now I'm writing my thesis. This is a rather haphazard collection of the raw materials that inspire my theories. (There is no original order.) more
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