As an archivist, I approach the digital humanities specifically with an eye towards how to position my work and outputs so that they can be used by researchers, scholars, students, and other interested communities. But there’s a lot to unravel in those considerations. Some questions to bat around in this session include
- Technical aspects: What sorts of files or information would be useful for archival repositories to provide? How can we make our (digital or analog) materials more discoverable and accessible to all? What technical skills should we cultivate to be useful to our humanities colleagues? How can we document the digital works of scholars that are being created?
- Historical realities: How do we all work around the silences of archival records? What can we do about all the materials that remain minimally available or completely unavailable due to limited archival labor?
- Systemic issues: How do technologies like Wikipedia (which adheres to notability guidelines and lacks diversity but also less restrictive than many institutions, allows widespread access to information, and benefits from edit-a-thons) expand or restrict access to scholarship? What institutional policies do we have that restrict additions to collections, access, use, and even future research? How can we, individually and institutionally, work together to define “notable” and collect “important” materials while not overly burdening collecting institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums (LAM)?
