Category: journal article

RESOURCE: (In)Accessibility and the Technocratic Library

The most recent special issue of First Monday, the online open-access journal devoted to studies of the Internet, is entitled “This feature has been disabled: Critical intersections of disability and information studies.”

One contribution to this special issue, “(In)accessibility and the technocratic library: Addressing institutional failures in library adoption of emerging technologies,” focuses on the rapid increase in academic libraries of services involving artificial intelligence (AI), immersive technologies (XR), big data, and other corporate technologies. Authors Jasmine L. Clark (Temple University) and Zack Lischer-Katz (University of Arizona’s School of Information) explore how library administrators and staff can take steps to address the needs of their disabled students, faculty, and other users.

From the paper’s abstract:

This paper draws on the authors’ research on XR accessibility in academic libraries to illustrate how broader trends in technocratic thinking in academia are producing socio-technical configurations that often exclude disabled library users. It argues that critical failures in designing and implementing accessibility programs for emerging technologies in academic libraries point to the broader technocratic imperatives of contemporary universities operating under the logics of neoliberalism. Accessibility is an afterthought in this context, forcing users to adjust their bodies and senses to conform to the master plans of technology designers and evangelists.

RESOURCE: Medievalists and the Scholarly Digital Edition

The freshly-released Volume 34 of Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing includes Dot Porter’s essay, “Medievalists and the Scholarly Digital Edition.”

Porter, the soon-to-be Curator of Digital Research Services at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, considers medievalists’ use of digital resources, opening with a brief history of digital medieval studies, from the 1970s, when “paper was the interface for electronically created texts,” documenting the shift toward electronic publishing in 1992, with “the first digital-oriented paper presented to the [International Congress on Medieval Studies] that describes an edition definitely intended to be published and delivered on a computer.”

In a survey of medievalists from 2011 that updates graduate research undertaken by Porter in 2002, she finds:

… not surprisingly, a shift from the use of print resources to the use of electronic resources, for the most part. This article focuses on the survey findings with regard to scholarly editions. I also present, in comparison, the findings with regard to journals and facsimiles. Although the survey respondents have a general interest in digital resources, and show a willingness to use them, there are complications surrounding electronic editions that still need to be addressed by the scholarly editing community.