Contributors: Andrew Lin, Wish Wang, & Elle Morris-Benedict
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Evaluation Plan Final Project
For our final project, we decided to focus on Native American artifacts in public institutions, with an emphasis on UC Berkeley. We understood that after the Native American Grave Protection Act (NAGPRA) was passed in 1990, museums and educational institutions nationwide were mandated to put more of a priority on repatriating culturally significant Native American items and remains, including UC Berkeley. However, the repatriation process sparked by NAGPRA has not been duly enforced, leading to the updated NAGPRA regulation passed December of 2023 which articulated that all unrepatriated remains and artifacts must not be put on public display without explicit permission from the tribe they belong to. Berkeley has an (underfunded) team of five NAGPRA representatives to lead the repatriation process of the 9,000+ Native remains/artifacts stored under the Hearst Gym. Thus, we hope to make a collection of news articles, interviews, and pictures relating to public education institutions repatriating their extensive collections. Other than making the collection based on available web resources, we plan to make the archive based on the exclusive resources provided to us as a student at UC Berkeley. We plan to visit UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Library, which we understand has resources and texts relating to our topic. Andy will be taking care of the Native American artifacts based on available web resources (particularly the Midwest). Elle will take part in adding news articles on Berkeley’s repatriation efforts, a video interview with a NAGPRA representative, and ensuring accurate metadata on each archival item upload. Wish will visit UC Berkeley libraries (particularly the Ethnic Studies Library) to find resources regarding the topic, as well as working on web accessibility.
As to how we’ll evaluate the project, we will have at least 50 objects/resources regarding buildings and artifacts relating to Native Americans. We hope that our website can be neatly organized through different categories by location (e.g. Berkeley Native American resources) so that they can navigate the site easily. We plan to use Omeka to structure our website, giving the most comprehensive overview of Native American artifacts, as well as using HTML/CSS to change the aesthetics of the website. Ideally, our project site will be cleanly organized such that it’s easy to navigate the archive site itself. We will choose a color palette that would be helpful for people to view the site, specifically a color palette that would be color blindness friendly such as this shade of yellow and teal pictured below.
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National Gallery of Art
Site name: Natural Gallery of Art
Url: https://www.nga.gov
Rights statement: https://www.nga.gov/open-access-images/open-data.html
Material seen on site: One of the largest art museums in the country, located in Washington D.C., the National Gallery of Art (NGA) has an extensive collection of American and Western European artwork from the Middle Ages to the present, with a special emphasis on works by masters like Picasso, Rembrandt, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Open Music Archive
Site name: Open Music Archive
Url: https://www.openmusicarchive.org/index.php
Rights statement: https://www.openmusicarchive.org/about.php
Material seen on site: An extensive collection of historical recordings, scores, and other music-related materials from the early 20th century to the present day are to be preserved and made accessible by the non-profit Open Music Archive.
Wikimedia Commons
Site name: Wikimedia Commons
Url: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Rights statement: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Copyright
Material seen on site: A massive library of freely useable photos, movies, and other media files are available via the Wikimedia Commons, a media repository that offers them under a variety of free licenses, including Creative Commons and public domain.
Prelinger Archives
Site name: Prelinger Archives
Url: https://archive.org/details/prelinger
Rights statement: https://www.panix.com/~footage/prelarch.html
Material seen on site: Over 3,000 publicly accessible films, videos, and rare and obscure industrial, educational, and amateur films from the 1930s to the 1970s are collected in the Prelinger Archives, which is a comprehensive online collection that can be viewed and reused for free under Creative Commons licenses, although not all films on the site have such licensing.
NASA Commons Site on Flickr
Site name: NASA on the Commons
Url: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasacommons
Rights statement: https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/
Material seen on the site: With over 140,000 NASA photographs available under Creative Commons licenses for public and media use, reuse, and modification, the NASA Commons Flickr account is a freely accessible online repository. It contains photographs taken by NASA of outer space.
J Paul Getty Museum
Site name: J Paul Getty Museum
Right’s statement: https://www.getty.edu/legal/terms-of-use/
Material seen on site: The Getty Museum website includes information about art, architecture, and cultural history, as well as educational tools, exhibitions, and research opportunities. Over 150,000 photos and films are available for free download.
What is Archive?
In the field of digital humanities, archives pertain to the methodical gathering, maintenance, and arrangement of digital resources associated with human civilization, past events, and academic research. Digital artifacts that have been carefully chosen, conserved, and made available for study and research include texts, photos, videos, audio files, and webpages. For my own personal project, I plan to use archives to demonstrate the impact of the Lewis and Clark journals on American culture. The digital archive I am going to analyze here is the project of Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis. This project demonstrates how data, geography, history, and social movements can intersect through a visual representation tracing the growth of LGBTQ spaces within St. Louis. The data shows the areas of St. Louis which welcomed the LGBTQ community between the end of World War II in 1945 and the 1992 adoption of St. Louis’s first civil rights law that included the queer community. The goal of the project is to empower the underrepresented, yet rich history of the LGBTQ community in St. Louis through visual illustration of the longstanding struggle for their identities to be accepted in the area. The researchers used data from the St. Louis LGBTQ History Project, interviews, city directories, phonebooks, and surveys to gather information and begin plotting areas on the map coinciding with the dates they became queer safe spaces.
The data collected and presented in this project is effective in that through the use of geo-spatial representation paired with text, it demonstrates that the gradual acceptance of LGBTQ community members in St. Louis correlates to the areas which desegregated earliest, signifying the intersection between race and sexuality at that time. What would make the project more interesting to viewers would be the application of personal stories to resonate more with users. Seeing colorful dots on the screen is one thing, but if I were able to hover over each dot and read a short quote from someone who frequented the location in that time period I would be much more engaged.
Marlene Manoff highlights the “ambiguity of the archive” in her piece Theories of the Archive from Across Disciplines. She discusses the different uses of the word by various fields and individual scholars, noting some differentiate between the type of archive a collection holds, and some do not. She argues that the term has transformed into “a kind of loose signifier for a disparate set of concepts.” (10)
On a similar note, Kate Theimer agrees with Manoff that “archive” is used too broadly nowadays, but she goes deeper and argues that the original definition by archivists is the best usage of the word. She wrote “archivists’ definition is more specific, and therefore in my opinion conveys greater meaning.” (2) Theimer contends that a more expansive concept of archives has been embraced by digital humanists, emphasizing the archivist’s selection process over the collection’s actual qualities. According to Theiman, in order to guarantee that the function archives serve in safeguarding unique historical material is understood, archivists should advocate for their conventional definition, as Theimer argues that the more inclusive one is inaccurate.
Kathleen Roe articulates an important factor of the Society of American Archivists definition of “archives” in her piece Why Archives? She states that because archives have “enduring” significance to society—that is, they are crucial for comprehending the past, present, and future—they are maintained and made available to the public.
The definitions of archives provided by these three authors demonstrate the ambiguity and complexity of the term. They stress the significance of archives as historical documents, their ongoing worth to society, and the necessity of a precise definition. Theimer argues for a more narrow definition centered on collecting qualities, Roe emphasizes the importance of archives as a source of knowledge, and Manoff observes the range of definitions across fields.
In my personal opinion, and based on these essays, I agree with Theimer. Because the word “archives” is used across so many disciplines, it would be more uniform and easier to collaborate if the definition was less ambiguous. I thought Theimers’ opening example of a native born “Archivist” nation citizen traveling to the country of “Digital Humanities” and being confused by the widespread misuse of the term the native Archivist is used to really hit home for me that the broad use of the word is inaccurate.