Nov. 1, 2019: Navigating the Digital Labyrinth: A Tutorial in Managing Your Personal Archive
You and your camera went to the archive over the summer, and now you have hundreds of document scans sitting on your hard drive. Now what? In this hands-on workshop, participants will create a way to systematically view, organize, and catalogue their digital files using software free to members of the NYU community. During the session, we will transform a sample directory of scanned images into linked tables that will be searchable and filterable with key criteria—a document’s provenance, author, or date of creation, for example. This workshop offers a potential strategy to overcome the paralysis associated with having so, so much digital material.
Eric Anderson, PhD student at NYU (History of Latin America & the Caribbean), has generously volunteered to share his skills in constructing digital databases of files with us in a lunchtime session.
The goal of this session is to walk away with the ability to manage your own files better. If you wish to participate in the tutorial, please bring a laptop to the session. Before you come, please download the sample data (forthcoming) and make sure you have Microsoft Excel 2016 or later downloaded on your computer.
Friday, November 1st from 12:30 to 2pm
Room 701 of the King Juan Carlos I Center, 53 Washington Square South
Picture ID is needed to enter the building
There will be lunch from La Palapa!
All are welcome.
Sponsored by the NYU Center for the Humanities
Nicole Nelson, February 22, 2019: An Evening of Interspecies Archives
Welcome to the Spring 2019 season of the Archives Workshop!
Please join us Friday, February 22nd, 6-8 pm, room 222 of 19 University Place. RSVP Here
Nicole Nelson is our guest. Check out her book, Model Behavior: Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders, if you have a chance. It is a fascinating study of an animal behavior genetics laboratory.
For the new year we have decided to pair invited guests with people working on projects that are still in the early stages of development. Archives Workshop is less a lecture and more of an experimental conversation aimed at talking through questions about archives, and we hope this format will add to this dynamic.
In this vein, Katherine McLeod will present after Professor Nelson about her archival work with scientific animal specimens from Guyana—the limitations these pose in understanding the circumstances of their collection, but also their potential to reveal aspects of who collected them, how, and why in ways not formally recorded by the scientists and museum curators who house them.
Nicole C. Nelson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Her research investigates how biomedical scientists think about complexity and uncertainty in their research, particularly in preclinical research with animal models. Her recent book, Model Behavior, is an ethnography of an animal behavior genetics laboratory where researchers studied the genetics of psychiatric disorders using mouse models. She is currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where she is working on a study of the reproducibility crisis in biomedicine.
Food and drinks will be provided!
Digital Platforms for Indigenous Resurgence
Please join us November 16th
for the 3rd meeting of the New Radical Archives Workshop!
Digital Platforms for Indigenous Resurgence
6-8 PM, 19 University Place, room 222
Our guests will be Jane Anderson and James Francis, developers of a range of digital platforms that support Native, First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous communities in the management of intellectual property and cultural heritage.
Here are some of their projects that we will discuss:
Local Contexts is an initiative to support Native, First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous communities in the management of their intellectual property and cultural heritage specifically within the digital environment. Local Contexts provides legal, extra-legal, and educational strategies for navigating copyright law and the public domain status of this valuable cultural heritage. By providing strategic resources and practical solutions, Local Contexts and partners are working towards a new paradigm of rights and responsibilities that recognizes the inherent sovereignty that Indigenous communities have over their cultural heritage.
Mukurtu (MOOK-oo-too) is a free, mobile, and open source platform built with indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage. It is a grassroots project aiming to empower communities to manage, share, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways. The creators of Mukurtu are committed to maintaining an open, community-driven approach to Mukurtu’s continued development. Their first priority is to help build a platform that fosters relationships of respect and trust.
Here is an example of Traditional Knowledge labels in the Library of Congress
More here: http://www.passamaquoddypeople.com/
Jane Anderson is an Associate Professor at NYU in Anthropology and Museum Studies. http://www.jane-anderson.info/
James Francis is the Penobscot Nation’s Tribal Historian and is studying the relationship between Maine Native Americans and the Landscape. Prior to working at the Penobscot Nation James worked for the Wabanaki Studies Commission helping implement the new Maine Native American Studies Law into Maine schools and has managed a team of teachers and cultural experts in developing curriculum.
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As usual, this is less a lecture and more of an experimental conversation over food and drinks.
Marisa Fuentes and Zeb Tortorici!
Thursday November 8th
6-8pm
53 Washington Square South, 2nd floor library, King Juan Carlos Center at NYU
Marisa Fuentes is the Presidential Term Chair in African American History and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and History at Rutgers University—New Brunswick. Her scholarship brings together cultural studies, critical historiography, and black feminist theory to examine gender, sexuality, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic World.
Professor Fuentes is the author of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), which illuminates the lives of enslaved women in eighteenth century Bridgetown, Barbados by interrogating the archive and its historical production to challenge the methods and categories by which historians have analyzed slavery in the Atlantic World, in addition to engaging with larger questions of violence, agency, and gender.
Zeb Tortorici received his Ph.D. in History and is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. His recent monograph, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain, was published by Duke University Press in 2018. He recently co-edited 2 special issues of Radical History Review on “Queering Archives,” and an issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on the topic of “Trans*historicities.”
Fall 2018 Line Up
We are excited to share the Fall 2018 line up with you. Exact locations are still be decided in some cases, we will keep you updated.
You can RSVP to each event on our calendar page.
**UPDATE** Our meeting with Ursula Johnson has been rescheduled for a date (TBA) in Spring 2019. We will keep you updated.
**Room Change** Please join us for our first meeting:
The location of our meeting on September 21st has been changed to 19 University Place, room 222 (just a few blocks north of the original location).
RSVP here!
The first meeting of the Archives Workshop: Nyssa Chow and Ada Ferrer
Please join us for our first meeting!
September 21, 2018, 6 PM
King Juan Carlos I Center (53 Washington Square Park South), Room 701
RSVP here.
Our guests will be Nyssa Chow and Ada Ferrer. Our goal is to try and have a fluid conversation about our archival practices—come with questions, thoughts, or anything else you feel like sharing. This is less a lecture and more a space to comfortably share ideas, an experimental discussion over food and drinks.
Nyssa Chow is a writer, new media storyteller, and educator. She is the current Writer in Residence at Fordham University, and a professor in the Oral History Masters program at Columbia University. She is the 2018 recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein for literary oral history, won for her book project, Still.Life. The project also won the Columbia University Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. She is a graduate of the Columbia University’s MFA program, and the Columbia University Oral History Masters Program. Check out some of Chow’s work at tellinghistories.com
Ada Ferrer is the Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean History at NYU. Ferrer is a specialist in the history of Cuba, the Caribbean, and Latin America, as well as on the comparative and transnational histories of slavery, freedom, and revolution. She is co-curator (with Édouard Duval Carrié) of Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom, a contemporary art exhibition based in part on Chapter 7 of Ferrer’s 2014 book, Freedom’s Mirror, as well as co-curator (with Linda Rodríguez) of the digital humanities website Digital Aponte.