Introduction to Digital Collections
Digital archives + collections are a curated set of items pertaining to a specific topic, often described with some form of standardized metadata, that are shared for use with a public user base. These kinds of projects are among the earliest examples of Digital Humanities work, and generally tend to make public otherwise unavailable material, especially in projects focused on marginalized or silenced voices. In addition to gathering historical materials, digital collections can also actively request first-person accounts and materials in response to specific events.
Examples
- Rossetti Archive
- Geography of Slavery
- September 11 Digital Archive
- Collective Biographies of Women
- Black in Appalachia
- Take Back the Archive
- Documenting Ferguson
- August 12 Archive
- DocNow Tweet Catalog
- UVA Police Reports
- National Archives on Flickr
Questions to Consider
- Subjects and ethics: Who are the people represented in your collection? What involvement, if any, do they have in how you represent them in the collection? What care have you taken yourself that work?
- Selection of materials: What do you choose to include in the collection, and why? What might you exclude?
- Description of materials: What metadata standards (if any) would you use in describing individual records? What challenges or shortcomings might existing standards
- Change over time: How might you communicate to users/researchers that you have added/removed/altered records?
- Use of your collection: How do you wish for your materials to be used in research and teaching? Are there questions you hope your collection will help answer? Are there materials that might cause users harm?
- Preservation and sustainability: What resources do you have to sustain the availability of the collection into the future? Can you identify features or technologies in your project that may have shorter lifespans?
Essays
- “Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies,” by Marisa Elena Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis.
- “Critical Directions for Archival Approaches to Social Justice,” by Ricardo L. Punzalan and Michelle Caswell.
- “Citizen Archivists at Play: Game Design for Gathering Metadata for Cultural Heritage Institutions,” by Mary Flanagain, et. al.
- “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor.
- “How We Construct Subjects: A Feminist Analysis” by Hope Olsen.
- “Feminism and the Future of Library Discovery” by Bess Sadler and Chris Bourg.
- “Xroads Praxis: Black Diasporic Technologies for Remaking the New World” by Jessica Maria Johnson
- “It’s All About the Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power, and People,” by Tim Sherratt.
- “Generous Interfaces” by Mitchell Whitelaw.