Month: February 2023

What are digital archives? Advantages and disadvantages? How they can change with the times, both adding new collections and with new technology? How will digital archives be preserved? These are the questions that this week’s readings endeavor to answer.

First, we must understand what a digital archive is and isn’t. In Jennifer Guiliano’s A Primer for Teaching Digital History, she wrote in Chapter 8: Archives, Exhibits, and Collections that historians use “the word ‘archives’ to mean any collection of documents,” which in the author’s opinion is misleading since not every digital space that houses sources can be held to or meet the standards of an archive (133). Instead, Guiliano uses the terms “digital historical representation,” “digital collections,” or “digital exhibits” because the terms respect the work of archival professionals while “still achieving our goal of creating historical scholarship that leverages digital collections and databases” (134). In “Critical Digital Archives: A Review from Archival Studies,” Itza A. Carbajal and Michelle Caswell, who are both archival practitioners, define digital archives as “(1) born-digital records (such as emails, Word documents, and tweets) that have been selectively collected by archival institutions or organizations and preserved and (2) analogue records (such as those created in paper, analogue film, and other nondigital formats) that have been selectively” digitized, collected, and preserved (1104). Furthermore, the authors believed that it is not a digital archive “unless there is a plan for preserving them across space and time, maintaining the context of their creation through metadata, and ensuring continual access to present and future users” (1105). As the world and its sources become increasingly more digital, historians, archivists, and other professionals are still grappling with how to define “the digital archive.”

In creating a digital archive, many aspects should be considered, such as its organization and infrastructure. Jefferson Bailey’s article “Disrespect des Fonds: Rethinking Arrangement and Description in Born-Digital Archives” traces the history of archives from the French Revolution to the present-day. Bailey focuses on the term respect des fonds, which is the “the principle of grouping records by the administration, organization, individual, or creating body in which they originated,” since it emerged in the creation of new archives in France after its revolution. Bailey examines the term while also detailing its uses and effects on digital archives. Bailey found through examining several case studies that in rethinking respect des fonds, practitioners “gain a better awareness of the extent to which the material affordances of paper records have had an undue influence on how we conceptualize and practice grouping and describing collections.” For instance, arrangement of objects in a digital archive is “no longer a process of imposing intellectualized hierarchies or physical relocation; instead, it becomes largely automated, algorithmic, and batch processed.” Bailey’s article shows that archivists cannot just transfer their practices of preserving, labelling, and cataloguing objects from the physical archive to the digital one.

Similar to Bailey’s article, Jerome McGann’s “The Rationale of the HyperText” also emphasizes how to arrange and catalog digital archives to ensure they operate correctly. McGann shows the importance of the HyperText by stating is allows “to navigate through large masses of documents and to connect these documents, or parts of the documents, in complex ways.” This statement means that each document can be connected to another document. From a researcher’s perspective this is highly helpful as one can find and read sources faster than if the HyperText were not present. Both Bailey and McGann’s articles shed light on the technological organization of the digital archive in a way to ensure its effectiveness.

Another aspect that one must consider in the digital archive is what will be placed in it. Archives – both physical and digital – have been criticized over time for prioritizing collections primarily from straight, white, wealthy men. Archivists, activists, historians, and others have called for creating a more inclusive archive. For instance, “Archival Challenges and Digital Solutions in Aboriginal Australia” by Kimberly Christen highlights the efforts of Indigenous communities with scholars, technical consultants, archives, and others to create solutions for making their cultural sources available to their community as many of them lack reliable access to the internet (21). Specifically, Christen details the efforts from the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory Australia. The project’s purpose was to create a “digital archive to house returned digital materials as well as newly produced digital content” (22). Christen concludes that “this type of virtual repatriation is beneficial for museums and archives” and local Indigenous communities as it not only adds their stories to the archives, but allows the community to more easily access their history (25). Additionally, in “Expanding #ArchivesForBlackLives to Traditional Archival Repositories” by Jarrett M. Drake, it describes how archives should highlight African American voices already in the archives before they can properly document the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement. Drake states that the archives must accomplish these two tasks before properly documenting BLM: “their complicity in upholding patriarchy, white supremacy, and other structural inequalities” and “must build trust with the people, communities, and organizations around whose lives the movement is centered, a trust they should pursue not under the guise of collection development but under the practice of allyship.” Drake states that archives should examine their locations & their accessibility/inaccessibility, business hours, and the finding aids to ensure that they are highlighting the materials already in the archives pertaining to African Americans and their history. Similar to Christen’s article, Drake also highlights the importance of working with the community to add and highlight stories that have been obscured and missing in the archives and to make the archives more accessible to that community, such as hosting events and creating a welcoming space for all. Both of these articles not only highlight the importance of adding more sources and stories to the archives, but working with communities in regards to both physical and digital archives.

Now that the digital archive has been created, how does one preserve it? Professor Trevor Owens’ book, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, and Carbajal and Caswell’s article discuss this idea. Owens wrote the book as a “basic introduction to the issues and practices of digital preservation” and provide a basic framework for digital preservation (3). The book describes the author’s 16 axioms on what digital preservation is and is not (4-9). Owens structured the book as a conversation between the author and reader in the hopes that the book “will be of use to activists who want to start practices to ensure long-term access to their records, or scholars, who want to make sure that their work has a life beyond them” (11). In addition to the 16 axioms, the book defines what digital objects are, challenges and advantages to digital preservation, and managing and arranging digital archives. In his conclusion, Owens outlines what he believes are the challenges to digital preservation in the future, such as fast-evolving technology, how certain industries will drive the newest technological inventions, and climate change (187-200). Carbajal and Caswell discuss many of the same challenges in their article, but they also highlight copyright issues (1113), adapting in providing new collections to engage with existing and new audiences (1114), and historical debt, which is the labor of re-doing another person’s work in the archives, such as new cataloging and new finding aid (1113).

All of these readings show us what a digital archive is (or isn’t), how they should be written in code, what objects and collections they should have, and how to preserve these digital archives for future generations. In an increasingly digital world, these are valuable tools and skills to know as historians and scholars.

-Meredith Jackson

The first reading was published in 2004 and serves as an introduction to the potential oral history that will soon become. As it is from 2004, it is dated but much of the predictions of what oral history would be were accurate. Oral histories, like everything else, became widely available and accessible as a result of the information and technology boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. The author, Michael Frisch, writes to share all the ways recorded histories can be reinterpreted and constantly relevant using digital search and cataloging tools. He briefly talks about the difficulty archivists face in how to catalog and indexing oral histories.

He argues that the oral history field was previously dominated by documentaries as the primary mode of utilizing oral history, but with technology, that authority will be quickly democratized. His prediction of rapidly developing technology moving from tape to CDs to begin fully digital was completely accurate. He mentions the start of digitization of oral histories began as archival projects uploaded to websites such as Holocaust survivor histories and other university-led efforts to broadly share stories. He argues that researchers did not have the tools to quickly evaluate oral histories as audio recordings and preferred text transcripts that can quickly be looked through. Again, he predicted the emergence of digital tools such as time stamps to quickly reference moments in audio recordings. Although dated, this is a very good Oral History 101 for the 21^st century that thoroughly predicts the potential impact digital tools will have on returning the value of audio and video recordings.  

The second reading is very straightforward “How To” guide for conducting oral histories. The author, Doug Boyd, takes the reader through every step of preparing, conducting, and preserving oral histories. He goes into preparation for the “point” of the interview. What do you want to get out of it? What is your project? Questions like these will narrow your outlook and questions when conducting the interview. He also goes into the importance of audio and visual recording equipment, the compatibility of each with the other, and the budget limitations for the best available equipment. Each section starts with a different header or questions prompting the next step in conducting oral histories. He also touches on the importance of digital storage and working with an archive to preserve the file for future use and comments that the importance can often be underestimated. Finally, he discusses using caution during and after the interview as you are handling sensitive and personal information. Ethical questions must be asked on how it will be used and if the subject is comfortable with it.

The third reading is highly detailed descriptions and guidance on how to choose your camera, how to save your files, and what all of those letters at the end of file names mean (yes, they actually mean something). If you are not familiar with file names and sizes, this reading will be very difficult to understand and should be used as a reference for future problems with files. The reading goes into the details of how best to save files and discusses the different levels of quality of the file when using the camera, types of files, and method of storage. I will not pretend to thoroughly understand the nuance of files and all that it encompasses and hope that I will not need to know it in the future. However, as we live in a digital age and will most likely encounter issues caused by not heeding the advice in this reading, its importance cannot be understated.

The fourth reading starts by contrasting MP3 files with WAV files, noting that MP3 dominates cyberspace as the optimum file for audio because it is more compacted. It also details the benefits of compression as it rids the file of unneeded audio details to optimize the recording and saves space. The reading then goes into the history of saved audio and the progress its made since the 20^th century. It examines the development of audio files from a traditional military focus to a corporate capitalistic view. The reading defends MP3 as the dominant file for audio files and goes on to predict that although it has been continually challenged by competitors, it has stood the test of time and, at the time the reading was published, still remains the go-to audio file. Whether that remains true to this day in the midst of streaming services and sites like YouTube, we will see.

HiPSTAS and Grant Proposal

The fifth reading is of the High-Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS) website and their NEH grant proposal in 2013-2014. The site’s goal is to make audio recordings that predate the digital age readily available and relevant to ongoing and future research. Audio files are becoming decreasingly utilized as scholarship shifts towards the seemingly endless modern audio and visual files. With their decrease in popularity, the chances of preserving dated audio files also decreases leading to the HiPSTAS mission. The site offers tools and software to assist researchers in accessing, preserving, and contributing to audio file research. The grant proposal is to conduct two rounds of academic training and recommendations on tool development in support of digital scholarly inquiry in sound. The proposal is very thorough and outlines a lot of the same information found on the sites’ “About Us” page. Their effort is to promote the use of sound collections by current and future scholars including graduate students, librarians, and other professionals who might be interested in learning more about the subject.

The amount of details set out in the proposal is also interesting to observe for anyone considering writing a grant proposal. It sets clear objectives, methodologies, and audiences in a comprehensive fashion that ultimately was successful. The project set out to preserve sound recordings and was successful enough to build more tools such as Adaptive Recognition with Layered Optimization (ARLO).

The next reading focuses on the subject of ethnography, particularly the emergence of digital ethnography. Hsu is an ethnographer that started her journey by observing and recording cultures by examining them in person, however, with the emergence of technology, ethnographers’ subjects are now easily accessible through social media. Social media allows ethnographers to broaden their research to include virtually everyone in the world. With this new technology comes a shift in the academic field which allows it to grow into a digital branch. Like other readings, this one has been quickly dated as it was published in 2014. Academic fields grew at a slower pace than technology so Hsu recognizes this by arguing the viability of digitalization as a tool to support methodology and theory. At the time of her writing, the field was still assessing how best to use this new digital tool so Hsu provides her opinion on how it can best be used.

Hsu focuses on computers as tools for scalability and Intermodality (or multimodality). Scalability is the ability of computers to identify and calculate trends at a scale never before possible. It can be used as a filter and tool “to rethink how we sample culture”. Intermodality is the convergence of different contexts and data to discover new patterns and relationships. This previously would have been extremely difficult to accomplish without the help of computers. Digital maps are an example of how you can track similar trends or relationships in things like music and location. The combination of scalability and intermodailty is what she terms, augmented empiricism, the closest thing to empirical precision ethnographers can discover to make sense of huge amounts of data that can then lead to the most impactful questions.