84 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. in 1946, Joseph Stalin had changed tack, feeling that he needed religion to shore up popular support. He revived the Church in zombified form, an instrument of the state that was massively surveilled and controlled by the security services. When some of the KGB’s archives were exposed in 2014—thanks in part to the brave efforts of the late Gleb Yakunin, a dissident Russian priest who spent years in prison—the collusion of the Church’s leaders was revealed.
  2. Apr 2024
  3. Feb 2024
    1. Digitalarchives encompass techniques and approaches towards the transfer of usually physical archivesinto accurate digital representations with the corresponding problems of metadata, OCR quality,material constraints, computational storage, and procedures and processes.

      Enfoque Archivos Digitales. ¿Quiere decir que en cierta medida estos archivos son estáticos?

    2. digital archives and digital tools.

      Dos enfoques: Archivos Digitales y Herramientas Digitales.

    1. Read [[Martha S. Jones]] in A New Face for an Old Library Catalog

      Discussion on harmful content in library card catalogs and finding aids.

      The methods used to describe archive material can not only be harmful to those using them, but they also provide a useful historical record of what cataloguers may have been thinking contemporaneously as they classified and organized materials.

      This is another potentially useful set of information to have while reading into historical topics from library card catalogs compared to modern-day digital methods.

      Is anyone using version control on their catalogs?

  4. Nov 2023
  5. Oct 2023
  6. Sep 2023
  7. Aug 2023
    1. While most of the joke cards are simply index cards with a joke typed on, others are more complicated. Some cards have strips of paper glued to them with longer jokes on those papers. Some cards have entire letter-size sheets of paper containing long jokes stapled to the cards. Some cards have comic strips, cut from the newspaper, glued to the cards. Other cards are not even cards but are just pieces of printer paper with jokes scribbled on them. These irregular cards were not stable enough to be sent through the feed scanner and had to be scanned one-by-one using a flatbed scanner, which slowed my progress.

      Not only a short description of the broad standard form of cards in Phyllis Diller's gag file, but also an enumeration of some of the non-standard cards, many of which are specified because of the issues which they presented in scanning/digitizing for transcription.

  8. Jun 2023
  9. Apr 2023
  10. Mar 2023
  11. Feb 2023
    1. Related here is the horcrux problem of note taking or even social media. The mental friction of where did I put that thing? As a result, it's best to put it all in one place.

      How can you build on a single foundation if you're in multiple locations? The primary (only?) benefit of multiple locations is redundancy in case of loss.

      Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene are counter examples, though Greene's books are distinct projects generally while Holiday's work has a lot of overlap.

    1. Moststriking, though, was Marcus’ appropriation of Deutsch’s cards when he extracted thoserelating to America, installing them in the reading room of the American JewishArchives where they remain to this day.
    2. Shortly after Deutsch’s death thealumni of the Hebrew Union College purchased his index for the seminary’s library.15
  12. Jan 2023
    1. The LibNFT Project: Leveraging Blockchain-Based Digital Asset Technology to Sustainably Preserve Distinctive Collections and Archives

      CNI Fall 2022 Project Briefings

      YouTube recording

      K. Matthew Dames, Edward H. Arnold Dean, Hesburgh Libraries and University of Notre Dame Press, University of Notre Dame, President, Association of Research Libraries

      Meredith Evans, President, Society of American Archivists

      Michael Meth, University Library Dean, San Jose State University

      Nearly 12 months ago, celebrities relentlessly touted cryptocurrency during Super Bowl television ads, urging viewers to buy now instead of missing out. Now, digital currency assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum are worth half what they were this time last year. We believe, however, that the broader public attention on cryptocurrency’s volatility obscures the relevance and applicability of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) within the academy. For example, Ingram has announced plans to invest in Book.io, a company that makes e-books available on the blockchain where they can be sold as NFTs. The famed auction house Christie’s launched Christie’s 3.0, a blockchain auction platform that is dedicated to selling NFT-based art, and Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Wyoming have invested in Strike, a digital payment provider built on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. Seeking to advance innovation in the academy and to find ways to mitigate the costs of digitizing and digitally preserving distinctive collections and archives, the discussants have formed the LibNFT collaboration. The LibNFT project seeks to work with universities to answer a fundamental question: can blockchain technology generally, and NFTs specifically, facilitate the economically sustainable use, storage, long-term preservation, and accessibility of a library’s special collections and archives? Following up on a January 2022 Twitter Spaces conversation on the role of blockchain in the academy, this session will introduce LibNFT, discuss the project’s early institutional partners, and address the risks academic leaders face by ignoring blockchain, digital assets, and the metaverse.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds

      In archival science, a fonds is a group of documents that share the same origin and that have occurred naturally as an outgrowth of the daily workings of an agency, individual, or organization. An example of a fonds could be the writings of a poet that were never published or the records of an institution during a specific period.

  13. Nov 2022
    1. Part of what makes Twitter’s potential collapse uniquely challenging is that the “digital public square” has been built on the servers of a private company, says  O’Connor’s colleague Elise Thomas, senior OSINT analyst with the ISD. It’s a problem we’ll have to deal with many times over the coming decades, she says: “This is perhaps the first really big test of that.”

      Public Square content on the servers of a private company

  14. Oct 2022
    1. Unfortunately, such diverse topics as literacy, numeracy, gestures, jokes, sexual morality, personal cleanliness or the treatment of animals, though central to my concerns, are hard to pursue systematically. They can’t be investigated in a single archive or repository of information. Progress depends on building up a picture from a mass of casual and unpredictable references accumulated over a long period. That makes them unsuitable subjects for a doctoral thesis, which has to be completed in a few years. But they are just the thing for a lifetime’s reading. So when I read, I am looking out for material relating to several hundred different topics. Even so, I find that, as my interests change, I have to go back to sources I read long ago, with my new preoccupations in mind.

      For a variety of topics and interests there are not archives of information that can be consulted or referenced. As a result one must slowly, but methodically collect this sort of information over a lifetime to be able to analyze it and build theses.

    1. Il y a un point, en particulier, qui me frappe chaque jour davantage : ce que l’archive du chercheur d’hier peut apprendre au chercheur d’aujourd’hui, sur le plan de la méthodologie.

      Translation:

      There is one point in particular that strikes me more every day: what the archive of yesterday's researcher can teach today's researcher, in terms of methodology.

      With the rarer exceptions of writers like Erasmus, Melanchthon, Agricola, U. Eco, and G. Weinberg who wrote manuals or others like John Locke (on Indices), E. Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos, and B. Webb who tucked reasonable advice on research and note taking methods in their texts or appendices one of the benefits of of researcher archives is not just the historical record of the researcher's evolving thought, but to actually show specific types of methodology and changes through time.

    1. eutsch suggestedthat personal memory was untrustworthy and admitted it was no match for the writtenword, and his index enabled him to store information in a way recalling Derrida’sdiscussion of archives as prostheses of memory (Derrida, 1995).
  15. Jul 2022
    1. An instance may be given of the necessity of the “ separate sheet ” system.Among the many sources of information from which we constructed our bookThe Manor and the Borough were the hundreds of reports on particular boroughsmade by the Municipal Corporation Commissioners in 1835 .These four hugevolumes are well arranged and very fully indexed; they were in our own possession;we had read them through more than once; and we had repeatedly consulted themon particular points. We had, in fact, used them as if they had been our own boundnotebooks, thinking that this would suffice. But, in the end, we found ourselvesquite unable to digest and utilise this material until we had written out every oneof the innumerable facts on a separate sheet of paper, so as to allow of the mechanicalabsorption of these sheets among our other notes; of their complete assortment bysubjects; and of their being shuffled and reshuffled to test hypotheses as to suggestedco-existences and sequences.

      Webb's use case here sounds like she's got the mass data, but that what she really desired was a database which she could more easily query to do her work and research. As a result, she took the flat file data and made it into a manually sortable and searchable database.

  16. Jun 2022
    1. century that the archival discipline began flourishing and has continued since. It did so by borrowing from different fields: the debate between historians and archivists led to the affirmation of the historical method of analysis; the strong relationship with library science affected retrieval practices and theories; the first attempts to introduce mechanisation in public administration changed documentation processes; information science changed the relationship of archives with technology; social sciences questioned archival behaviour, processes, and policies; and post-modernism spurred a debate about archival identity and purposes. However, the core of archival knowledge dating back to Sumerian times has not changed, and neither has the body of concepts and principles that accrued around that core between the 16th and the 19th centuries, because the core has controlled the use of knowledge taken from other disciplines and shaped the outcome of interactions with them.
  17. May 2022
  18. Apr 2022
    1. The earliest survivingauthor’s manuscripts date from late eleventh- century Italy and include somemanuscripts of Petrarch from the fourteenth century, but large collections ofpapers by scholars first survive from the fifteenth century and in increasing num-bers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
  19. Feb 2022
  20. Jan 2022
    1. As memory models, rhetorical storehouses and archives are functional equivalents. Both are used as devices for storing and retriev-ing knowledge.

      Mnemonic (mental) storehouses (thesaurus) and written archives are functionally equivalent and serve to store and retrieve information. Their primary difference is in the effort put into how one applies their attention to them. The former requires more mental effort into storing information into the location and then recalling it.

      In the case of archives with subject indices, they require less mental effort and visually serve a potential store of variety and ease of creating additional links between bits of knowledge.

  21. Nov 2021
  22. Oct 2021
    1. https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Luhmanns-Denkmaschine-endlich-im-Netz-4364512.html?seite=all

      An interesting overview of Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten and how it was digitally archived with some potential ideas about how this might be done for other such systems or for ideas for those building and designing their own digital gardens.

    2. Retrodigitalisierung und Archivierung bedeutet weit mehr als Scannen, transkribieren und ordentlich wegspeichern. Die Digitalisierung des Zettelkastens scheint ein besonders komplexes Unterfangen zu sein, dass sehr spezifische Antworten und Lösungen erfordert. Können andere, ähnliche Projekte von Ihren Erfahrungen profitieren?

      Machine translation:

      Retro digitization and archiving means much more than just scanning, transcribing and storing properly. The digitization of the card box seems to be a particularly complex undertaking that requires very specific answers and solutions. Can other, similar projects benefit from your experience?

      It would be interesting to compare the digitization efforts of this process with that of W. Ross Ashby's notes: http://www.rossashby.info/.

  23. Sep 2021
  24. Jul 2021
    1. I like the hovercard-like UI that enables one to see prior versions of links on a page. It would be cool to have this sort of functionality built into preview cards for these as well.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Jonathan Zittrain</span> in The Rotting Internet Is a Collective Hallucination - The Atlantic (<time class='dt-published'>07/08/2021 22:07:17</time>)</cite></small>

    1. A solid overview article about the architectural deficiencies of the web for long term archival and access as well as some ideas for fixing the issue and a plea to attempt to make things better for the future.

    2. John Bowers, Elaine Sedenberg, and I have described how that might work, suggesting that libraries can again serve as semi-closed archives of both public and private censorial actions online. We can build what the Germans used to call a giftschrank, a “poison cabinet” containing dangerous works that nonetheless should be preserved and accessible in certain circumstances. (Art imitates life: There is a “restricted section” in Harry Potter’s universe, and an aptly named “poison room” in the television adaptation of The Magicians.)

      I love this idea of a poison cabinet or giftschrank.

      How might this work in an oral society? How would it be designed?

    3. Libraries in these scenarios are no longer custodians for the ages of anything, whether tangible or intangible, but rather poolers of funding to pay for fleeting access to knowledge elsewhere.

      A major archiving issue in the digital era is that libraries are no longer the long term storage repositories they have otherwise been for the past two thousand years.

      What effects will this have on the future? Particularly once the financial interests of the owning companies no longer exists?

  25. Jun 2021
    1. Bookmarklets to check common archive sites for archives of the current page(all open in a new tab or window) Archive site Bookmarklet Archive.org javascript:void(window.open('https://web.archive.org/web/*/'+location.href)) UKGWA javascript:void(window.open('http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/*/'+location.href))
  26. May 2021
  27. ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
    1. Oxford Text Archive A repository of full-text literary and linguistic resources. Thousands of texts in more than 25 languages.
  28. Mar 2021
    1. These newsletters are the most backed up pieces of writing in history, copies in millions of inboxes, on millions of hard drives and servers, far more than any blog post. More robust than an Internet Archive container. LOCKSS to the max. These might be the most durable copies yet of ourselves. They’re everywhere but privately so, hidden, piggybacking on the most accessible, oldest networked publishing platform in the world.

      This is an interesting point about longevity of content. It's definitely a good reason to email it out as well as to post it on your own website and archive it all at the same time.

  29. Feb 2021
  30. May 2019
    1. photographies et des films.

      Pour les archives sonores, il y a souvent la "boite à chaussures" : cf https://medihal.archives-ouvertes.fr/medihal-00835187

    2. l faut attendre juin 1949 pour que la question de la collecte, du classement, de la conservation, et de la communication des archives scientifiques soit concrètement posée

      En 1902, Léon Azoulay dresse la liste des archives sonores recueillie par des anthroopologues (cf Liste des phonogrammes composant le Musée phonographique de la Société d'Anthropologie [article]sem-linkAzoulay (L.)Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris Année 1902 3 pp. 652-666 https://www.persee.fr/doc/bmsap_0301-8644_1902_num_3_1_6077) : ne peut-on y voir les premières archives de terrain organisées ?

  31. Aug 2018
    1. (Sometimes, in the early years, I called these the Service System and the User System)

      As he does in the Project MAC memo, summer 1963.

    2. By 1959 1 was lucky enough to get a small grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR, from Harold Wooster and Rowena Swanson) which carried me for several years -- not enough for my full-time work, but by 1960 SRI began pitching in the difference.

      Actually, I think Doug has this backwards, at least from what I can see in the archives. SRI did pitch in half of his salary, but that seems to have been the first funding, in early 1960. The AFOSR proposal was submitted in mid-December 1960 and the funding, which allowed Doug to go full-time, kicked in in March, 1961.

  32. Jun 2018
    1. In the first question posed above – (there may be a document (or documents) in an archive with the potential to bring down a government. If this hasn’t happened yet, does that record have power?) – the latency of the archive-as-content is assumed. In other words, there’s always the possibility that somewhere in the repository is the single, golden item that will reveal itself as ‘the one’ – whatever that may be – and then the injection of agency, the transition from inherent to active power occurs, as Mike notes. More broadly though, I think there’s an ‘imagined’ power in archival repositories. Not only on the basis that they are often mythologized as the store of potentially ‘golden’ items, but also in the way that they allow communities to potentially imagine themselves as communities. This is Benedict Anderson’s thesis – that to be part of a group there needs to be a range of shared or widely accepted attributes and/or elements that the group imagines themselves all sharing – and the archival repository, although it doesn’t feature in his work, I think is a key to fulfilling this role. And in this role, it’s not about the one item, series or accession, but the very existence of the thing called an archive that is key. It has its mysterious ways, supported by a range of cool stereotypes (cardigan, ‘dust’, things ‘lost only to be ‘discovered’, ‘reading rooms etc…) which help to establish the archive as more than a thing, and all those attributes help to give it the air of mystery. If you need something, it’s likely to be ‘in the archive’. Even if you don’t, there’s safety in the knowledge that someone, somewhere, has carefully archived it. And it’s that mythologising I think that creates a peculiar type of archival power, at once active and activated, latent and potential.
    2. One aspect of such discussions is that power – whether assigned or inherent – is often treated as an actual or potential property of a discrete thing. But, looking at Annelie’s post, particular phrases stand out: Windschuttle engaged with archival documentation records were accessed and interpreted the Ngarrindjeri hold an extensive archival collection All are relational. They describe relationships between people (or groups of people) and records. Annelie approaches this idea with the following: “ultimately someone needs to be there to engage with the records and therefore assign power.” Taking this a step further, to understand power we need to understand the ways in which things interrelate. This doesn’t have to be engagement with the records (in the sense of access and use). An organisation which prevents access to its records (or destroys them) by doing so produces and reproduces structures of power. Power here is not something inherent to things, or assigned to things by agents, but the product of complex systems involving things, their relationships, and their contexts.
    1. The archival community needs game changers and iconoclasts. In some areas we need to directly challenge the established order and refuse to accept some practices and institutions as they currently stand. We need to show a willingness to adopt a DIY approach based on necessity; and we need to push ourselves forward, so we are seen and heard standing up for what we believe in (even those of us who consider ourselves introverts). Bring in the Clash or the Dead Kennedys and you get a strong sense of political and social justice. With Patti Smith comes a fusion of genres. With the Ramones at their best comes a stripped back, short, sharp shock. With riot grrrl comes a refusal to accept oppression based on gender, sexuality or class.

      This contains a some pretty good ideas around what 'a hacker in the archives' or 'archive hacking' might be.

  33. Jul 2017
  34. Jun 2017
  35. Jul 2016
    1. "The BBC Domesday Project was a pair of interactive videodiscs made by the BBC in London to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book and published in November 1986. It was one of the major interactive projects of its time, and it was undertaken on a scale not seen since."

      "In 1983, a BBC Television producer named Peter Armstrong wondered if it would be possible to harness the Domesday philosophy to modern Britain. With the large user base of microcomputers in British schools (helped by a government subsidy) it was feasible to ask schools around the UK to survey their areas to produce a database of how Britain looked to the British in 1986."

      "...the original Domesday book is still readable after (at the time) 925 years while our 15 year old one is not ... unless you have the original computer/videodisc system and it still works of course."

      "The first visible manifestation of a reappearance of the BBC Domesday Project was achieved in a project called CAMiLEON, which was a research project that investigated emulation as a digital preservation strategy and was based at the Universities of Michigan and Leeds. [CAMiLEON web site ... with supreme irony this is now only available via the internet archive]"

  36. Jun 2016
    1. The kind of due diligence that, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, would have taxed a team of private eyes is now readily available at the touch of an “enter” key. The fact that a virtual ocean of information exists doesn’t mean that it’s known, doesn’t mean that a prosecution team would now do better at warding off its effect on the jury, and doesn’t mean that a defense team would make different use of it.

      Archival Research

    2. Archival Research

    3. Archival research.

  37. Apr 2016
  38. Jan 2016
    1. Guidelines for publishing GLAM data (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) on GitHub. It applies to publishing any kind of data anywhere.

      • Document the schema of the data.
      • Make the usage terms and conditions clear.
      • Tell people how to report issues.<br> Or, tell them that they're on their own.
      • Tell people whether you accept pull requests (user-contributed edits and additions), and how.
      • Tell people how often the data will be updated, even if the answer is "sporadically" or "maybe never".

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Knowledge<br> http://openglam.org/faq/

  39. Dec 2015
    1. an ex-static archive, of an archive not assembled behind stone walls but suspended in a liquid element behind a luminous screen; the archive becomes a virtual repository of knowledge without visible limits, an archive in which the material now becomes immaterial. (ii)

      Is this a layered, annotatable archive, like a finely tuned kaleidoscope?

  40. Aug 2015
  41. Jul 2015
    1. She said that's because, to an archivist, everything's worth saving.

      Although, a big part of being an archivist is appraisal - determining what's worth saving and what isn't, based on institutional mission and funding. Yale probably has enough money to do this, which most archives do not.

  42. Dec 2014