Memes of Resistance, Election Reflections, and Voices from Drug Court: Social Justice, Ethical Cataloging, and Digital Humanities at Utah State University
Location
Room 303/305 Roundtable Discussion
Document Type
Presentation
Start Date
24-2-2018 10:45 AM
End Date
24-2-2018 12:15 PM
Description
Folklorists and librarians have long championed social justice and advocacy issues. Today, the skills garnered through principled academic discourse, community based ethnographic fieldwork, and ethical librarianship are utilized to collect, preserve, present, and educate around social themes and issues. Utah State University’s folklore faculty, folklore curator, and metadata librarians are using digital humanities to focus on social justice issues. From capturing memes that express shared social concerns to collecting personal reflections about the 2016 US Presidential Election Reflections, USU folklorists and librarians are working to create robust digital collections that focus on timely social issues with informed and ethical metadata. The aim is to bring the voices of those often under-heard, underserved, and excluded in current social dialog into the hub of USU’s digital humanities.
Utah State University's Digital Folklore Project tracks digital folk trends, which often fall into three categories: Social Issues, Serious Fun, and Animals. Each year, it names the Digital Trend of the Year. During the past three years, two of the three winners of the Digital Trend of the Year have had social justice themes: #BlackLivesMatter in 2014 and #LoveWins (which was about the Supreme Court decision on same sex marriage) in 2015. When it named #BlackLivesMatter as the trend of the year, the Digital Folklore Project was the first national group to recognize publicly the impact of this hashtag, which Time magazine later nominated for its Person of the Year for 2015.
Through community-based fieldwork projects, USU’s Fife Folklore Archives endeavors to bring the voices of historically underrepresented and excluded people, predominantly from the Inter-Mountain West, into its Archives. At its core, these efforts aim to be ethical, community-driven and informed, working to provide access and inclusivity. Recent projects include the Cache Valley Drug Court Oral History Project, the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Reflections: Social Media Collecting Project, and the Cache Valley Refugee Oral History Project. Fall 2017, the Fife Folklore Archives and the Folklore Program piloted a project to allow students to digitally submit folklore through the Libraries’ DigitalCommons, adding greater folk voices to USU’s digital offerings.
Along with the rich and vibrant content of these collections comes the imperative to make them accessible to researchers and the public. The Cataloging and Metadata Services unit at USU bridges the divide between collection preservation and access. Catalogers and metadata specialists must walk a fine line between maintaining national standards, providing useful access points, and warding off potential biases (ethnic, gender, religious, political, etc.), as they carefully select subject heading terminology and name authorities. Yet, catalogers often must do so with limited experience and understanding of the populations they are trying to describe. Thus, it is the aim of USU Cataloging and Metadata Services to engage in ethical, community-informed cataloging practices.
This round table will look at the issues surrounding social justice in the digital humanities and open a conversation about how the folklore and archives/library fields can develop a joint awareness about the manner in which these voices are collected and represented in archival collections.
Memes of Resistance, Election Reflections, and Voices from Drug Court: Social Justice, Ethical Cataloging, and Digital Humanities at Utah State University
Room 303/305 Roundtable Discussion
Folklorists and librarians have long championed social justice and advocacy issues. Today, the skills garnered through principled academic discourse, community based ethnographic fieldwork, and ethical librarianship are utilized to collect, preserve, present, and educate around social themes and issues. Utah State University’s folklore faculty, folklore curator, and metadata librarians are using digital humanities to focus on social justice issues. From capturing memes that express shared social concerns to collecting personal reflections about the 2016 US Presidential Election Reflections, USU folklorists and librarians are working to create robust digital collections that focus on timely social issues with informed and ethical metadata. The aim is to bring the voices of those often under-heard, underserved, and excluded in current social dialog into the hub of USU’s digital humanities.
Utah State University's Digital Folklore Project tracks digital folk trends, which often fall into three categories: Social Issues, Serious Fun, and Animals. Each year, it names the Digital Trend of the Year. During the past three years, two of the three winners of the Digital Trend of the Year have had social justice themes: #BlackLivesMatter in 2014 and #LoveWins (which was about the Supreme Court decision on same sex marriage) in 2015. When it named #BlackLivesMatter as the trend of the year, the Digital Folklore Project was the first national group to recognize publicly the impact of this hashtag, which Time magazine later nominated for its Person of the Year for 2015.
Through community-based fieldwork projects, USU’s Fife Folklore Archives endeavors to bring the voices of historically underrepresented and excluded people, predominantly from the Inter-Mountain West, into its Archives. At its core, these efforts aim to be ethical, community-driven and informed, working to provide access and inclusivity. Recent projects include the Cache Valley Drug Court Oral History Project, the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Reflections: Social Media Collecting Project, and the Cache Valley Refugee Oral History Project. Fall 2017, the Fife Folklore Archives and the Folklore Program piloted a project to allow students to digitally submit folklore through the Libraries’ DigitalCommons, adding greater folk voices to USU’s digital offerings.
Along with the rich and vibrant content of these collections comes the imperative to make them accessible to researchers and the public. The Cataloging and Metadata Services unit at USU bridges the divide between collection preservation and access. Catalogers and metadata specialists must walk a fine line between maintaining national standards, providing useful access points, and warding off potential biases (ethnic, gender, religious, political, etc.), as they carefully select subject heading terminology and name authorities. Yet, catalogers often must do so with limited experience and understanding of the populations they are trying to describe. Thus, it is the aim of USU Cataloging and Metadata Services to engage in ethical, community-informed cataloging practices.
This round table will look at the issues surrounding social justice in the digital humanities and open a conversation about how the folklore and archives/library fields can develop a joint awareness about the manner in which these voices are collected and represented in archival collections.