Arte Público Press/Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage at the University of Houston invites you to a Digital Humanities & Social Justice lecture and workshop by

Purdom Lindblad
Assistant Director of Innovation and Learning
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)

Public lecture: “Archives in the Anthropocene”

Thursday, February 15
2:00pm-5:00pm
MD Anderson Library 266-C
University of Houston

No RSVP required.
*Light refreshments provided
*We will live-tweet the event using #usLdh and livestream the video on our Facebook page

Where does memory reside? Who, which communities, shape the contexts and content of memory? Why is it important, particularly in this current political and environmental moment? How can librarians, archivists, and digital practitioners practice explicitly anti-racist and anti-violent approaches to identifying, collecting, describing, and making accessible cultural records and cultural memory?

This talk focuses on exploratory work on anthropocenic archives with an emphasis on empathetic platforms, feminism, and ethnicity. Engaging current and speculative archival practices, this talk asks how archives can be empathetic platforms and sites of rebalancing/restructuring unjust infrastructures and colonization of cultural memory. Applying principles of Advocacy by Design (AbD), a framework for critical engagement centered on advocacy, to archival practices to re-evaluate transparency, openness, multiple narratives, and the roles and responsibilities of stewardship. This talk engages with archives and archival practices in a moment of intense environmental and political pressure to consider how advocacy-based design of digital objects and interfaces make explicit the roles, decisions, attentions of the creators to current and future users and to speculate on the relationship between digital collections, communities, and “the archive.”

Workshop: “Advocacy and the Digital Humanities: Archival Approaches to Advocacy by Design”

Friday, February 16
9:30am-11:30am
Arte Público Press
Building 19
UH Energy Research Park
Please RSVP to cvillarroel@uh.edu
Seats are limited
*Lunch will be provided

As scholars and practitioners, we create, analyze, trouble, and reference the archive, though are often signaling vastly different understandings of archives and archival practices. Grounding the workshop are questions of what do archival practices do to the materials we can use/collect/analyze as digital scholars and practitioners? How does power move through the archive? What power do researchers/users have and can extend from archives? What are our collective and individual responsibilities to issues of privacy, description, and access to the materials we collect, analyze, and publish?

The workshop opens with a conversation of the principles and practices of Advocacy by Design, which 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. Participants will identify core positions of their own research through the lens of Advocacy by Design.

Secondly, participants will gain a strong understanding of some archival practices which subsequently shape discovery, use, and analysis of materials. This portion will examine how archival practices can contribute to white supremacy and injustice with a strong focus on alternative approaches to archival practice that resist such injustice.

Finally, the workshop will return to principles and practices of Advocacy by Design, asking how do archival practices shape how participants materials are collected, described, and shared? How are these choices/practices represented in the research and research products?

Participants will gain a way of fronting the ‘why’ of their research as well as who and what is being advocated for; an understanding of archival practices as they shape access and use of materials; a method for implementing modified archival practices to materials within their own work and research products, and a framework to make explicit the processes used to gather, describe, and analyze materials.

About Lindblad:

Purdom Lindblad is the Assistant Director for Innovation and Learning at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). She has a MA in American Studies from Michigan State University and a MS in Information from the University of Michigan. Her research interests include the implicit and explicit effort that digital humanities can do for social and environmental justice.

About the Digital Humanities & Social Justice Speaker Series and Workshops:

The speaker series and workshops on Digital Humanities & Social Justice explores the ethical concerns involved in creating digital projects with minority archives and digital scholarship as a site of social justice and activism. The series includes leading scholars in digital humanities who are engaging and creating ethical, socially conscious methodologies. This series is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Arte Público Press/Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, the Digital Research Commons at MD Anderson Library, the Houston Arts Alliance and the Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies (WGSS) Program.

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