What I’m Reading This Summer: Lydia Willoughby

Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. First up, we hear from Lydia Willoughby, Research and Education Librarian at SUNY New Paltz.

 

FemTechNet for all the wins!

http://scalar.usc.edu/works/ftn-ethnic-studies-pedagogy-workbook-/index

I’ve been reading and rereading the work of the FemTechNet group every time that I sit down to work with faculty or students who are studying digital humanities. I return to FemTechNet because of its Center for Solutions to Online Violence which has useful frameworks for thinking about working, studying, learning and teaching in public and online with digital technologies and social media. Another group action and committee part of FemTechNet is the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Committee (CRES). CRES produces a pedagogy workbook that you need to be looking at and engaging with because it provides a continuum from theory to practice that transcends digital pedagogy and praxis and goes into actionable steps for a wide range of communities and stakeholders. FemTechNet also produces other publications of importance, such as Signal/Noise, an open peer review journal for student work and Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media & Technology.

Collection as Service: Cultural Assessment and Digital Collections

https://www.diglib.org/archives/13667/

You know it’s good stuff when it’s a bibliography that you’re reading (and an annotated one at that). The Digital Library Federation released an Annotated Bibliography for Cultural Assessment of Digital Collections in March of this year, and it’s seriously giving me life. This guide to thinking holistically about the scope and scale, outreach and impact of collections is integral to library work of any level. Beyond ‘digital’ collections, the articles in this guide address collections as an essential service that we provide to our communities, of relevance and use by all of our stakeholders, and addresses the ways in which competency go beyond programming and into deep collecting policies and practices. I include the link to the google doc, as it’s the running 2017 update for this year.

Chronicling the Intersections of #blacklivesmatter, @DivaFeminist on ‘Black Violability’

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.15767/feministstudies.41.1.232

Lindsey, Treva B. “Post-Ferguson: a “herstorical” approach to Black violability.” Feminist Studies 41.1 (2015): 232-237.

Treva B. Lindsey’s scholarship addresses Black bodies and social media, invoking meaningful analysis to the collective imaginings (and realities) of Black death on social media. Moving beyond a framework of ‘black violability’ as an interrelated impact of State and government violence on Black people, Lindsey focuses on the visibility and viability of marginalized Black identity outside of representations of #blacklivesmatter. Lindsey argues for digital collection, analysis, attention and chronicling so that, “[w]hen documentation and activism fail to encapsulate violence against Black trans* people, queer people, and women and girls, then we further marginalize and render invisible those surviving and living on the margins of marginalization” (Lindsey 237). This article (and all of her writing) is an incantation to connect our recent past and contemporary narratives from a standpoint grounded in herstory, zirstories, and at the intersections of identities and activisms.