The University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh Futures Institute is hosting a hybrid talk by Dorothy Berry (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture), entitled “How Users Imagine Archival Research: JPCA Explore and Digital Curation at the Smithsonian National African American History and Culture Museum.” The free talk is December 10th, from 4:00 PM – 6:30 PM GMT. From the talk description:
The Johnson Publishing Company Archive (JPCA) is the largest collection of 20th-century African American publishing materials, including a core collection of over 3 million photographs. The JPCA was purchased in 2019 by a consortium of funders – the Ford Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. Since 2022, it has been formally co-stewarded by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and Getty.
JPCA Explore is an experimental discovery lens in the larger in-development JPCA digital eco-system. Based on a hand-selected subset of 3,000 images, Explore uses a bespoke metadata schema to invite users with zero research experience to create their own discovery paths by selecting inter-connected images. Explore was designed with an eye towards how the general public imagines archival discovery- moving from file to file, noticing connections, discovering the unknown. It has also served as an internal education tool, demonstrating the possibilities of digital humanities work as well as the intensive resources that are required to make those possibilities real.
This talk will focus on the development of JPCA Explore and how it reflects wider issues around creating human-scale digital projects that still represent the magnitude of larger collections. By creating an interface with a focus on archival discovery, and at the same time completely ignoring archival hierarchical structures, this project seeks to implement Black Digital Humanities concepts to create new avenues into this archive.
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