Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez is Processing Archivist for Latin American Collections at Princeton University Library. Elvia holds an MLIS with a concentration in Archives, Preservation, and Records Management from the University of Pittsburgh. She has presented widely on digital archives and diversity and is co-author with Rose L. Chou, Jenna Friedman, Simone Fujita, and Cynthia Mari Orozco of the forthcoming article ‘The Reach of a Long Arm Stapler: Calling in Microaggressions in the LIS Field through Zine Making’ (Library Trends, Spring 2018).

Thomas: In Invisible Defaults and Perceived Limitations: Processing the Juan Gelman Files you describe how technologies used to work with digital collections can channel bias – bias that is not just a historical legacy but very much a product of the here and now. Before we discuss this piece in detail I’m curious to hear more about what experiences shaped how you see your work in archives? Perhaps what led you to the archival profession?

Elvia: My interest in archives evolved from my studies in art history as an undergraduate at UCLA. I took a class on Dada and was fascinated by the Dadaists’ tendency to collect and piece together meaning from disposed and/or re-purposed materials. Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelor’s Even, The Large Glass and Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau inspired a deep pathos that eventually became the catalyst to move to a career in archives.

Merz Picture 32 A. The Cherry Picture (Merzbild 32 A. Das Kirschbild), Kurt Schwitters
1921

To provide a little more context on the catalyst—between 1923 and 1936, Schwitters collected and progressively pieced together his colossal Merzbau with objects gifted or left behind by friends and family such as souvenirs, letters, clippings, and articles of clothing (some stolen by Schwitters). Everything that mattered to Schwitters became part of the bau. It was ultimately destroyed by an Allied air raid during World War II. Schwitters’ loss struck a chord with me. His unconventional way of record keeping and memory construction made me curious about archival collections and the process of maintaining and making them available for access.

[pullquote]Who gets to be remembered and historicized by way of record creation?[/pullquote]Archival work requires an ethics of care for the deeply personal and the deeply political. My former boss at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics often said that all art is political. The same can be said about archives and archival work. Record creation, keeping, obstruction, or misrepresentation are all acts of identity and power. Who gets to be remembered and historicized by way of record creation? Who is forgotten or purposefully silenced in history by way of omission or destruction of records? How are records themselves (official records created for governmental purposes in particular) used to communicate misguided notions of holistic representation, truthfulness, neutrality, and objectivity? These are all questions that initially drew me to and continue to keep me in the profession.

Thomas: I’ve noticed that power and representation or lack thereof are taking a more prominent place in Digital Humanities and digital library conferences. I gather that this focus in archival work isn’t necessarily sparked by a transition to digital environments – rather that it predates that transition and maybe even runs alongside it. Do you think there is a reciprocal value to be gained from working across physical and digital legacies? What sorts of critical questions are raised when working with either? How are these questions different or similar depending on the medium and the technology?

Elvia: Issues of representation and power are fundamentally rooted in archival work and there is rich critical scholarship that discusses these issues in the context of pre-digital archives. Sam Winn’s piece The Hubris of Neutrality in Archives does an excellent job acknowledging some of the recent critical work in the archival profession that addresses issues of representation, and gives a nod to Howard Zinn’s seminal address to the profession at the 1970 Society of American Archivists meeting. Scholars like Verne Harris, Cheryl Beredo, Randall Jimerson, and Michelle Caswell discuss issues of power, representation, and accountability by challenging the existing canon of archival neutrality and objectivity; speaking on colonialism, apartheid, and transitional democracies and their relationships to record keeping; and connecting these challenges to current archival practices. These scholars have built critical foundations for emerging scholarship that speaks to these same issues in the digital realm.

There is definite value to be gained from working across physical and digital legacies. The work helps us recognize our shortcomings. Jarrett Drake has pointed out that the archival profession’s canonical principle of provenance is grounded in a 19th century colonialist and imperialist era wherein legal property and ownership of records was limited to western white men. Historically provenance has more or less worked well for archivists tasked with keeping a history of ownership. In digital mediums and environments things are a bit different. What does the provenance of a collaboratively created or anonymously created Google Doc look like? In digital environments provenance is becoming increasingly difficult to pin down. I believe this will force the profession to re-evaluate how archivists should account for ownership, authenticity, and custody.

3.5″ floppy disks from the Juan Gelman Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez.

[pullquote]Appraisal for digital collections is, I believe, slowly being shouldered by the processing archivist…[/pullquote] Of course privacy and volume are issues present in analog collections but they are further problematized when we consider the digital deluge and the responsibility of determining permanent historical value. In analog archival collections donors and creators can physically comb through and filter materials they do not want to deposit in an archival repository due to the presence of sensitive or personal information. Acquisition of entire hard drives makes appraisal for donors a lot more difficult and places the responsibility of protecting sensitive or personal data on archivists, who, on the whole are not nearly paid enough; not equipped with the necessary tools and infrastructure; and do not have enough hours of the day to devote the labor necessary to peruse every file. Appraisal for digital collections is, I believe, slowly being shouldered by the processing archivist without a donor, curator, or administrator understanding of the amount of time it takes to do the work. Questions about how to best address privacy issues and what to keep and what not to keep when we speak with our donors at the point of acquisition is something archivists will have to continue to advocate for.

Thomas: At the end of your previous response you allude to what might be called “the weight of inheritance” – what is passed to us and the wherewithal we gather deal with it. I sense a similar tension at work in Invisible Defaults and Perceived Limitations: Processing the Juan Gelman Files. In that piece you describe how tools you inherit as an archivist carry a set of assumptions that bias processing and representation of digital collections. Are there particular strategies for recognizing these biases and dealing with them? Particular readings or frameworks that guide you in the engagement?

Elvia: I recommend taking a deep dive in social justice and decolonizing technology readings (a trove of which are located here and here).

For me, it has become important to recognize that the tools archivists and other information managers are using (and developing) are part of a larger system that is complicit in propelling and replicating a hegemonic Global North. While technologies are marketed as decentralized, democratic products unbound by location (geographic, cultural) they are largely being developed by a relatively small minority of the world’s population who has the majority control to assert autonomous power. Understanding this, we begin to ask how this frame of thinking impacts an archivists’ responsibility to collections on the margins of, or far from, the Global North.

I want to emphasize that at the heart of what I was writing about in my experience processing the Gelman materials has more to do with recognizing our own biases and perceptions as practitioners learning to be technologists, rather than the current tools we have at our disposal.[pullquote]I also think about the weight of our ancestral and cultural inheritances and how we reckon (or not) with these as practitioners, users, and creators of digital collections. [/pullquote]You mentioned “the weight of inheritance” in the first part of your question — and beside having to reckon with the tools we use and their probable limitations, I also think about two other types of inheritances. I think about the technical language the digital curation community has inherited or adopted as its own and how potentially ill fitting it can be when applying it to cultural heritage collections. I also think about the weight of our ancestral and cultural inheritances and how we reckon (or not) with these as practitioners, users, and creators of digital collections. Tapping into my own cultural inheritances as a bilingual-U.S. living practicing archivist of Mexican ancestral roots, I understood how removing diacritic characters from accented words not only inherently changed the meaning behind filenames, it would be an act of cultural erasure. We need more use cases like Gelman’s in order to critically reflect on our current practices to make them better.

Thomas: In the digital humanities, researchers and practitioners (myself included) often dig into the language that is used to describe data and how one works with data. Verbs like cleaning (see Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz’ piece Against Cleaning) are problematized. The word data itself is questioned extensively – some even go the route of suggesting alternative nouns (see Johanna Drucker’s argument for capta). Some question a terrestrial bias at work in our understanding of data (see Melody Jue’s Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater). An increasing number of scholars explore the genealogy of the word data (see Lisa Gitelman’s Raw Data is an Oxymoron). In your work with the Gelman files I was intrigued to see your focus on words like “clean”, “compromise”, and “illegal”. I’m wondering if you might comment on possible alternatives in this space? Maybe models of collaboration and community that could lead to something that better approximates the diversity of a range of lived experience?

Elvia: I find the use of the term “illegal” irresponsible when it is applied outside the confines of the law. Contextualizing the term in our current sociopolitical moment and its application (among others) in the form of a noun to describe migrants not authorized to stay in their country of residence makes for a potentially dangerous association with the dehumanization of migrants. We (digital humanists/archivists) are in the business of preserving and making accessible collections that include a diversity of cultures, identities, and perspectives. Surely we can find more accurate descriptors to communicate what checks out or does not check out in the language we use to describe our practices.

Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, Invisible Defaults and Perceived Limitations: Processing the Juan Gelman Files

[pullquote]… we should keep in mind that wholesale adoption of technological language that has been developed for and by other (dis)similar fields is potentially incongruous to our needs.[/pullquote]Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz are onto something when they point to the example of “data cleaning” and how this term is used as an opaque shorthand for a number of diverse actions and steps that are taken to render data usable. This work illustrates the point that emerging areas of work in this space have not fully developed the pointed language needed to communicate our processes and roadblocks. As we move forward we should keep in mind that wholesale adoption of technological language that has been developed for and by other (dis)similar fields is potentially incongruous to our needs. Even in my use of “our” (digital humanists/archivists) there are varying use/need cases.

I believe having conversations across similar fields with a diversity of practitioners is key to understanding how our practices and end goals are alike and dissimilar. Part of the issue is that we are so busy trying to figure out how to reach end goals that we are not quite familiar with the practices each of us employ en route. The proposal of the Collections as Data framework is certainly an opportunity to bring together varied practitioners and users of data to conceptualize or begin reimagining a shared terminology that is mapped to our respective practices and responsibilities.

The records continuum model may add to the collections as data conversation. The model was originally conceptualized to reflect the overlapping responsibilities of records managers and archivists but I think it could potentially be expanded for those working on preserving and researching archival data. For instance, my goal as an archivist is to make little to no changes to the structure and content in a collection while normalizing accessible content to make it as platform and system agnostic as possible. When I intervene (duplicate or irrecoverable files, etc.), I must document and justify why I had to. These decisions should be made transparent to our users. The goals of digital humanists are a lot more diverse (i.e. potentially a lot more “data cleaning”), but their ability to access the content they work on is potentially dependent on my labor to preserve and provide access to it.

While archivists and digital humanists might have different goals, we share similar processes and terminology. I think the records continuum model can reveal how much of our current practices we share, or potentially want to share. I would love to organize a think out loud meeting (a future Collections as Data meeting?) with data curators, archivists, digital humanists, systems administrators and developers, and whomever else is heavily thinking about this. We might create a shared lexicon that better describes our shared needs and practices.

Thomas: Lastly, whose work would you like people to know more about?

Elvia: Tara Robertson’s presentation, Not All Information Wants to be Free, taught me that the library profession’s blanket tendency to digitize pre-Internet print resources can be harmful especially if it clashes with the original consent of participants involved. In the case Tara highlights, materials from an underground print publication that was produced for a very specific target audience were digitized and made accessible to a general audience without taking care to reach out to individual participants to get their renewed consent. The act of digitizing for access, in this case, was an act of “outing” for some participants who relied on the relative obscurity print provides. Everyone should take pause and read it.

Angela Galvan’s Architecture of Authority helps explore the differing and often conflicting core values libraries and vendors have and how these relationships affect the ways we provide access to our resources. The piece also complicates how we see our relationships to our users. My fellow co-presenter, Giordana Mecagni gave an excellent talk, The Colonizing Gaze – Digitized Collections, Radical Communities and Paywalls, on this subject at this year’s Society of American Archivists annual conference. Designer Jen Wang’s Now you see it: Helvetica, Modernism, and the Status Quo of Design, speaks on the history of design and its perpetuation of whiteness as aesthetic neutrality. Todd Honma’s work on teaching community archives and zines can serve as lessons for librarians, archivists, and other information professionals on how to use zines, an originally analog medium, to better engage with broader communities. I’ve gathered much inspiration, perspective, and validation from these readings. I am also excited to hear more from students and new professionals like Itza Carbajal, Chido Muchemwa, Nikki Koehlert, Aliza Elkin, and Crystal Paull, all of whom I just had the pleasure of meeting recently.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Thomas Padilla

Thomas Padilla is Humanities Data Curator at the University of California Santa Barbara. He publishes, presents, and teaches widely on Humanities data, data curation, and data information literacy. He is Principal Investigator of the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported, Collections as Data. Thomas is a member of the Association for Computers and the Humanities Executive Council (2017-2021), the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities Executive Council, the Integrating digital humanities into the web of scholarship with SHARE Advisory Board, and the ARL Fellowship for Digital and Inclusive Excellence Advisory Group.

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Yvonne Ng is Senior Archivist at WITNESS, an organization that “trains and supports activists and citizens around the world to use video safely, ethically, and effectively to expose human rights abuse and fight for human rights change.” Yvonne currently serves on the Advisory Board of Documenting the Now, and previously worked as a Research Fellow for the Preserving Digital Public Television Project. 

Thomas: To kick things off, how did you find yourself working for an organization like WITNESS? Were there particular experiences that you had that shaped your interest in the work?

Yvonne: I was very lucky to end up at WITNESS, an organization whose mission I truly believe in, and in a position that coincides with many of my interests. As Senior Archivist, I have the opportunity to collaborate with people around the world who are dedicated to defending human rights, to help develop new workflows for archiving video outside of traditional institutional contexts, and to manage a unique collection of human rights video. Since joining WITNESS in 2009, my job has grown to incorporate more outreach, engagement, and training functions, which has given me the opportunity to learn from so many people outside of archives, while also remaining active within the professional archives community.

WITNESS, “Film it”

Before joining WITNESS in 2009, I was a research fellow on the Preserving Digital Public Television project, where I studied economic and other factors affecting the sustainability of digital preservation initiatives in public television. Prior to that, I graduated from the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program at NYU. My MIAP thesis focused on small arts organizations with audiovisual collections, and developed criteria for assessing their readiness to initiate preservation projects. So I came to WITNESS with a fresh awareness of the challenges of sustaining archives in non-institutional settings, as well as the potential value of archived collections to all different kinds of users.

Before I moved to New York for the MIAP program, I worked at the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre in Toronto, one of the oldest artist-run centers in Canada with an amazing de facto archive of important experimental works on film. I was also enrolled in a graduate program in film studies at York University. For a time, I thought I would pursue a Ph.D in film studies, but while at York I became interested in working in a more hands-on way with media, with the people who created it, and in audiovisual archives. Film theory and academia started to seem distanced from the actual systems of media production, distribution, preservation, and use.

Throughout my life, I have always been involved in activist- or art-oriented avocations, ranging from community radio starting in high school, activist-led student government in undergrad, and a collective that made art with kids. These days, I am really proud to be part of XFR Collective and Community Archiving Workshop. Working at WITNESS is the perfect fusion of so many aspects of my life and interests – human rights, archiving and preservation, video, community collaboration, creative production … the list goes on.

Thomas: Thinking about your work with one or more activist groups, can you describe specific challenges that WITNESS sought to help with?

[pullquote]We try to communicate the value of basic archival practices, such as keeping backups in geographically dispersed locations.[/pullquote]Yvonne: When it comes to video archiving, the primary challenges faced by the groups we work with are limited resources, and the fact that they are working in contexts where human rights abuses are taking place and their security is a concern. Groups that have implemented archival workflows tend to be ones that do a lot of video production and post-production, like La Sandia Digital in Mexico or Refugee Law Project in Uganda, and others focused on collecting evidentiary documentation, like SyrianArchive.org. For other groups that are not directly concerned with media management or preservation as part of their everyday activities, it can be difficult to set aside the additional time and resources to implement archival workflows.

We try to communicate the value of basic archival practices, such as keeping backups in geographically dispersed locations. Unfortunately, the importance of these practices sometimes does not sink in until something bad happens, like having a YouTube account taken down or having a hard drive fail. A positive example that I like to share is that of Kianga Mwamba, a woman who recorded her mistreatment by the Baltimore police on her phone. The recording was “accidentally” deleted while her phone was in police custody, but she fortunately had the foresight to activate her remote backup ahead of time. Because of that small act, she was later able to retrieve a copy of the video from the cloud and use it as evidence in her successful suit against the police department.

WITNESS, “Kianga Mwamba: Cops try to delete video of violent, unwarranted arrest, but fortunately it’s backed up to the cloud”

WITNESS provides archival training resources, in-person workshops, and ongoing consultation and collaboration. Our freely available resources include the Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video, which received the 2014 SAA Preservation Publication Award, and a number of short training videos. In our resources and workshops, we try to give guidance that is practical and realistic for small human rights groups, which are not necessarily what traditional collecting institutions might consider best practices. I do not, for example, talk much about metadata standards, but do brainstorm with groups about the kinds of information they want to keep track of, why it’s useful to record that information in a consistent way, and at the same time discuss what information might put them at risk.

WITNESS, “Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video”

While I think we have been successful helping some groups with practical activities like collecting, organizing, and cataloging their videos, our training resources do not solve larger sustainability challenges, like staffing and the cost of ongoing collections maintenance. One way that groups might address this, however, is through local networks and collaboration – a good example of this is our partnership with XFR Collective.

One of the biggest ongoing challenges is of how to archive and preserve, while at the same protecting video documentation from authorities that seek to seize it, through subpoenas or other means, and use it against people. There are a variety of approaches to mitigating harm, such as concealing identities, informed consent, and encryption, but these are not always sufficient in every case.

Thomas: It is clear from your comments above that there is often an immediate tension between the ability to capture and share digital media with relative ease and an awareness of how the data and relatively automated systems of description around them hold the potential to endanger the creator. What technical solutions have been developed to help groups you typically work with?

Yvonne: A number of technical tools are available that can make documenting abuse safer for victims, activists, and witnesses. There are dedicated apps, like CameraV, which we partnered with the Guardian Project to create. CameraV allows a user to capture important metadata from the device at the time of recording and then secure the video and data from unauthorized access through password-protection and encryption.

Guardian Project, “CameraV”

Most people will not have a dedicated app like CameraV installed on their phones just in case they witness an event, of course, so it is important that they are aware of how to operate securely with their available settings and technologies. My colleague Morgan Hargrave wrote a great blog post that outlines some of these basic practices, like securing your device with a strong passkey, setting up automatic cloud backup, knowing your rights, and being conscious of potential risks before you share your video.

Knowing that people will usually use widely available tools and services rather than dedicated apps, we also work with technology companies to encourage the development of built-in security features that are easy to use and benefit all kinds of users beyond human rights defenders. The YouTube Custom Blurring tool, for example, makes it easy for users to obscure identifying information like faces and license plates when they share their videos.

Thomas: You’ve mentioned explicitly and implicitly, efforts you make to balance the needs of the groups you work with, with professional archival practice. What framework or ethic guides you as you walk that line? What suggestions do you have for others working in related capacities?

[pullquote]I think that meeting the needs of the groups we work with is professional archival practice.[/pullquote]Yvonne: I wouldn’t frame it as a balance between those two things; I think that meeting the needs of the groups we work with is professional archival practice. That is, it’s the job of a professional archivist to be able to look at existing standards and best practices and judge how they can apply or be adapted to suit particular situations, which are almost always less than ideal.

But in terms of what frameworks or ethics guide my professional practice, I guess I can point to a few things. First, on the most basic level, I try to approach my work always keeping in mind human rights principles of dignity, equality, inclusion, and accountability. In the day-to-day, this means prioritizing people’s safety and well-being, working in participatory and inclusive ways, and supporting and following the lead of activists working in their communities. With regard to our archival collections at WITNESS, we have internal guidelines on access and use that emphasize our responsibility to people depicted in the footage, people who recorded the footage, and to communities affected by human rights abuse. The Ethical Guidelines for Using Eyewitness Videos published by the WITNESS Media Lab, aimed at people collecting and curating video from the web, reflects these principles as well.

WITNESS, “Video as Evidence: Ethical Guidelines”

Michelle Caswell draws a useful framework for human rights archiving that she calls a “survivor-centered approach,” which resonated a lot with me when I read it last year. I appreciate her assertion of an ethical imperative to prioritize survivors of human rights abuse and victims’ families over other stakeholders in the archive, like academic researchers. She also calls for an approach to human rights archiving that is participatory and inclusive, that embraces its work as a form of activism, and that is able to look critically at itself.

I suppose the suggestion I would have for others is similar to what Caswell argues for in her article, which is to be self-reflective about our role as archivists, and not to hide behind the false idea that archiving is a “neutral” act. The work we do has value, so it’s important to think about who it should serve and where we want to put our energy.

Thomas: Whose data praxis would you like to learn more about?

Yvonne: I’m always on the lookout for smaller organizations and groups with media archives. I’m interested in learning about their workflows, what systems and tools they use, their collections, and their specific challenges. There are many ways that groups can manage and preserve video with limited resources, and it’s instructive to hear about as many real-life examples as possible.

Thomas Padilla

Thomas Padilla is Humanities Data Curator at the University of California Santa Barbara. He publishes, presents, and teaches widely on Humanities data, data curation, and data information literacy. He is Principal Investigator of the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported, Collections as Data. Thomas is a member of the Association for Computers and the Humanities Executive Council (2017-2021), the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities Executive Council, the Integrating digital humanities into the web of scholarship with SHARE Advisory Board, and the ARL Fellowship for Digital and Inclusive Excellence Advisory Group.

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In his latest post for The Signal, Trevor Owens explores digital objects through the lens of archival theory, such as respect des fonds, or the archival imperative to maintain original order. He explains:

While the representations of digital objects often appear non-linear it is critical to not be seduced by the flickering and transitory view of digital objects provided by our screens. At the end of the day, every digital object is encoded on some medium and that encoding is an ordered sequence of bits.