Active Archives News
Welcome to the first edition of the Active Archives Insights newsletter. As mentioned in the last edition of the h+d insights newsletter in October, this new, bi-weekly newsletter will primarily focus on news, innovations, and projects in the areas of digital archives, art, museums, and participatory culture. We welcome any feedback on the new format or suggestions for news items and events. Please send your comments to aai-info[at]mit{dot}edu.
I am glad that Ben Silverman will continue as the newsletter’s editor.
Kurt Fendt and the Active Archives team
Focus: Active Archives
An international team led by Canadian professor Laurence McFalls and Swedish-German film producer Alberto Herskovits release Open Memory Box, a project collecting over 400 hours of home movies from residents of the German Democratic Republic spanning 1947 to 1990. The project aims to portray daily life in East Germany, categorizing rolls of film by keywords and stories. Click here to visit the Open Memory Box web application.
Jasper St. Pierre's noclip.website offers a novel way to explore archived video game worlds. Using 3D level assets extracted from games on Nintendo and Sony consoles from the 1990s through the 2010s, St. Pierre's web app invites users to go "out of bounds" and escape the confines of the games' control schemes. Users can click and drag and use WASD controls to move the camera, or toggle various render effects, layers, and scenes with toolbar controls.
The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa presents Trans Past, Trans Present: The Making Trans Histories Project, an online collection coordinated by Will Hansen, Gender Minorities Aotearoa, Tranzform, InsideOUT, and Tīwhanawhana. This collection draws together selected objects and stories from trans people's lives, ranging in age from teenagers to septuagenarians. The significant objects and their attached narratives shed light on the trans experience, from coming out, to fashion, to the surgical removal of organs, and more.
archives digest
Nine chapters (and counting) are released Green Open Access from the new Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites.
Michael Weinberg writes for Slate about Berlin's Neues Museum and the complex legal claims to copyright surrounding a 3D scan of the Nefertiti Bust produced by the museum and leaked online.
After one year of operation, the New York Public Library's Insta Novels project has been a success, reports David Griner in AdWeek. The project depicts classic literature in a series of Instagram stories.
Also on Instagram, Djali Brown-Cepeda presents a digital archive of historical photos from Latinx New Yorkers called nuevayorkinos. Read photo descriptions for stories from each donor, and learn about related efforts in Isabelia Hererra's article for the New York Times.
Writing for Cultural Analytics, Ed Summers and Amy Wickner trace the circulation of Vine posts on Twitter before and after the former service's shutdown. The article features visualizations of changes that occurred around the sunsetting event.
The Zay Initiative presents a digital archive of Middle Eastern fashion heritage—the first of its kind, reports Nadine Fahmy for Scene Arabia.
Reporting for Roll Call, Alex Gangitano selects some favorites from FloorCharts, the digital archive of charts presented on the floor of the US Congress. Browse the entire FloorCharts archive here.
Quartzy's Anne Quito reports on Google's new digital archive project to digitally preserve Puerto Rican artwork saved from Hurricane Maria.
Conferences, Fellowships + Publications
Applications are due November 22 for presenters at the Digital Pedagogy Lab UK critical digital pedagogy workshop (20-22 April 2020).
Proposals are due December 1 for the EADH Virtual Research Environments and Ancient Manuscripts workshop in Lausanne (10-11 September 2020).
Applications are due December 20 for Grants-in-Aid from the University of Houston US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH) program.
* Proposals are due December 31 for demos and lightning talks for the MuseWeb conference (MW20) in Los Angeles, California (31 March - 4 April 2020).
* Proposals are due January 15 for the 2020 Keystone DH conference, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (8-10 July 2020).
Proposals are due January 24 for the 2020 Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL) with topic "Hindsight 2020: Looking Back, Moving Forward," held in Austin, Texas (18-21 May 2020).
Abstracts are due January 25 for the 2020 Corpora & Discourse International Conference at the University of Sussex, UK (17-19 June 2020).
* added this issue
