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Category: what if

THATCamp Reflections

THATCamp 2008 Badges

My path to the inaugural THATCamp started at the Society of American Archivist’s 2006 annual meeting in DC. I was a local grad student presenting my first poster: Communicating Context in Online Collections – and handing out home-printed cards for my blog. When I ran out, I just wrote the URL on scraps of paper. I found my way to session 510: Archives Seminar: Possibilities and Problems of Digital History and Digital Collections, featuring Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, described in the SAA program as follows:

The co-authors of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web lead a discussion of their book and, in particular, the possibilities of digital history and of collecting the past online. The discussion includes reflections on the September 11 Digital Archive and the new Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which collects stories, images, and other digital material related to hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.

The full hour and twenty-four minutes audio recording is available online if you want to dive down that particular rabbit hole.

2006 was early in the “archives blogging” landscape. It was the era of finding and following like-minded colleagues. RSS and feed readers! People had conversations in the comments. 2006 was the year I launched my blog. My post about Dan & Roy’s session was only the 9th post on my site. I was employed full time doing Oracle database work at Discovery and working towards my MLS in the University of Maryland’s CLIS (now iSchool) program part-time. So I added Dan’s blog to the list of the blogs I read. When Dan invited people to come to THATCamp in January of 2008 and I realized it was local – I signed up. You can see my nametag in the “stack of badges” photo above. For a taste of my experiences that day, take a look at my 2008 THATCamp blog posts.

In 2008, the opportunity to sit in a room of people who were interested in the overlap of technology and humanities was exciting. As a part-time graduate student (and wife and mother of a 6-year-old), I spent almost no time on campus. I did most of my thinking about archives and technology at home late at night in the glow of my computer screen. There was not a lot of emphasis on the digital in my MLS program at UMD. I had to find that outside the classroom.

The connections I made at that first THATCamp extend to today. As mentioned elsewhere, I was part of the group who put together the first regional THATCamp in Austin as a one-evening side-event for the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting in 2009. I swear that Ben Brumfield and I were just going to meet for dinner while I was in Austin, where he lives, for SAA. Somehow that turned into “Why not throw a THATCamp?”. How great to have no idea of the scale of what we were taking on! Ben did an amazing job of documenting what we learned and tips for future organizers, including giving yourself more time to plan, reaching out to as diverse a group as possible, and planning an event that lasted longer than four hours. All that said, it was a glorious and crazy evening. I still have my t-shirt. While our discussions might have been more archives-skewed than at most THATCamps, it also gave lots of archivists a taste of what THATCamp and un-conferences were like. Looking through the posts on the THATCamp Austin website, there was clearly an appetite for the event. We could easily have had enough topics to discuss to fill a weekend – but only had time for two one hour session slots, plus a speed round of “dork shorts” lightning talks.

I know I went to other THATCamps along the way. I graduated with my MLS in 2009. I started an actual day-job as an archivist in July of 2011 at the World Bank. Suddenly I got paid to think about archives all day – and I didn’t need my blog in the way I used to. I started writing more fiction and attending conferences dedicated to digital preservation. Somewhere in there, I went to the 2012 THATCamp Games at UMD.

THATCamps brought together enthusiastic people from so many different types of digital and humanities practice — all with their own perspectives and their own problems to solve. We don’t get many opportunities to cross-pollinate among those from academia and the public and private sectors. Those early conversations were my first steps towards ideas about how archivists might collaborate with professionals from other communities on digital challenges and innovations. In fact, I can see threads stretching from the very first THATCamp all the way to my Partners for Preservation book project.

Thanks, THATCamp community.

This post is cross-posted as part of the 2020 THATCamp retrospective.

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Countdown to Partners for Preservation

Yes. I know. My last blog post was way back in May of 2014. I suspect some of you have assumed this blog was defunct.

When I first launched Spellbound Blog as a graduate student in July of 2006, I needed an outlet and a way to connect to like-minded people pondering the intersection of archives and technology. Since July 2011, I have been doing archival work full time. I work with amazing archivists. I think about archival puzzles all day long. Unsurprisingly, this reduced my drive to also research and write about archival topics in the evenings and on weekends.

Looking at the dates, I also see that after I took an amazing short story writing class, taught by Mary Robinette Kowal in May of 2013, I only wrote one more blog post before setting Spellbound Blog aside for a while in favor of fiction and other creative side-projects in my time outside of work.

Since mid-2014, I have been busy with many things – including (but certainly not limited to):

I’m back to tell you all about the book.

In mid-April of 2016, I received an email from a commissioning editor in the employ of UK-based Facet Publishing (initially described to me as the publishing arm of CILIP, the UK’s equivalent to ALA). That email was the beginning of a great adventure, which will soon culminate in the publication of Partners for Preservation by Facet (and its distribution in the US by ALA). The book, edited by me and including an introduction by Nancy McGovern, features ten chapters by representatives of non-archives professions. Each chapter discusses challenges with and victories over digital problems that share common threads with issues facing those working to preserve digital records.

Over the next few weeks, I will introduce you to each of the book’s contributing authors and highlight a few of my favorite tidbits from the book. This process was very different from writing blog posts and being able to share them immediately. After working for so long in isolation it is exciting to finally be able to share the results with everyone.

PS: I also suspect, that finally posting again may throw open the floodgates to some longer essays on topics that I’ve been thinking about over the past years.

PPS: If you are interested in following my more creative pursuits, I also have a separate mailing list for that.

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Career Update

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I have some lovely news to share! In early July, I will join the Library and Archives of Development at the World Bank as an Electronic Records Archivist. This is a very exciting step for me. Since the completion of my MLS back in 2009, I have mostly focused on work related to metadata, taxonomies, search engine optimization (SEO) and web content management systems. With this new position, I will finally have the opportunity to put my focus on archival issues full time while still keeping my hands in technology and software.

I do have a request for all of you out there in the blogosphere: If you had to recommend a favorite book or journal article published in the past few years on the topic of electronic records, what would it be? Pointers to favorite reading lists are also very welcome.

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Breast Cancer: Join the Army of Women & Help Scientists Find the Cause

In honor of the Army of Women Day, my post today takes a quick look at how the American public  has been delivered various messages about cancer via posters and PSAs.

These two 1930s posters from the Library of Congress focus their message on convincing women to seek treatment from their doctor quickly and not fight their cancer alone.

By the 70s we got PSAs from organizations like the American Cancer Society, focusing on not smoking, doing self-exams and seeing your doctor for ‘regular cancer check-ups’. The clip below features Farrah Fawcett in 1981 (25 years before her own cancer diagnosis):

Almost 30 years later we have a new kind of video appeal. The Army of Women, a program of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, funded by a grant from the Avon Foundation for Women, is recruiting 1,000,000 women (and men!) of all ages and ethnicities to participate in studies to find the cause of breast cancer. Their PSA below recasts the challenge. Now, instead of living a healthy lifestyle and then seeking out doctors for diagnosis and treatment – we are asked to join forces with others to support doctors in their research the cause of breast cancer.

I lost my aunt to breast cancer. I have more friends and family who have fought breast cancer than I can count on one hand. I joined the Army of Women over a year ago.

What can you do?

  • If you are over 18, sign up to join the Army of Women database. The first step is to add your name to the pool of individuals willing to be contacted to hear about research projects in the future. It is free. You are not agreeing to participate in any specific project, just adding yourself to the list so researchers can find the subjects they need as fast as possible.
  • Invite your friends and family to join.

Help us reach a day when the only way that a woman can learn about what it was like to have breast cancer is from memoirs, documentaries and tear-jerker movies. I want to put cancer in the archives (forgive me.. couldn’t resist it!).

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ArchivesZ Needs You!

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I got a kind email today asking “Whither ArchivesZ?”. My reply was: “it is sleeping” (projects do need their rest) and “I just started a new job” (I am now a Metadata and Taxonomy Consultant at The World Bank) and “I need to find enthusiastic people to help me”. That final point brings me to this post.

I find myself in the odd position of having finished my Master’s Degree and not wanting to sign on for the long haul of a PhD. So I have a big project that was born in academia, initially as a joint class project and more recently as independent research with a grant-funded programmer, but I am no longer in academia.

What happens to projects like ArchivesZ? Is there an evolutionary path towards it being a collaborative project among dispersed enthusiastic individuals? Or am I more likely to succeed by recruiting current graduate students at my former (and still nearby) institution? I have discussed this one-on-one with a number of individuals, but I haven’t thrown open the gates for those who follow me here online.

For those of you who have been waiting patiently, the ArchivesZ version 2 prototype is avaiable online. I can’t promise it will stay online for long – it is definitely brittle for reasons I haven’t totally identified. A few things to be aware of:

  • when you load the main page, you should see tags listed at the bottom – if you don’t at all, then drop me an email via my contact form and I will try and get Tomcat and Solr back up. If you have a small screen – you may need to view your browser full screen to get to all the parts of the UI.
  • I know there are lots of bugs of various sizes. Some paths through the app work – some don’t. Some screens are just placeholders. Feel free to poke around and try things – you can’t break it for anyone else!

I think there are a few key challenges to building what I would think of as the first ‘full’ version of ArchivesZ – listed here in no particular order:

  • In the process of creating version 2, I was too ambitious. The current version of ArchivesZ has lots of issues, some usability – some bugs (see prototype above!)
  • Wherever a collaborative workspace of ArchivesZ were going to live, it would need large data sets. I did a lot of work on data from eleven institutions in the spring of 2009, so there is a lot of data available – but it is still a challenge.
  • A lot of my future ideas for ArchivesZ are trapped in my head. The good news is that I am honestly open to others’ ideas for where to take it in the future.
  • How do we build a community around the creation of ArchivesZ?

I still feel that there is a lot to be gained by building a centralized visualization tool/service through which researchers and archivists could explore and discover archival materials. I even think there is promise to a freestanding tool that supports exploration of materials within a single institution. I can’t build it alone. This is a good thing – it will be a much better in the end with the input, energy and knowledge of others. I am good at ideas and good at playing the devil’s advocate. I have lots of strength on the data side of things and visualization has been a passion of mine for years. I need smart people with new ideas, strong tech skills (or a desire to learn) and people who can figure out how to organize the herd of cats I hope to recruit.

So – what can you do to help ArchivesZ? Do you have mad Action Script 3 skills? Do you want to dig into the scary little ruby script that populates the database? Maybe you prefer to organize and coordinate? You have always wanted to figure out how a project like this could group from a happy (or awkward?) prototype into a real service that people depend on?

Do you have a vision for how to tackle this as a project? Open source? Grant funded? Something else clever?

Know any graduate students looking for good research topics? There are juicy bits here for those interested in data, classification, visualization and cross-repository search.

I will be at SAA in DC in August chairing a panel on search engine optimization of archival websites. If there is even just one of you out there who is interested, I would cheerfully organize an ArchivesZ summit of some sort in which I could show folks the good, bad and ugly of the prototype as it stands. Let me know in the comments below.

Won’t be at SAA but want to help? Chime in here too. I am happy to set up some shared desktop tours of whatever you would like to see.

PS: Yes, I do have all the version 2 code – and what is online at the Google Code ArchivesZ page is not up to date. Updating the ArchivesZ website and uploading the current code is on my to do list!

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Topic Modeling, Auto-Classification and Archival Description

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In an example of Twitter serendipity, @silverasm‘s (Aditi Muralidharan) tweet pointed me to @historying‘s blog post about Topic Modeling. In this post Cameron Blevins explains the results of using the topic modeling feature of UMass Amherst‘s MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit (MALLET) on the text of Martha Ballard’s Diary.

I have spent lot of time thinking about how to generate thematic overviews of groups of archival collections. My information visualization project, ArchivesZ, aims to provide ways of understanding aggregated archival description data, both from a single institution or across institutional boundaries. Now I find myself wondering if text mining with a tool like MALLET might generate smart topic groupings more elegantly than fighting with the wide range of non-standardized collection subjects.

Topic Modeling with MALLET

To get a sense of what MALLET generates, see the excerpt below from Blevins’s post:

With some tinkering, MALLET generated a list of thirty topics comprised of twenty words each, which I then labeled with a descriptive title. Below is a quick sample of what the program “thinks” are some of the topics in the diary:

  • MIDWIFERY: birth deld safe morn receivd calld left cleverly pm labour fine reward arivd infant expected recd shee born patient
  • CHURCH: meeting attended afternoon reverend worship foren mr famely performd vers attend public supper st service lecture discoarst administred supt
  • DEATH: day yesterday informd morn years death ye hear expired expird weak dead las past heard days drowned departed evinn
  • GARDENING: gardin sett worked clear beens corn warm planted matters cucumbers gatherd potatoes plants ou sowd door squash wed seeds

He goes on to explain that “MALLET also allows us to track those topics across the text.” What if, instead of text mining a diary, we pumped the descriptions of every archival collection from a single institution into MALLET. Of course we would need a good list of stop words including such common terms as archives, history, sources and records. But I wonder how the topics MALLET suggests would compare to the official subjects associated with each collection? Could this give us a broad overview of the topics covered by a specific repository and give us a new way to build paths to the collections based on topic?

Auto-Classification Using Castanet

Text miner Aditi Muralidharan also posted recently on this theme in Castanet: automatically generating a browsing structure for a collection and explains:

Castanet automatically carves a sub-structure from the hierarchical concept dictionary, WordNet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu), and matches items in the collection to one or many appropriate places within that hierarchy. Then, after some automated trimming and flattening, the result is a hierarchical browsing system.

I have heard of Castanet before via the Flamenco Search Interface Project. Apparently Muralidharan did a project using Castanet last summer to create a category system for Flickr Commons images based on the images’ tags which is then rendered using a Flamenco interface. I include a partial screen-shot below to give you a taste of what the navigation of images feels like a few levels down in the hierarchy. I love the classification of ‘Group Action’ then filtered by a sub-classification of ‘Commerce’. The first images shown are of ‘horse trading’ – with additional headings and images beneath them as well as additional filter options on the left.

What If?

What if we pulled all the English language archival descriptions from around the world as our original data set. If we used this data for topic modeling, our subjects clusters would be cross-institutional. Maybe we could map the local institution assigned subjects to the topic model generated topics for each collection and get a sort of automated crosswalk for finding related collections. If we used the local institution assigned subjects from the archival descriptions for Canasta style auto-classification, maybe we could generate a way to hierarchically browse collections topically.

Both MALLET and Flamenco are open source (I am not sure of the status of Castanet) and, as I discovered working on ArchivesZ, many institutions will share their archival description data for a good cause. So – is this a good cause? I need to tease these ideas out a bit more, but what do you all think of it at first blush? Feasible? Interesting? Worthwhile experiments?

Image Credits: MALLET logo from MALLET homepage. Images in screen shot from Flickr Commons with no known copyright.

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Ada Lovelace Day: Portraits of Women in Technology

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What does a brilliant female scientist look like? In honor of the 2010  Ada Lovelace Day, I went on a hunt through the Filckr Commons and other sources of archival images to see how many portraits of women who have contributed to science and technology I could find.

A few years back I read Malcolm Gladwell‘s book Blink. One of the ideas I took away was the profound impact of the images with which we surround ourselves. He discusses his experience taking an Implicit Association Test (IAT) related to racism and his opinion that surrounding oneself with images of accomplished black leaders can change ones ‘implicit racism’. Project Implicit still continues. I found a demo of the ‘Gender-Science IAT’ and took it (you can too!). “This IAT often reveals a relative link between liberal arts and females and between science and males.” My result? “Your data suggest little or no association between Male and Female with Science and Liberal Arts.” My result was received by 18% of those taking the test. 54% apparently show a strong or moderate automatic association between male and science and female and liberal arts.

My inspiration for this post is to find images of accomplished women in science and technology to help young women and girls fight this ‘automatic association’. How can you imagine yourself into a career when you don’t have role models? Lets find the most varied assortment of images of what female scientists and technologists looks like!

The Smithsonian has an entire set of Women in Science images on the Flickr Commons about which they wrote a fabulous blog post over on their Visual Archives Blog. Consider the difference between the Smithsonian Flickr set of Portraits of Scientists and Inventors and that of Women in Science shown below in my snazzy animated GIF.

For me, the first set goes a long way to associate what a scientist or inventor looks like to images of white men with varying degrees of facial hair. I don’t see myself in that set of photos, even though there are a few women mixed into the set. The Women in Science set shows me women and, even though the images are black and white and reflect the style of another era, I can imagine myself fitting in with them.

Digging into a few specific examples within the ‘Women in Science’ images, on the left below we see research scientist Eloise Gerry who worked for the US Forest Service from 1910 through 1954. The caption from this image is “Dr. Gerry in her laboratory with the microscope that helped give the great naval stores industry in the United States a new lease on life.” On the right we have Physicist Marie Curie.

Over on the website of the Smithsonian’s Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology I found a few more images. On the left we have mathematician Tatiana Ehrenfest, from the first half of the 20th century, and on the right a physicist from the 1700s, marquise du Châtelet, Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil. These were not easy to find – I did in fact skim through all the names and photos listed to find the two shown here.

After thinking a bit about the shortest path to more images of women in science and technology I went onto Freebase.com. I was so pleased to discover how easy it was for me to find entries for computer scientists, then filter by those who were female and had images. This gave me the faces of Female Computer Scientists, including those shown in the screen shot below (and yes, that is Ada Lovelace herself 2nd from the left in the top row).

I was excited to find more images and next I pulled together a list of Female Scientists. Finally a bit more diversity in the faces below (and there are many more images to explore if you click through).

Finally, I put a call out on both Twitter and the DevChix mailing list asking for women to share images of themselves for use in this blog post. Within just a few hours I received photos of Lorna Mitchell (a PHP developer in the UK – photo by Sebastian Bergmann), Aimée Morrison (shown crafting a social multimedia curriculum for DHSI 2010), Kristen Sullivan and a group photo of the DC LinuxChix dinner at ShmooCon.

There are many sources of images of women who have contributed to or are members of the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, but one of the best are archives. Consider the photo credits page for the website dedicated to Biographies of Women Mathematicians which credits 9 different archives for images used on the site.

Images are so powerful. The preservation of images of women like those mentioned above is happening in archives around the world. The more of these images that we can collect and present in a unified way, the more young women can see themselves in the faces of those who came before. It sounds so simple, but imagine the impact of a website that showed face after face of women in science and tech. Of course I would want a short bio too and the ability to filter the images by specialty, location and date. I think that Freebase.com could be a great place to focus efforts. Their APIs should make it easy to leverage images and all the structured data about women in tech that we could possibly dream to collect. I know that many of the posts created today will feature photos of amazing tech women, how do we organize to collect them in one place? Who wants to help?

If you know of additional archival collections including images of tech women, please let me know!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day everyone!

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Archivists and New Technology: When Do The Records Matter?

Navigating the rapidly changing landscape of new technology is a major challenge for archivists. As quickly as new technologies come to market, people adopt them and use them to generate records. Businesses, non-profits and academic institutions constantly strive to find ways to be more efficient and to cut their budgets. New technology often offers the promise of cost reductions. In this age of constantly evolving software and technological innovation, how do archivists know when a new technology is important or established enough to take note of? When do the records generated by the latest and greatest technology matter enough to save?

Below I have include two diagrams that seek to illustrate the process of adopting new technology. I think they are both useful in aiding our thinking on this topic.

The first is the “Hype Cycle“, as proposed by analyst Jackie Fenn at Gartner Group. It breaks down the phases that new technologies move through as they progress from their initial concept through to broad acceptance in the marketplace. The generic version of the Hype Cycle diagram below is from the Wikipedia entry on hype cycle.

Gartner Hype Cycle (Wikipedia)

Each summer, Gartner comes out with a new update on Where Are We In The Hype Cycle?. Last summer, microblogging was just entering the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’, public virtual worlds were sliding down into the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ and location aware applications were climbing back up the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’. There is even a book about it: Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time.

The other diagram is the Technology Adoption Lifecycle from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. This perspective on the technology cycle is from the perspective of bringing new technology to market. How do you cross the chasm between early adopters and the general population?

Technology Adoption Lifecycle (Wikipedia)

Archivists need to consider new technology from two different perspectives. When to use it to further their own goals as archivists and when to address the need to preserve records being generated by new technology. A fair bit of attention has been focused on figuring out how to get archivists up to speed on new web technology. In August 2008, ArchivesNext posted about hunting for Web 2.0 related sessions at SAA2008 and Friends Told Me I Needed A Blog posted about SAA and the Hype Cycle shortly thereafter.

But how do we know when a technology is ‘important enough’ to start worrying about the records it generates? Do we focus our energy on technology that has crossed the chasm and been adopted by the ‘early majority’? Do we watch for signs of adoption by our target record creators?

I expect that the answer (such as there can be one answer!) will be community specific. As I learned in the 2007 SAA session about preserving digital records of the design community, waiting for a single clear technology or software leader to appear can lead to lost or inaccessible records. Archivists working with similar records already come together to support one another through round tables, mailing lists and conference sessions. I have noticed that I often find the most interesting presentations are those that discuss the challenges a specific user community is facing in preserving their digital records. The 2008 SAA session about hybrid analog/digital literary collections discussed issues related to digital records from authors. Those who worry about records captured in geographic information systems (GIS) were trying to sort out how to define a single GIS electronic record when last I dipped my toes into their corner of the world in the Fall of 2006.

It is not feasible to imagine archivists staying ahead of every new type of technology and attempting to design a method for archiving every possible type of digital records being created. What we can do is make it a priority for a designated archivist within every ‘vertical’ community (government, literary, architecture… etc) to keep their ear to the ground about the use of technology within that community. This could be a community of practice of its own. A group that shares info about the latest trends they are seeing while sharing their best practices for handling the latest types of records being seen.

The good news is that archivists aren’t the only ones who want to be able to preserve access to born digital records. Consider Twitter, which only provides easy access to recent tweets. A whole raft of third-party tools built to archive data from Twitter are already out there, answering the demand for a way to backup people’s tweets.

I don’t think archivists always have the luxury of waiting for technology to be adopted by the majority of people and to reach the ‘Plateau of Productivity’. If you are an archivist who works with a community  that uses cutting edge technology, you owe it to your community to stay in the loop with how they do their work now. Just because most people don’t use a specific technology doesn’t mean that an individual community won’t pick it up and use to the exclusion of more common tools.

The design community mentioned above spoke of working with those creating the tools for their community to ensure easy archiving down the line. In our fast paced world of innovation, a subset of archivists need to stay involved with the current business practices of each vertical being archived. This group can work together to identify challenges, brainstorm solutions, build relationships with the technology communities and then disseminate best practices throughout the archives community. I did find a web page for the SAA’s Technology Best Practices Task Force and its document Managing Electronic Records and Assets: A Working Bibliography, but I think that I am imagining something more ongoing, more nimble and more tied into each of the major communities that archivists must support. Am I describing something that already exists?

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SAA2008: Chinese Hammered Dulcimer + Tango = Archivists as Creative Collaborators

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Library of Virginia: St. Peters Service Club dance, Richmond HotelThe official title of this session was Getting to the Heart of Performance: Archivists as Creative Collaborators. It was a lovely change of pace. Upon entering this session, we discovered someone tuning a Chinese hammered dulcimer in the middle of a social dance floor. Our hosts were Scott Schwartz of the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, University of Illinios, Urbana-Champaign and Andrew M. Wentink of Middlebury College Special Collections & Archives. The goals of the session? To teach us about Asian American Jazz fusion and Tango.

Asian American Jazz Fusion

Dr. Anthony Brown, of Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra, explained why there was a Chinese hammered dulcimer sitting in the middle of the room. Brown was going to introduce us to Asian and American Jazz fusion. The curator of the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection from 1992-1996, he discovered materials related to Ellington’s Far East Suite, originally composed to honor the people who welcomed Ellington during his state department tour (cut short by Kennedy’s assasination). Brown was able to trace Ellington’s itinerary through business records and then figure out the instruments that inspired the original in the Asian American Jazz Orchestra’s recording of Far East Suite. His next CD project was Monk’s Moods. The Asian American Jazz Orchestra is now celebrating its 10th anniversary with the release of a CD titled Ten.

Yangqin Zhao plays the Chinese hammered dulcimer and is the formost performer on the instrument in the western hemisphere. The dulcimer travelled via the silk road from persia. The silk road was the original information highway. It was the way east and west were connected in the ancient eras.

Then a recording of Monk’s Moods on piano was played. Then Zhao performed the same piece on the Chinese hammered dulcimer. To achieve this, Brown and Zhao had to work together to translate the original arrangement. Excerpt from Gershwin’s rapsody in blue – recomposition – reorchestrated for his orchestra. A piece of music or a dance chart cannot come to life until you breath life into it. Enabling access to performing arts is different.

The second piece that Zhao played was Andantino from Rhapsody in Blue. Samples of both Andantino and Monk’s Moods are available on the Ten CD page. Zhao then thanked Anthony for teaching her Jazz.

Tango

The dance portion of the session was brought to us by Richard Powers of Stanford University Dance Division and his dance partner Joan Walden. Powers founded the Flying Cloud Academy of Vintage Dance. He has a design and creative process degree from Stanford where he is an expert in 19th and early 20th century social dance. Stanford has an extensive dance manuals collections and Powers is the director of Stanford’s 70 member vintage dance ensemble.

Stanford Dance department wanted Richard to make dance more visible on campus to help make sure that it didn’t get cut (partially or completely). Outreach is important – strengthen funding or let potential donors know about you. He recommends that you can bring back dance manuals from your archive. With movies like Mad Hot Ballroom and Shall We Dance? and TV shows like Dancing With The Stars, the American public is predisposed right now to be interested in dancing. Most of the dances in dance manuals were meant for teaching regular people to dance so they could dance with their friends. They were part of a self improvement movement.

Think of unique way to encourage others to use archival records. Powers encourages everyone to NOT hand it off to others. Being a non-dancer gives you a better chance for colloboration. The more we know, the harder it is to get into a true collaboration. But if it is new for you you are more open minded and more open to true collaboration.

There are other resources beyond dance manuals: dance magazines, etiquette books, anti-dance manuals (which sometimes describe the illicit dances that the proper dance manuals won’t mention), novels that give background, journals/diaries/letters, iconography – lithographs, photos, drawings, etchings, sculptures .. to help get the visual idea.. costuming. Dance cards and ball programs give lots of information – when, who.. what music.. maybe where. This also gives you a chance to see which dances were popular (vs the manuals which are promoting dances). Motion pictures from the times. So – how can we weave all of this together?

For more information about how to reconstruct dances, read Powers’ Guidelines for Dance Research and Reconstruction.

We then got a crash course in Tango history. I took notes as fast as I could, but I know I missed a lot along the way. Here are the bits I managed to get down – but don’t trust me to be an authority:

  • 100 years ago in Buenes Ares or Paris – you could find the argentinian tango. 1908 – just arrived in paris.. in the outskirts from Buenes Ares. But that version would seem simple. And then they danced!
  • 1st Myth of the Tango: It was born in the brothels. His informed opinion is that it was created by the poor, but that doesn’t mean they were pimps & prostitutes. Most tango scholars today believe it was created by the honest poor in the bario.
  • 2nd Myth of the Tango: The Tango was imported to Paris (1908-1912) and tamed by the French who found it too passionate and make it more appropriate for the ballroom. Lots of documentation from many sources that prove that the French ADDED more passion.. and that the dance was carried to Paris by young aristocrats.
  • Tango was presented in response to the dance called the Apache – exchanged influence from 1912-1914 in Paris.
  • A Buenes Arnes dance manual from 1914 (dated by the illustrations) called El Tango Argentino includes detailed illustrations and foot diagrams. Going back to the source shows us the meaning behind the names and rules about steps. Most drama and stalking was added 15 years later.
  • The true roots of Tango are unknown.
  • The main trunk of Tango is the version known in Paris 100 years ago.. social Tango today is still the same. Three branches of
  • Tango are: 1) stage performance (more dramatic), 2) ballroom competition and 3) Beunes Ares – every 10 years or so it changes dramatically.

Then they got everyone up and out on the dance floor. We went from learning history and thinking about how to one might decipher dance manuals to actually learning to Tango!

My Thoughts

If you are wondering why I am posting this over four months after the conference – you can blame Beaver Archivist’s post about Dancing Archivists. It immediately made me recall the largest gathering of dancing archivists I had personally witnessed. The session itself was really great. It was so far from people sitting in silent rows staring at powerpoint slides (not that there is anything wrong with that) that you might have thought you had wandered into the wrong conference.

It was the takeaway that was especially appealing to me. I really like the idea of finding new ways to bring performance based archives back to life – of finding new ways to reach out to people and make the records sing and dance again. Hearing music reinterpreted and reinvented is of course fundamentally different from seeing sheet music in a glass case. What if every archives that had performance art related records found a way to have two live, participatory events each year? I can only imagine the new audience who might be drawn in to learn about what is hidden in the archives — they might just come back because it is fun. My fingers are crossed that I can get my 2nd Tango lesson in Austin, TX in August 2009.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2008, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

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Copyright Slider: Quick Easy Access to Copyright Laws and Guidelines

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ALA OITP Copyright SliderThanks to Digitization 101’s post I learned about the Copyright Slider. A creation of the ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) – you can find more official information over on ALA’s Washington Office blog (Let the OITP Copyright Slider Answer Your Questions!) and order one of your own for only a bit more than $5 (less if you order in bulk).

The Copyright Slider lets you answer questions such as (quoting the post linked to above):

  • Is a work in the public domain?
  • Do you need permission to use it?
  • When does copyright expire?

Here is their example of how it might be used:

A library in rural Pennsylvania is digitizing its local historical collection on the copper mining industry in the region. One of the collection texts, Memoirs of a Copper Miner, was published in 1953 and is still protected by copyright. Or is it? Align the black arrow on the slide-chart to materials published between 1923 and 1963 and discover that works originally published in the U.S. between 1923 and 1977 without a copyright symbol are in the public domain! Memoirs of a Copper Miner was published in 1953 and does not have a copyright symbol. Let the digitizing begin!

This looks like a dandy little tool to have in your desk drawer and I plan to order one sometime soon.

My next question is how hard would it be to make a slick flash version of this that could live online and be updated as copyright rules change?

Image Credit: A cropped version of a photo from the District Dispatch blog post quoted above. 

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