Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, explores the challenges and possibilities of preserving new media artifacts and works, contrasting the strategies that curators, archivists, institutions, and creators themselves will need to use for new media with the conventional wisdom currently practiced in preservation. Rinehart and Ippolito argue that […]
Posts from March 2015
All About That Bot
According to Wikipedia, bots are software applications that run automated tasks over the internet. Although bots can be written for all types of things on the web, many of the ones I encountered before this week’s readings were spam advertising. (If you were using a desktop in the third quarter of 2014, 41% of the […]
9/11 Digital Archive and the Bracero History Archive: A Review
The September 11 Digital Archive and the Bracero History Archive are two collaborative digital history archives projects that work to record and preserve the experiences of two important chapters in American history. These sites collect and archive oral histories, interviews, images and other documents related to the events of September 11, 2001 and the Bracero […]
Drowning in Context
The Rossetti Archive is terrifying. It is massive and as a recovering student of literature it makes me want to run screaming for the hills because it has everything. I don’t mean everything a scholar could want with rainbows and puppies; I mean everything the man ever produced, the entirety of the journals is poems […]
Defining Archives: A Context Standard
Practitioners and theorists are posing many fundamental questions about the archival profession. Where is it heading? What are its core principles? Is it in jeopardy of becoming obsolete or even ending all together? The questions of what the archives profession is and what it means to be a member of it relates to how we […]
On Context
In this post, I will not be addressing what is and isn’t an archive (Joe’s throwing down on that), but for full disclosure, I will be using the terms “archives” and “digital collections” interchangeably when referring to a grouping of materials. What I will do in this post is compare features of digital archives highlighted in […]
Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms
Although Johanna Drucker, in a review of Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms, calls the work “improbably readable,” this book is not an easy read. The reviews of this book, although less dense are still not easy to read. I have found myself continually getting stuck in the introduction trying to make my way through his explanation of […]
Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Glitch
This week I attempted to recreate the results of glitching files as demonstrated in this blog post by Trevor Owens. As we shall see, I ran into a few difficulties in reproducing this experiment exactly. But first what is a glitch? According to Wikipedia, “A computer glitch is the failure of a system, usually containing a […]
April is the Cruellest Month: Ending the Civil War in 1865
I propose to create blog and podcast to commemorate the ostensible end of the American Civil War in the month of April, 1865. This site will provide text, photos, and audio (maybe video?) to succinctly tell the story of the end of the war. (Above is a working title, below is a photo from Richmond […]
Digital Project Proposal: Building a Catalog with Omeka and The William O. Lee Jr. Collection
William O. Lee Jr. (1928-2004) was a prominent Frederick County citizen, active in local education, politics, civic associations and his church. After his death in 2004, Lee’s papers were given to the Historical Society of Frederick County (HSFC). The materials within the William O. Lee Jr. Collection are those gathered or created by Lee through […]