Archive of Refuge
Very minimal meta-data, but extensive oral histories:
https://archivderflucht.hkw.de/en/
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.
This collection of differently themed oral histories -- in the South Asian American Digital Archive that Gina pointed us to -- gives good ideas for how oral histories could be collected and presented in communities where we are working on environmental injustice -- community members and research interns could propose themes then lead collaborative development of a thematic collection.
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.
Aside from stuff I wrote in my collaboration biography, I came across the following archives this week while in-preparation for another event, the EcoGov Lab-GREEN meeting on June 4, 2022.
Lauren Infantino's presentation on environmental justice solutions pathway made me think about what types of qualitative research have been useful for impact-based EJ pathways. During EiJ-A this Winter (2022), our class annotated Engaged scholarship which included a few examples of how engaged qualitative research using oral history impacted environmental justice, such as Suzanne Marshall's work to fight Sweet Valley, Alabama; and a GIS-based mapping project by the Winneman Wintu tribe in California. Searching about the earlier led to this article where Marshall's work is mentioned in a footnote. Searching about the Winneman tribe led to this page: http://www.datacenter.org/winnemem-wintu-tribe-begins-sacred-mapping-storytelling/
I skimmed through the DataCenter, a forty-year old but now-defunct independent research organization for social justice organizing and grassroots movement that was based in Oakland, California. Their archival contents seem to be distributed all over the place now:
"DataCenter sent some material to other locations as well. Rini Templeton, an incredible graphic artist whose drawings have been used by activists, primarily in the United States, Mexico and Central America, had a close relationship with DataCenter for many years. We sent our assembly of her drawings to UC Santa Barbara’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) which holds a Rini Templeton collection. We sent posters by Clayton Van Lydegraf, a political activist based in the Pacific Northwest, to the Clayton Van Lydegraf archive at the University of Washington Labor Archives. Archivist and activist poster expert Lincoln Cushing received the rest of DataCenter’s poster collection."
Mike Fortun's further exploration into this informed that DataCenter came out of NACLA, an "archiving social movement" that animated Central American resistance movements. An article written by then-undergraduate student and now-Rhodes scholar Kate Reed argues that:
"NACLA plays an important role in countering mainstream historic narratives, providing a direct window into histories of resistance and an invaluable tool for educating a new generation of activists and engaged scholars."
Why am I using this example to explain my archiving impulse?
Well, for one, it coincides with the frustration I felt while finding data on environmental and science education--there is a lot but it's spread all over the place. The silo-ing is not even intentional; it's hard to imagine what kind of data would count here as it quickly gets overwhelming depending on scope and depth. Or it could be a bunch of stuff about the same thing being distributed over people's homes, offices, and cloud storages. If one were to reconstruct the DataCenter archive, which is now a part of many archives, there wouldn't just be one organization or orientation of the archive that would look and feel right and make sense--there would be plural organizations and orientations that would make sense. Which is where PECE can be beautifully leveraged.
For second, I like the memory pathway that sent me this archive; it reveals my interest in pedagogy of the archive: how to tell plural stories to anticipate and cultivate different ends? The fact that this is a "radical" archive betrays my interest in a certain sensibility, which inhabits clarity about "what needs to be done".
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
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.
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.
1) PECE projects:
https://www.researchdatashare.org/
https://disaster-sts-network.org/content/formosa-plastics-archive/essay
https://theasthmafiles.org/ https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/sts-across-borders-4
http://centerforethnography.org/content/visualizing-toxic-subjects-project-page/essay
2) Education Archives:
https://www.zinnedproject.org/
https://archive.scienceforthepeople.org/
https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/jaste/issue/archive
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...