Libraries, Archives & Databases 2011

School Bus, by Phillip Capper on Flickr: http://bit.ly/gv4hGE

…to the Library! We’re meeting with Wendy Scheir and Allen Jones at 4pm in room 908 at 55 West 13th Street.

All the videos I would have shared with you in class today if we had more time:

On Indigo Blue @ the Spoleto Festival & SFMOMA:

On Testimony, at the Venice Biennale:

On Corpus @ Mass MoCA:

And here’s a little something I wrote a while ago for a conference:

We might say that visual artist and MacArthur honoree Ann Hamilton feels a sort of “archival impulse”—although not the kind that has gripped some of her contemporaries, like Sam Durant and Tacita Dean. While these artists, according to Foster (2004), collect and combine détourned everyday objects into a “quasi-archival architecture [of]…platforms, stations, or kiosks,” Hamilton uses quotidian materials—from bread to blue jeans to pink Pearl erasers—to form inhabitable, multisensory archival landscapes. In her installations, which engage the histories of their sites, she creates these palimpsestic landscapes by layering sight, sound, smell, taste, and texture, then activating the scene with simple, repeated movements, or what Lunberry (2004) calls “accretions of gesture.” I argue that, through the material abundance of her work, and through its lack of familiarity to typical “archival architectures,” Hamilton’s work allows its inhabitants to create new, unfamiliar affective connections to history. It calls attention to the limitations of the official historical record and suggests means of refreshing the archive’s architectures and materials.

“I’m very interested in the hierarchies of our habits of perception,” Hamilton says, noting in particular “our” prioritization of “the discursive structure of words” over other “ways of knowing” (quoted in Coffey 2001). Her work frequently questions the authority of the verbal and textual record. Aleph, for instance, includes a video close-up of Hamilton’s mouth, full of marbles, rendering her mute. For myein, she recited Lincoln’s second inaugural address in phonetic code and covered the inside walls of the Venice Biennale’s American Pavilion with a Braille translation of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: The United States (1885-1915). Both pieces questioned the universality of language and called attention to the archive’s—and, in the latter case, American history’s—unheard voices. Meanwhile, indigo blue and tropos involved the “unmaking” of a book through erasure, or by burning away the text, line by line. Rather than an act of destruction, however, this unmaking represented a means of “clearing the field,” making room for another “material kind of telling” (quoted in Wallach 2008).

Hamilton seeks to evoke history’s “untold stories…through a material presence” (ibid.). In mattering, for instance, a person sitting in a perch draws up from the floor a long line of typewriter tape and “weaves” it around his hands. The gesture links mechanical production to handicraft, and, considered in light of the installation’s title, “mattering,” represents the transformation of materiality, and the human labor that produces it, into something that matters. Embodiment is entwined with epistemology (even her experiments with mouth-held pinhole cameras argue for an embodied record-making). Hamilton’s work addresses “the way the body through physical labor leaves a transparent presence in material and how labor is a way of knowing” (quoted in Wallach).

While we might not regard Hamilton’s installations as archives themselves, they do call into question the contents and architectures of the historical record. She proposes that a history rooted not only in extraordinary events, but also in the everyday—its artifacts, sensations, labor, simple gestures—requires an archive that is embodied, material, and living.

Our classmate Steve sent me an Economist “Flash Interview” with Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, who cites a University of Michigan study in which “they had a team of students find answers to a set of questions using materials in the campus library. Then another team had to answer the same set of questions using Google.” According to Hal, “It took them 7 minutes to answer the questions on Google and 22 minutes to answer them in the library. Think about all the time saved! Thirty years ago, getting answers was really expensive, so we asked very few questions. Now getting answers is cheap, so we ask billions of questions a day, like “what is Jennifer Aniston having for breakfast?” We would have never asked that 30 years ago.”

And the fact that we’re asking that question now — and valorizing the technology that can provide a quick answer — is a sign of progress? The study, “A Day Without a Search Engine,” is here.

Steve writes:

Its an interesting study, but what I find more interesting is a) how they conducted it and b) why Varian finds this to be so interesting/awesome.

We were talking about ideology in relation to archives and, while we can agree that the internet is not an archive exactly, I still think this illustrates a good point about how an ideology can shape the nature of an archive (or at least can set parameters as to what information is considered valuable, which in turn could form the basis of a given archive’s content).  Apparently, the study took “a random sample of 2515 queries from a major search engine”; this is a great method for studying many things, but not necessarily for studying the efficacy of googling vs. researching in the library.  I think that this (and Varian) assumes that a) search engines and libraries are used for the same thing and b) that the two contain the same information.  It also assumes that one would ask the same questions of the search engine and of the library (or archive).   The internet (or search engines) gives rise to not only new sets of information (such as celebrity breakfast habits- and yes, google quickly directed me to the fact that Jennifer Aniston eats egg-white omelets when she needs to lose a few quick pounds!) but also to new sets of queries. Varian acknowledges the new set of queries, but merely treats it as something to be quantified and spoken of in terms of efficiency and productivity, but we are only being productive in a very narrow sense- yes, trivia is ever-more accessible, but that is because search engines are designed to make it so, not because it has more actual value than obscure documents or bits of information.  This is a problem for the future of both libraries and archives, I think: as this worldview (that something’s value is proportional to how many people search for it or link to it) becomes more normalized, more obscure pieces of information will be inevitably cast aside; worse, less and less people will notice or care when information and documents are cast aside.

Neo Libre – Content Digitization from Neo Libre on Vimeo.

The two most popular recommendations for use of our open week on April 5 were (1) discussing digitization and (2) welcoming a guest speaker. I’ve combined the two by inviting both Wendy Scheir, Director of the Kellen Archives, and Allen Jones, Director of Digital Library Programs at The New School, to talk with us about the practical concerns of digitization in libraries and archives. They’d like to respond to your specific interests — so please propose discussion topics and questions by replying to this post.

Spotted by Rory in C-Town:

Now that’s one hell of a classification system!

March 24-26, 2011

The Fourth Annual Interdisciplinary Memory Conference
The New School for Social Research, New York City

There are lots of archive-related panels! See in particular:

Friday 2:00-3:45pm: Digital Memory—Room 510, 66 West 12th Street

●      Al-Andalus and how it lives on online
Omar Al-Ghazzi (Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania)

●      Crowdsourcing Memory: Archives 2.0 and Historical Presence
David Kim (Information Studies, UCLA)

●      Virtual feelings of kinship: Challenging the legitimacy of remembering in post-dictatorial Argentina
Cecilia Sosa (Drama Department, Queen Mary, University of London)

●      Memory in the Age of Digital Technology
Diana Taylor (Performance Studies, New York University)

Moderator: Karen Strassler (Anthropology, Queens College, CUNY)

Our own Alex K. will be attending this fantastic conference in Boston in early April, and she thought some of you might be interested, too. Graduate student fellowships are available until March 15!

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The capability of newspapers to provide community information is declining. At the same time, informal sources of local information are rapidly increasing.

Libraries and legacy media have always shared a common purpose — helping us acquire the information we need to be engaged, informed (and entertained) citizens. They used different tools — newspapers, broadcast stations and books. Now the tools are converging — web search, data taxonomies, database creation and analysis, social networks — as librarians and journalists together foster civic literacy and engagement.

Librarians want to expand public access to accurate information, including trustworthy local news. So do journalists. How do we expand libraries as community information centers beyond books — perhaps even beyond their four walls — facilitating and engaging with journalists? What can libraries and journalists do — together — to foster improved access to community information?

Thus, as the tools and mission converge, it’s time to ask: “What’s possible at the intersection of libraries and journalism that serves the information needs of communities and democracy?”

On Wednesday and Thursday, April 6 and 7, 2011, Journalism That Matters,  (the American Library Association,) the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, the Media Giraffe Project at UMass Amherst the New England News Forum and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute invite you to join in a work session for civic information transparency that builds from and beyond books.

Via a pre-event social network, an evening agenda-setting dialogue, a day of roundtable planning and closing action commitments, we’ll discover what’s possible at the intersection of public spaces, open documents, citizen reporting and journalistic purpose.  Among the questions we may ask:

• What might libraries do to facilitate community social news networks?
• Must free speech be absolute within a taxpayer-supported institution?
• How do we define the boundaries between engagement and partisanship?
• Are libraries poised to become public-access media centers as cable fades?
• Should a library operate a news collective, non-profit or citizen-journalism service?
• How can libraries help preserve a free digital information commons?