Documenting Born Digital Creative and Scholarly Works for Access and Preservation [Day 2 a.m.]

Digital Humanities Summer Institute Workshop #2
Documenting Born Digital Creative and Scholarly Works for Access and Preservation
Day 2 a.m.

1. What can you walk away with in a week?
2. What resources do you have to complete your vision (funding, skills, people, knowledge)?
3. Where can you go for further help?
4. What needs to be done for your project to count towards your academic output (RTP)? How do you document what you've done so it counts

Barnett's Memory Machines. 

Medieval Popular Culture - first time someone collected what the simple folk do, local catechisms, death records, reviving what was happening at ground level in continental Europe. Collecting current ephemera will be valuable to someone. 

Virtuality and the Art of Exhibition by  Dziekan - online and physical exhibitions. Looks at teh notion of liveness. All digital objects are digital, but not all digital are virtual. Liveness/Virtuality has 3 characteristics: participatory, interactive, experiential (PIE). Virtual objects are live objects. Not all digital objects are (see: email). Works like e-lit require you to participate. VR environments much more experiential. How do you put those live objects together, how do we curate them when each has own features, own sense of liveness? We've developed rules for curating ourselves in an environment like the classroom, just now getting there for virtual objects. How do we keep their liveness qualities in effect and obvious?

Rumsey's book When we are no more is worth reading - collective cultural memory necessary for us to continue as a species. Dictators go into a culture and wipe out libraries, female goddesses marry off to new conqueror gods, have taken control of culture. Argument is larger than one culture moving forward--without Chicano culture in TX, TX is not TX. The capacity of our memory systems is falling dramatically behind our ability to generate information. We don't have the capacity to hold onto all of this. Data is not knowledge. Connects memory to imaginative capacities - our vision is only as broad as ability to think through it. Connected to emotional health. How do we decide what to keep and what to lose - there's no real model to follow but to collect. 

Today: Varela and Thompson's The Embodied Mind - p. 59 to be human, indeed to be living, is to be in a context. Selflessness and ego-less-ness concepts. Variable media. Rogue Archives. memory has gone rogue - memory institutions where archive is an organ of the institutionalized state. Cultural dominant today is the internet which gives rise to untrained archivists ("rogue memory workers"). Forces change. She's talking about a broader definition of archive than before (deprofessionalization of archives)--not just that they're going to do the work degreed folks do because we don't need the degree, it's that the scale of material is so great, our existing models for intake doesn't suit the flood of information. Constant 24/7 availability and zero barriers to entry for all who can connect on the net, no requirement for payment, content that would generally never be contained in official archives is kept. Rogue archives are repertoire with features more permeable, flexible, malleable than traditional archives. Print culture privileges traditional archive.

Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute - submit a proposal for a project with a team of people.