#insuetude

[readingvocabulary]

cassation - instrumental music

perichoresis - refers to holy trinity

vendanges - grape harvest

epergne - an ornamental centrepiece for a dining table used for holding fruit or flowers

tin lizzie - a car, especially a very early Ford

catabasis - journey to the underworld

lex abscondita - hidden law

codex gentium - code of nations

centrisome

dialegesthai - converse or talk through (Plato)

ascesis - the practice of severe self-discipline, typically for religious reasons.

anamnesis - recollection, especially of a supposed previous existence

venation - the arrangement of veins

taupe - brownish grey

sinuate

nubilous - cloudy, misty; obscure

corvine - like a raven or crow

nomes - each of the thirty-six territorial divisions of ancient Egypt; an administrative division of modern Greece.

Ennead - The Ennead or Great Ennead was a group of nine deities in Egyptian mythology worshipped at Heliopolis: the sun god Atum; his children Shu and Tefnut; their children Geb and Nut; and their children Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. The Ennead sometimes includes the son of Osiris and Isis, Horus.

pavonine - like a peacock

sebaceous- relating to oil or fat

caliology - study of bird’s nests

greegree - African amulet

electrolier - a chandelier in which the lights are electrical

ateknia - childlessness

monocoque - an aircraft or vehicle structure in which the chassis is integral with the body.

ogive/ogival - the roundly tapered end of a two-dimensional or three-dimensional object

dihedral - Dihedral angle is the upward angle from horizontal of the wings or tailplane of a fixed-wing aircraft

haliographic - writing about the sea

contranatent - against the current

pelisse - long coat

Camanchaca - fog off Peru and Chile

parpen - stone passing through a wall from side to side, with two smooth vertical faces

docent - a person who acts as a guide, typically on a voluntary basis, in a museum, art gallery, or zoo.

lazzaroni - Italian homeless

insuetude - state or quality of being unaccustomed; absence of habit

talipes - club foot

[radical-empathy]

This link shares foundational readings and working bibliography from the Design for Diversity Forum. Not all of the articles relate to radical empathy and archives directly, but many explore common areas of interest. 

Selected items from that list: 

Carter, R. G. S. (2006). “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence.”Archivaria, 61(61).

Useful for succinct synthesis of major strands of thought in historiography, critical theory, and archival science regarding power and silences in the archive. Those interested in an even deeper exploration may explore sources (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, etc.) mentioned. Also touches on the tension between records kept in primarily oral cultures versus records recognized as archive-able (i.e., documentary records from primarily literate/print cultures) in the Western European archival tradition. Finally, proposes that some communities may refuse to “be archived” and use silence as a form of resistance — a point important for our work in Design for Diversity.

Christen, K. (2015). Tribal Archives, Traditional Knowledge, and Local Contexts: Why the “s” Matters. Journal of Western Archives, 6(1).

Archivist scholars argue that it is not enough for collections to be inclusive of cultures and voices, but make “structural changes” in which Indigenous people still have ownership over their texts and stories. This notion of ownership, though, becomes less defined when Indigenous cultural artifacts are collected by institutions; when a non-Indigenous culture “owns” Indigenous artifacts, it is crucial to create a system of ownership that empowers the Indigenous communities. Local Contexts has created the Traditional Knowledge (TK) license which renegotiates ideas of ownership and copyright that is flexible and more individualistic the needs of particular cultures.

Jules, B. (2015, November). Preserving Social Media Records of Activism. Presented at the Diversity in the Archives: Preserving Ephemeral Activist Culture, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Libraries.

Jules argues that social media has been crucial for documenting and disseminating social activism, especially for Black communities. After the Watts Rebellion’s 50th anniversary, Jules decided to research how much primary material about specific rebellions were available; the results, not surprisingly, were slim. For the digital #BlackLivesMatter collection that Ed Summers and Jules put together, they archived almost 45 million Tweets to document and preserve primary source documents about police encounters. The problem with recording these images, Tweets, videos, and other documenting materials, though, is surveillance culture may put advocates and people who show up to rebellions at risk.

Nowviskie, B. (2016, April 29). everwhere, every when. nowviskie.org. Presentation at Insuetude, Columbia University, New York City. Retrieved May 16, 2017.

Nowviskie begins this talk by asking the question “where and when do Black lives matter?” in information sciences; she looks at Afropolitanism (space) and Afrofuturism (time), focusing on Afrofuturism; it is “self-possesed” and centers around the past, present, and future of blackness and locating/telling stories of the future while never forgetting the past. She advocates the need for digital cultural heritage systems affordance – a White-dominant field – to decolonize archives and “design for agency” so that Black communities and cultures as well as other marginalized communities have control over their stories and archives, their “philosophical infrastructure.” Instead of merely designing for inclusion, design for progress and spaces/places where Black lives are everywhere and every when.

Summers, E. (2016, February 16). Introducing Documenting the Now — Documenting DocNow. MITH: Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities: News, Research

In Summers introduction to this collaborative project, he provides background about the urgency and need for this type of open source application, especially for the Black community. He outlines two main goals of the DocNow project: 1) Create an open source app “that will allow researchers and archivists to easily collect, analyze, and preserve Twitter messages and the Web resources they reference;” 2) “Cultivate a much needed conversation between scholars, archivists, journalists, and human rights activists around the effective and ethical use of social media content.”