This presentation discusses the conceptualization and development of interactive cartographic platform In the Same Boats: Toward an Intellectual Cartography of the Afro-Atlantic. In the Same Boats is a work of multimodal scholarship designed to encourage the collaborative production of humanistic knowledge within scholarly communities. Comprising two interactive visualizations that trace the movements of seminal cultural actors from the Caribbean and wider Americas, Africa, and Europe within the twentieth century Afro-Atlantic world, the platform seeks to push back against the ways in which “Global South” intellectual production has been stubbornly balkanized in the academy, its limits and contours largely determined by imperial metropoles. The project charts the extent to which Caribbean, African, Latin American, European, and Afro-American intellectuals have had opportunities to be in both punctual and sustained conversation with one another: attending the same conferences, publishing in the same journals and presses, active in the same political groups, perhaps even elbow-to-elbow in the same Parisian cafés and on the same transatlantic crossings – literally and metaphorically in the same boats – as they circulate throughout the Americas, Africa, Europe, and beyond. Leveraging the affordances of digital technology to facilitate a literal retracing of hemispheric black studies, the project draws attention to multiple sites of potentially interconnected Afro-Atlantic theoretical and creative production. Easily accessible, visually impactful, and content-rich, the combination of these two visualizations proposes a generative resource for twenty-first century scholarship concerning the long-historical impact of Afro-Atlantic figures across a vast networked geo-cultural space.

See below for a Sutori recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Glover during her talk.

I’m posting a short series of a lightly edited posts from of my keynote for the University of Maryland Library Research and Innovative Practice Forum. Slides and talk are available through DRUM. This is Part 3 and the final post of the series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.  —Purdom

I return to Moya Bailey’s article, #transform(ing)DH Writing and Research, An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics, quote:

“If my work and aims are not in collaboration with the communities I wish to talk with, then I’m not doing the right work. Transparency is essential for creating the kind of research that is of most use to these communities—the communities that are so graciously letting me and other scholars into their lives.”

With community collaborations, can we create and describe collections that show, offer modes of manipulation, and resist a single explanation or narrative? It is incredibly important to make visible the decisions that are made, from selection to description to discovery. These decisions are interpretive and can reinscribe erasure and exclusion, particularly when materials are gathered from those whose own cultural documentational methods are not considered valid or valuable to the institution.

One example of documentation as an element of transparency and collaboration is Project BlackLight, an open source, front-end, discovery interface for Apache Solr. Blacklight is now a part of Project Hydra, a collaboration to help institutions around the world preserve, maintain and give access to their knowledge repositories and assets.

The quickstart guide gives clear indication of the dependencies, which is great but the more exciting documentation is the Wiki. It is written in an welcoming tone with clear expectations of skillsets. Yet, if someone is interested but not experienced with Ruby there are links to resources and guides. The intention is not to reduce documentation to meet all skill-levels, but to point people towards clear avenues to best use Blacklight.

Returning to Bardzell, who asks us to attend to the broadest context of stakeholders. Within the context of library platforms and systems, could we be transparent to our communities about who is building software and in what environment, what skills are expected to best utilize these platforms and systems, and where one could acquire such skills.

Sharing documentation and access to library platforms offer doorways for users to see the most recent version, empowers people to pull the code, change it, contribute back. Can we imagine library documentation that is welcoming, simple to read, that communicates how the system or platform works? Why it was decided upon? Who contributed to it? And how users may fork it, change it, contribute back to it? As well as indicate to users the labor involved in creating the system and subsequent documentation?

Particularly within the question of who contributes to the development of library software, but also extending to who makes up library committees, collaborates with students, performs outreach to campus and communities?-these questions are inherently questions of staffing, labor, and library policies.

It is time-consuming and difficult to be transparent in why and how our policies come about; it means taking down and reimagining our hiring and retention practices. As April Hathcock wrote in her 2015 article White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS:

“We need to make space for our diverse colleagues to thrive within the profession. In short, we need to dismantle whiteness from within LIS. We can best do that in two equally important ways: by modifying our diversity programs to attract truly diverse applicants and by mentoring early career librarians in both playing at and dismantling whiteness in LIS.”

She continues, “when we recruit for whiteness, we will get whiteness; but when we recruit for diversity, we will truly achieve diversity.” We can, with attention to our hiring and retention practices, make space for more black, brown, trans, and queer bodies to contribute to library software, library committees, and outreach efforts.

This making space is difficult—it takes time, money, effort to examine and dismantle existing practices and to imagine then build new, more equitable and just ones.

Making space, for me, means returning to the Carol Gilligan’s Ethic of Care. Gilligan’s argument that the human condition is one of connectedness, one of interdependence echo’s Donna Haraway’s call for us to recognize and honor the interconnections among people, plants, animals, and the planet in an effort to create, foster, and defend places of refuge.

For Gilligan, a feminist ethic of care is an ethic of resistance to the injustices inherent in patriarchy (meaning the association of care and caring with women rather than with humans, the feminizing of care work, as well as the rendering of care as less important, though linked with, justice). The Library is a space where this resistance and radical care work can be, and is currently, practiced.

Interconnectedness is a major tenant of the Ethic of Care described by Gilligan. Within the library, the processes of what collections we buy, which collaborations we lend time to, are interconnected to issues of funding, user stats, time allocations, and a myriad of other concerns. Much of the negotiations and decisions are obscured from other departments and our patrons. One way to challenge this is to create and share open workflows.

Open Workflows, more than open data and open access (both of which are important), give scope to protocols, tools, practices, and rationales. Practicing transparency can create deeper understanding of the very real constraints libraries are working within. For example, and I think the statute of limitations has run out now . . . hopefully . . . in one of my former positions, I had a patron upset because a very expensive resource was being canceled. I sat down with this patron, walked them through the committee’s decision process. I did all the things I was not supposed to do- I shared the general the budget, shared the cost of the canceled resource (It costs about x thousand dollars per year, we have about 3 people using it), and then we worked together to identify the specifics of what they needed in order to find that information in a different database.

Open Workflows clarify the constraints an institution is working within, can detail who is responsible for making decisions, what information goes into those decisions, helps us say no to projects that are beyond the scope of the work we do (hopefully with pointers to who else on campus or within the community does accommodate that work). Moreover, openness means others can reuse it, expand it, fix it. Openness further gives us a platform to talk about the costs and effort of service.

In libraries, care on par with justice, includes educating ourselves and our collaborators ( including students, community members, staff, and faculty) about privacy online. Library Freedom Project is a partnership among librarians, technologists, attorneys, and privacy advocates which aims to address the problems of surveillance by making real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries.Their focus is teaching librarians about surveillance threats, privacy rights and responsibilities, and digital tools to stop surveillance, with the hope to create a privacy-centric paradigm shift in libraries and the communities they serve.

The Library Freedom Project, responding to increased surveillance online, has a Privacy Toolkit for Librarians, makes clear its funders and funding model, as well as a wide-range of resources for learning and advocating for privacy online.

The mission of The Library Freedom Project is one way to enact of the Ethic of Care. Specifically, we teach others to use digital resources, teach digital literacies, but we do not make clear what data is collected or by whom or for what purposes when people use library services or through general internet use.

Could we include digital privacy workshops within the rich range of existing Teaching & Learning workshops or as a quick-start guide alongside managing data and resources within the excellent Research Commons services? How can we make transparent our own efforts to better understand governmental and corporate data gathering from our vendor services? What collaborators would we need to identify to build relationships across campus? How can we identify our own risks and communicate those out to our colleagues within the library and beyond?

One approach to such questions is to center the library as a base for grassroots activism–around digital privacy as well as endangered data. The Library is a vibrant center of intellectual life and is situated at a crossroads of campus. Positioned in this way, grassroots efforts, like those of Endangered Data Week, can activate the broad networks of collaborators spread across campus.

In the case of UMD’s Endangered Data Week, representatives from the Library, iSchool, and MITH organized an interdisciplinary panel on the complex topic of endangered data, a hands-on workshop for personal data archiving best practices, as well as hosted a webinar. These events were held in conjunction with international Endangered Data Week which is dedicated to highlighting threats to data security and preservation.

The collaboration was one of distributed labor, various members of the organizing team taking a lead on a portion of the weeks events. It relied on email and shared google docs to keep communication flowing. And importantly, this kind of collaboration can serve as a model for other grassroot efforts of interest to the Library and the Library’s communities.

A final example of Libraries enacting the Ethic of Care is UVa’s Making Noise Series hosting Overmorrow by Rachel Devorah Wood Rome, which is a sonification of gun violence in the United States. Making Noise hosted both a performance of the sonification and a discussion afterwards. The library became a space to talk about gun violence in the United States, specifically police violence against black bodies, as well as a space to reflect upon whiteness, the pitfalls of empathy in sonifying violence predominantly against black people, the role and responsibilities of white researchers engaged in anti-racist work, specifically when that anti-racist work is about violence and death. These are not easy conversations. Rachel Trapp has written about the evolution of Overmorrow and the work still to be done in order not to reinscribe violence with her work.

Libraries can be a space to elevate conversations of our interconnectedness. Taking the lead from The Crunk Feminist Collective, the library can create space of support and camaraderie by building community through fellowships, debates, challenges, and support of each other as struggle together.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the editors of the journal Salvage, wrote “The infrastructures against social misery have yet to be built.” Applying Gilligan’s ethic of care, engaging with the principles and elements of Advocacy by Design, Libraries, specifically, our library, can begin the speculative work of sketching out and practicing what those infrastructures against social misery look like. Much of this work is not speculative; As Bess Sadler and Chris Bourg assert:

The means of production for the archives of humanity are up for grabs, and within our reach is the possibility of new production methods that resist the recreation of existing patterns of exclusion and marginalization.

We can put concerns about people at the center of everything we do, inviting our patrons to be collaborators
We can work to build a vocabulary of advocacy,
We can strive to be transparent in our decision making and policies, about what service means
We can transform our hiring and retention practices
We can include codes of conduct for our conferences, communication channels, and projects.
We can use library space to foster grassroots organizing around issues like privacy and endangered data
We can use library space to talk about our anti-racist and anti-violence commitments, collaborations, and research

These are foundations to do the speculative work together, in a critically engaged way, and with an approach that is conscious of the effects of our decisions.

I’m posting a short series of a lightly edited posts from of my keynote for the University of Maryland Library Research and Innovative Practice Forum. Slides and talk are available through DRUM. This is Part 2 of the series. Read Part 1.  —Purdom

The interface for Take Back the Archive which aims for transparency and temporality:

The timeline is one way of showing stories persist over time. We are working to improve the timeline, but for now, the lines above the dots (which are sized according to how many materials are in the collection) indicate how these stories reappear over time. We want to visualize how these stories drop out of conversations or how often they are referenced.

The Take Back the Archive project explores experimental interfaces including Rich Prospect Browsing as outlined in Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage. We used Rich Prospect Browsing as an element of transparency and poly-vocalism to show the extent of the collected materials for the archive, as well as a quick way of identifying the type of content. In this case, materials were designated as advocacy materials, policy reports, and journalistic accounts. Rich Prospect Browsing offers options for representing the full scope of materials with the goal of empowering users to understand the varied paths through the archival materials, that there is not one story, but many represented within. A major challenge to transparency is the ability to visualize absence–we know that many people do not report, particularly men and people from the LGBT community, so their stories do not appear in the archive. Can we better represent absence of materials to signal that this archive is incomplete or not fully representational?

Showing every item within the collection additionally resists embedding assumptions of rank and relevance in search algorithms, namely that the most commonly asserted statements must be true. Sadler and Bourg point out that ‘search algorithms represent a single majority-rules point of view, masquerading as neutrality; which does not render visible how the system has been designed for an “ideal user.” Further, the documentation and research determining the characteristics of that ideal user are not shared with others.

I lean on Safiya Noble’s work on Biased Data which explores the ways search algorithms reflect racism. She writes ”when we talk about these kinds of racist experiences and pointers that happen in technical systems, we also hear in the public discourse these things talked about, again, as anomalies, as glitches, rather than helping us understand and unveil the ways that programmers are people who write, and code is a language. And all languages are value-laden, including binary code languages.”

Nobel writes ”when we talk about these kinds of racist experiences and pointers that happen in technical systems, we also hear in the public discourse these things talked about, again, as anomalies, as glitches, rather than helping us understand and unveil the ways that programmers are people who write, and code is a language. And all languages are value-laden, including binary code languages.”

For the De/Post/Colonial Digital Humanities course at HILT 2015, Roopika Risam and Micha Cardenas collaborated with participants to develop a resource for designing digital humanities research with demonstrated commitments to social justice. 11 participants shared their work publicly with an explicit invitation for others to contribute prompts and resources around access, material conditions, methods, ontologies and epistemologies that shape digital humanities. In their words, “The goal here is to make visible the critical and theoretical processes that subtend digital humanities practices.”

The site contains prompts, such as “How accessible is the project for people with disabilities?” “How accessible is the project in low-bandwidth environments?” “Which archives does the project use?” and “Whose voices are absent from these archives?” alongside links to practitioners and resources engaged with the issues around a particular prompt.

Users are able to comment at sentence, paragraph, or section level, extending a conversation about practice beyond the local and temporally located working group. The goal here is not to stagnate or stall a project, rather to slow down and reflect upon the ethical choices needed in the creation of digital work. The goal is to break these choices down to manageable, addressable parts. As Amy Wickner observed, Ethical tensions are addressable. While ethical considerations need to be at the center of our work, they need not prohibit this work from progressing.

African Diaspora PhD, led by Jessica Marie Johnson, Kidada Williams, and Ana-Lucia Araujo—uses tagging and clear licensing information as well as multiple entry points into content, as examples of elements of the principle of transparency. The team page does a great job of showcasing who is contributing to the various pieces of the project, highlighting shared credit as an element of collaboration.

Collaboration here, as in the next example, Documenting the Now, can be very useful when thinking about the library. What does collaboration look like and mean within the library? Particularly for liaison librarians, but also for all throughout the library, we can include a Collaborator’s Bill of Rights or other documents to make visible our expectations, skills, and constraints when we collaborate. Making shared credit something actionable for our work.

Documenting the Now does a fantastic job at communicating technical infrastructure and project decisions through a variety of platforms, from newsletters to a Slack Channel to GitHub, all elements of transparency.

Further, Documenting the Now builds tools alongside the community of activists, scholars, researchers, and interested public so users are able to manage their own data and representation. Christina Harlow points to DocNow as a model for library and information professionals in opening our work of selecting, curating, and managing data and tools to the very users who are best positioned to shape and improve these practices.

Collecting in collaboration with communities is slower, more complicated, yet this practice can support our reflection on biases inherent within traditional collecting policies, particularly who decides what is valuable, worth of collecting and preserving and therefore status, funding, and place within the archive. It also means we must address what collaboration looks like and mean within the library, particularly attention to what power structures are inherent and tacit within collaborations? Ed Summers, co-PI of Doc Now, indicates that collaboration can be a source of tension-but this tension is vital because the project has a responsibility to work with communities to insure people are authentically represented, or not, within the archive.

How can interactive media supplement and support justice-related social movements? Alexandrina Agloro, media artist and assistant professor, will discuss the landscape of design and digital humanities projects geared toward social change, and share some of her current projects. Each of these projects incorporate pieces of reimagining archives, culturally relevant education, game development, and tools for reproductive justice. These projects were developed through a participatory design methodology and model how we think about organizing and implementing activism. The second part of this talk will turn to community-engaged game development and discuss two games, The Resisters, an alternate reality game about social movement history, and Vukuzenzele, a videogame about reblocking informal settlements in South Africa. These games are examples of the opportunities and challenges in applied game design and how game mechanics can be utilized as instruments for engagement and action.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Agloro during her talk.

Walter Forsberg, Media Archivist for the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian, will present an overview of the new museum’s audiovisual digitization programs and activities, in place since 2014. Forsberg will discuss how NMAAHC established digital file-management workflows, target specifications, equipment sourcing, and access platforms, alongside screenings of newly-digitized collections. He’ll showcase highlights from the museum’s “Great Migration Home Movie Digitization” public project, and announce details regarding the institution’s new Robert F. Smith Fund—a partnership program aimed at digitizing and sharing collections of African American cultural material held by other institutions.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue (now migrated to Sutori), including live tweets and select resources referenced by Forsberg during his talk.

Though publics are often conceived of as bounded by platform, users frequently deploy platforms in conjunction to create trans-platform digitally networked publics. The multi-media and trans-platform nature of such publics provide users with a range of affordances that allow them to oscillate the public between functioning as an enclave or as a counter-public. This talk discusses a network of Black American content creators and social media users to explore how such oscillation, between enclave and counter-public, occurs as participants move between platforms in the network and exploit, or work around, the affordances each offers.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Florini during her talk.

Library and information science (LIS) has a dual history; as a profession that is over 80% white and female, the LIS workforce has been plagued with segregation and a lack of representation. However, LIS also has many amazing stories, stories of people of color changing the profession and the lives of their patrons. It is imperative that these stories be unearthed, to celebrate our success stories, but to also learn from our mistakes.

This talk will discuss examples of segregation in LIS, specifically highlighting The Carnegie Scholars who were a group of 30 graduate students of who attended the University of Illinois after the Civil Rights Movement and the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Discussion will then turn to the difficulties of conducting this type of research and the challenges that come with trying to unearth both good and bad episodes of LIS history.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Cooke during her talk.

I’m posting a short series of a lightly edited posts from of my keynote for the University of Maryland Library Research and Innovative Practice Forum. Slides and talk are available through DRUM. Below is Part 1, with more posts to follow. —Purdom

I have been sitting with a sentence written by the editors of the journal Salvage, “The infrastructures against social misery have yet to be built.”

In 2014, the disappearance and murder of University of Virginia (UVA) undergraduate Hannah Graham, the Rolling Stone ‘After a Rape’ article, and the assault of UVA African American student leader, Martese Johnson, by two Alcoholic Beverage Control agents led to the development of Advocacy by Design. The cries of ‘how could this happen here?’ and ‘we had no idea!’ were discordant with the long history of sexual and racial violence at UVa.

Together with Professor Lisa Goff, the Scholars’ Lab team organized a digital archive to document this history at the university. Jeremy Boggs and I felt the archive must be feminist at the core, that feminist principles must be present at each stage-from collecting materials, to describing and organizing metadata, to the interface, to the ways in which the archive was shared. While we continued to work on Take Back the Archive, we felt this feminist mode of working could be extend to other projects.

Advocacy by Design articulates a shared understanding and practice that fronts questions of how people are represented in, or are subjects of, academic work; questions of who reads and uses our work as well as those who collaborate and contribute to our work. We articulate this advocacy through particular stances on a number of interrelated concepts, we call principles. Some principles are borrowed from Shaowen Bardzell’s Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design, while others grew out of our experiences with Take Back the Archive.

These principles include within them components and elements, such metadata, project management, and licenses, to better apply principles throughout a research inquiry. Advocacy is active–an attention-based practice of asking what are we doing to foster diverse voices? What do these practices look like face-to-face? What do they look like in the things we design, build, share?

Advocacy by Design begins with defining, seeking ‘the why’ and using that why as a guide through the research area. Defining the why enables us to identify which hows are critical. In the beginning stages of a research project or formation of a library committee, task force, or service, the hows should be platform agnostic. For example, centering the why opens up not just what the goals of a particular service or committee will be, but why those goals are important? In turn, the why drives ‘how’ that service or committee will work, how it will be legible to patrons or library colleagues.

As Frank Chimero points out, it is easier to ask “How do I paint this tree?” (or in our case “how do we organize a new committee?”) than to articulate why this tree or committee needs to be.  Defining the why clarifies the objectives of our work, something we can return to when the tasks pile up. For Advocacy by Design, the ‘why’ frames which principles should be fronted and how those principles can be enacted.

I lean on Bess Sadler and Chris Bourg’s Feminism and the Future of Library Discovery:

“Research libraries in particular have always reflected the inequalities, biases, ethnocentrism, and power imbalances that exist throughout the academic enterprise through collection policies and hiring practices that reflect the biases of those in power at a given institution.”

My ‘why’ is grounded in identifying and revealing practices that reinforce patterns of exclusion and inequality, the “how” flows from this beginning.

Advocacy by Design is not proscriptive, not a checklist, rather a way of practicing that invites return and reflection upon the why and how along with attention to the questions of who is represented in-and are subjects of-archives and academic work; questions of who reads and uses our work as well as those who collaborate and contribute to our work.

Principles for Advocacy by Design include transparency, openness, stewardship, temporality, an ethic of care, accessibility and usability, poly-vocalism, sustainability, interoperability, and collaboration. Today I would like to focus on Transparency, Poly-vocalism, and Collaboration ending with some reflection on the Ethic of Care. As you will see, the principles are interconnected and elements move across them. It is not meant to draw strict boundaries, rather to develop a vocabulary to frame our discussion. Elements are ways to make visible the principles of Advocacy by Design within our workflows, interactions, and research products. What follows in future posts are example projects to tease out how different elements could work to enact specific principles.

Digitization and online access are often presented as an important tool for making history, particularly those whose histories are rarely told, accessible to a broader audience. However, what happens to born-digital materials which can technically be accessed—but whose content and format may not be accessible in the contemporary media environment? In this presentation, I’ll talk more about my process working with materials from the Usenet Historical Collection to build the Transgender Usenet Archive and conduct my own research. I’ll discuss the technical and ethical challenges I faced in building the archive, as well as how these challenges informed my own research into early use of the term “cisgender” in transgender discourse.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Dame during his talk.

A heartrending recent development of digital practice is the dissemination on social networks of videos of state violence against Black men and women, such as the Facebook video of Philando Castile’s passing, or the YouTube video depicting the arrest and beating of Sandra Bland. In response, many Black folk have begun describing the effects these videos and shares have upon them, a phenomenon that can be understood as racial battle fatigue.

This presentation, in the mode of critical digital humanities, addresses how social and digital media mediates and manifests the ‘peculiar social environment’ of White racial ideology. One egregious example can be found in Lisa Nakamura’s 2013 essay describing how White racial ideology configures internet beliefs and discourses to portray racist digital practice as a “glitch.”

White racial ideology (“whiteness”) in online spaces is not always explicit, however. It takes many paths toward coercion and hegemony; I speculate here upon algorithmically-driven social media “feeds,” rather than individuals, enacting racist digital practice. This practice, which I argue for here as “weak tie racism,” becomes apparent in its engendering of the Black digital practice of reflexivity. This reflexivity, presented as cultural digital practice, is often expressed as spiritual, emotional, and physical engagement with online racism. Taken together, weak tie racism and Black online reflexivity can be understood as a dialectic of cultural digital practices that should be considered a norm, rather than a glitch.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Brock during his talk.