Documenting the Now
Theoretical Bricolage
Ed Summers / @edsu
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
bit.ly/docnow-bricolage
Goals
- Dataset
- Application
- Community
Dataset
… the cause of social justice has been a topic of discussion on
various archival fronts for at least 40 years. If the birth of the
modern Western archival profession occurred in 1898 with the
publication of the Dutch Manual, then the field has been tackling
various aspects of social justice issues for nearly half of its
modern history. With this trajectory, we believe that the
conversation will continue in years to come.
Punzalan & Caswell (2016)
Without focusing on the first week of the Ferguson network and
further unpacking the network by day, we would not have been able to
see the important influence of key crowdsourced elites and members
of American counterpublics. In particular, our data spotlight the
discursive labor of initiators and other influential everyday
citizens, most of whom were young and/or African- American, who
pushed the larger public sphere to address what happened to Michael
Brown and offered ideological interpretations of Brown’s death and
resulting events firmly situated in minority experiences with state
oppression.
Jackson & Foucault Welles (2015)
Application
What is important is that access to information about how this
part of the platform works creates the possibility for the
individual to make a choice. Choice creates the possibility
for the expression of informational power. These possibilities
are closed off when users do not have the basis of informational
power from which to enter these fields of action.
Proferes (2016)
Community
We cannot ethically continue to conceive of our primary users as
academic scholars; survivors of human rights abuse and victims’
families use records, community members use records. We need to build
policies, procedures, and services with these users in mind, but even
more so, we need to shift our affective orientations in service to
these users.
Caswell & Cifor (2016)
