Beautiful archives and library infrastructure! 😍 (And lots of labor behind it!)

Great discussion by @drjpw.bsky.social about ethical/methodological pitfalls of legacy descriptions of archival material, and the need to be sensitive to lived experience of marginalized people in the past.

Never a boring day in the archives! 🙃

How do we decolonise archives? In this collaborative piece, researchers Christina Williamson, Beth Greenhorn, and Carol Payne and Inuit Elder Ann Meekitjuk Hanson reflect on the role of names in the colonial archive.

Editing revised chapters for the forthcoming 2nd edition of our guide to #EarlyModern 🗃️ sources today👌 The revised volume will also include 3 new chapters: Part 1 'Sources': - Digitised Sources Part 2 'Histories': - Race - The Body, Mind & Emotions.

📢GREAT RESOURCE📢 Stumbled on Carissa Chew's Inclusive Terminology Glossary, which collates information about historic & current usage of words related to race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, disability. itg.nls.uk/wiki/Introdu...

OOOO! The latest special issue for the Journal of #EarlyModern History is on Archives & Objects, a dialogue between the archival and material turn 🤩 Would you look at that ace table of contents 🤩 brill.com/view/journal... #YayArchives! #HistArchives!

I really dislike how science has started calling almost any fancy computational technique AI. 🧪 The framing of this entire article makes it sound like a benevolent AI independently made these drugs. That is *pure fantasy*. Instead: a team of scientists made a machine learning model for a study.

I've contributed an essay to this DEPENDENT issue: "Archival Trajectories: Information Beyond Content" It gives an overview of my PhD research that focuses on why we find what we find, i.e., the many recordkeeping and archival dependencies that underpin what is visible and accessible today.

Now also in English! Including eight stories by yours truly, about Rembrandt’s Black neighbours, Armenian merchants fighting at the stock market, indigenous Surinamese leaders in 17th century Amsterdam and more.

Probably a study written by people who have never set foot in an achives, thus are totally oblivious that the *vast* majority of...history isn't digitized, has minimal descriptions, often is 'hidden' etc. etc. etc. O--and no "history" is complete if it doesn't account for what's missing and why...

Knowledge infrastructures we rely upon today reflect and perpetuate dependencies and technologies of imperial power and colonial control. 🧵

Knowledge infrastructures we rely upon today reflect and perpetuate dependencies and technologies of imperial power and colonial control. 🧵

"Archives are not inert historical collections. They always stand in an active, dialogic, relation to the questions which the presents puts to the past; and the present always puts its questions differently from one generation to another." Stuart Hall, "Constituting an archive"

In a few week I’ll be teaching a Rare Books School course on medieval manuscripts. One skill I’ll be teaching is how to recognize manuscript fragments. While this account here is rare, it’s a reminder of why the histories of scraps matter. www.leeds.ac.uk/news-arts-cu...

Excited to kick off our workshop today at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg: Transient Communities and Spaces of Mobility: Theories, Methods, and Themes in Early Modern Mobilities History, organized with my colleague Dr Sarah Lentz from the University of Bremen #earlymodern #history #mobility #history 🗃️

For those many, many of you newly here (very exciting, a little overwhelming!), I'd love to offer my project's blog on medicine, race-making, and slavery as teaching resource, research inspiration, and testament to an exciting community of new and established scholars #EarlyModern

For 30 years I've been experimenting with ways to see & use the online collections of libraries, archives & museums. I've made useful things, playful things, & weird things. Here's a big list of them for you to explore! https://wraggelabs.com #glam #histodons #digitalhumanities

What is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders? Archives are not dusty! We take good care of them and that's why users can access centuries-old material today. O! And *even* dust adds context ;)

Looking forward to being part of this!

This. Also: - Very (very!) little of archives is digitized (let alone datafied) - Information is not always in what's written but between the lines - Context of a document's creation, preservation, transmission is crucial. No AI can access + understand humanity's memory for the forseeable future.

Periodic PSA 🙃: Reminder that whenever you "discover" something at the archives, it's been made available to you through the physical and intellectual labor of archivists.

"a true social theory of archives requires not just analyses of papers or people but also interrogations of process, place, and power." Jarrett Drake, "Blood at the Root" elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol8/is...

Worth noting today that the entire budget of the NEH is about $200M.

This is simply unbelievable. Anyone and everyone I had ever interacted with at NEH were passionate, selfless individuals that worked truly for the greater good. What a loss...

Now I need to find a reason to visit Buckinghamshire Archives! Great job @bucksarchives.bsky.social showing all your exciting collections!

If you write abt 'the archive' but don't engage with or acknowledge archival studies literature ... please know that your arguments ▪️have no to limited validity ▪️remain theoretical, oblivious to arch praxis ▪️lack understanding and depth ▪️don't account for the infrastructure/materiality of archives

A timeline cleanse: Here's a short, image-filled essay of mine in @aeon.co about why black holes and sea monsters have something in common. 1/2 🧪 🗃 #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #arthistory aeon.co/essays/how-b...

If you write abt 'the archive' but don't engage with or acknowledge archival studies literature ... please know that your arguments ▪️have no to limited validity ▪️remain theoretical, oblivious to arch praxis ▪️lack understanding and depth ▪️don't account for the infrastructure/materiality of archives

Catch us next week at this year’s ACURIL conference in Curaçao 🇨🇼! We will be offering a beginner-level workshop on digital humanities on Monday, June 9th at 3:30 PM in the Royal Ballroom. More info on this year’s conference available here: urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

Reimagining cataloging "not as a disciplinary apparatus that enforces authorized meanings, but as an emancipatory practice... Not as a technology of control, but as an infrastructure of possibility." scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/03/25/g...

⬇️ This 1,000 times!!! All the fun is in the archives! Why would anyone want to "solve" that? 😈

"Building on provenancial fabulation, which accounts for the ways relationships are created and imaginaries function..., crip provenance draws specific attention to absences, messiness, and the impossibility of knowing a complete disability history." elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol9/is...

"You can’t take it with you, yet we often feel ourselves immortal and act as if we can." Thank you for this beautiful post.

Superbly written article about reconciling the digitization of sources with their materiality with a focus to "the many ways in which the creation of sources shape their potential use." By @bhamhistory.bsky.social and @emilymayvine.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Underneath every archival document there's an ocean of information beyond the text on the page: how it was created; copied; recopied; moved; stored; conserved; microfilmed; digitized; put online, and myriad other processes. To tell the whole story, it matters how and why we access information.

Pleased to have contributed this article about 'Ariadne', an enslaved girl in 19th c. Barbados. It explores the methodological + epistemological issues of using colonial records of violence from the Caribbean for life writing about the enslaved. www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GYMFT...

Yay! Go @dependencybonn.de ! Congrats to all for the great work, honored to be among you.

The latest from @amaliasl.bsky.social will be of interest to the #FreedomSeekers community. Check it out! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Pleased to have contributed this article about 'Ariadne', an enslaved girl in 19th c. Barbados. It explores the methodological + epistemological issues of using colonial records of violence from the Caribbean for life writing about the enslaved. www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GYMFT...

One of the bedrocks of digital preservation is institutional commitment. All of this thread is a masterclass in how this can be eroded.

😍 👏 Awesome work and use of funding + tech + human expertise.

😍 Love to see global connections through the materiality of books and records!

@yaelrice.bsky.social and I co-authored this piece precisely to combat misguided work like this so people don't have to constantly rehearse the arguments about why it's specious. We laid it all out here for you! hyperallergic.com/604897/how-s...

🤣 "permanent" 🤣 digital records...

All this thread.

Could you use help explaining the value of #cataloging & good metadata to your admin, coworkers, #MLIS students, etc.? Happy to share this set of resources put together by an ALA working group chaired by @magsjoy.bsky.social. All of these & more are available at hdl.handle.net/11213/22872. 📚

Both the #NEH and #IMLS have had immeasurable impact in the US & the world, because - their staff works tirelessly & altruistically - awardees produce exceptional work - projects spearhead/sustain communities - ROI is greater by orders of magnitude to amount given. So sad to see them decimated.

Thankfully, nature blooms despite humankind.

Who were the sailors and soldiers who left for Brazil, Caribbean islands, Africa and New York in the service of the Dutch West India Company (WIC) in the #17thcentury? Until recently we didn't know much about them, thanks to the new database #wicopvarenden, this will change.