What digital archives or exhibits (including digital humanities projects) have you found impressive, and why?

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Sean Ferguson's picture
June 5, 2022

This was shared by Kim Fortun: https://sites.google.com/asu.edu/kaach/principles?authuser=1 ; the clarity in the justification of this group and the procedures they follow are impressive. Transgression of the academic and activism is compelling.

https://mappingcville.com/ A mixture of oral history, archival work, and journalist sleuthing produced the first version of a racial profiling map of Charlottesville, VA. It has much that needs to be improved since it is a relatively new, but for a small scale barely funded project it has proved compelling. I like this work because it starts from testimonial justice and uses available written publications and archives to augment those stories.

https://onthebooks.lib.unc.edu/ Similary to mappingcville, a collaborative space to support a long term investigation of racist language in legal texts. Does not shy from the anti-racist possibilities of machine learning even as ML reinforces so much injustice.

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June 5, 2022

Disaster STS Network (disaster-sts-network.org) The Formosa Plastics Global Record Archive is impressive to me because of how it displays the information to users and its organization. I find this archive very easy to navigate and find information. I think the PECE essay format is used to its fullest potential here and I hope to potentially do something similar in the Santa Ana EiJ archive. I especially like how it is organized in two main sections, places and facilities. This is a good way to situate people in the data and locations.

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June 4, 2022

ACT UP Oral History Project - https://actuporalhistory.org/
Digitized AIDS Quilt - https://www.aidsmemorial.org/interactive-aids-quilt
West Philadelphia Collaborative History - https://collaborativehistory.gse.upenn.edu/
Informal tribal resource compendium - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lvbV1PljWxw8C9F__ebXSYpptr7liAaq

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Nadine Tanio's picture
June 4, 2022

Early on there was a visual thesaurus (now behind a paywall) that was part dictionary, part conceptual mapping tool. I thought it had such potential for the collaborative visual mapping of ideas and practices.

The Sugar plantations, Chemical Plants, COVID-19 tour on the Disaster-STS Network as an assemblage of people, stories, engagement and artfulness is such a rich and complex collaborative exhibition.  I found it stunning.

The Formosa Plastics Global Archive organized by Tim Schütz and Shan-Ya Su is also such an impressive project and so-well executed. Again, there is an artful quality inherent in this Archive, a quality I think is undervalued in academic and find so important in engaging with multiple publics.

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June 4, 2022

Tim's stuff...

Beyond PECE, I don’t really spend my time using and engaging with digital archives or exhibits. Occasionally some art museum sites. At this stage, I try to spend as little time in front of a screen as possible. And when I am in front of a screen, I want to make archives. If there was, like, a weeklong intensive somewhere in the world where I could attend and spend a week reviewing archives, I’d for sure go. But I don’t do it independently. I could also imagine, if there were a list of archives to review, and a schedule, and a community of people to review the archives with... I’d have a 60/40 chance of attending. 

 

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Mike Fortun's picture
June 2, 2022

Stumbled upon, as usual. I first got to the archive of items left at the wall. Letters like this one are so poignant, and made me imagine this younger brother walking down that pathway down into the wedge (and made me remember the initial controversies about the memorial and its designer Maya Lin, and just how wrong the criticisms were and the powerful memorial that actually memorializes that it became), leaving this letter on the ground under a long column of names but apparently not referenced to any of them, about how his brother was supposed to come home in a week, told the younger one to buy a case of beer for the fridge when he got home, but then volunteers for a rescue mission where he is killed. At the end of this sweet sweet letter thhe at made me think of MY older brother, who drew a high draft number and never had to consider going, is "PS I drank the case of beer." Letter was found and dated by a Park rangerm, I think, and then passed on to a volunteer (?) at the memorial fund to add really quite extensive metadata. The time it must have taken to read and summarize the content of the letter and enter it as metadata!  Then there's the Wall of Faces, which can be searched either by name or by hometown; here's the 21, 22, and 21 year-old boys from Cheswick PA that were killed and that my brother knew. Anyone can "Leave a Remembrance;" mostly these are family members or friends, but sometimes it appears to be just another vet who is just making sure this person is recognized: 

Dear PFC James Joseph Koprivnikar, sir

As an American, I would like to thank you for your service and for your sacrifice made on behalf of our wonderful country. The youth of today could gain much by learning of heroes such as yourself, men and women whose courage and heart can never be questioned.

May God allow you to read this, and may He allow me to someday shake your hand when I get to Heaven to personally thank you. May he also allow my father to find you and shake your hand now to say thank you; for America, and for those who love you.

With respect, and the best salute a civilian can muster for you, Sir

Curt Carter

And then there is the Honor Roll  of men who served in Vietnam but were not killed there: an endless gallery of snapshots, all metadata-ed up...

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