Demographic

Age: 58

Gender identity: Female

Race: Black

Indigenous: No

Class: Middle class

Other identity (e.g. linguistic, religious): N/A

Education: PhD

Language: English

Personal responsibilities: Family, research centre

Location: I am located in Toronto, Ontario. I lived in Vancouver for 10 years in the 1990s and worked at a number of artist-run centres while living there. I am of Jamaican and Nigerian ancestry and was born in Birmingham, England. I moved to Canada in the late 1970s.

Widgets: Tools & Platforms

• Transcription – Transkibus
• Collaborative Annotation – Annotator, Annotorius, Textus
• Crowdsourcing – PyBosa, Hive, Text Thresher
• Curation – Ponga
• Flagging Harmful Language – Description-Audit
• IIIF – Mirador
• Visualization – Gist

Brief Biography

As a Toronto-based researcher/educator I am interested in accessing media arts works that express the experiences of west coast citizens who identify as black. My broader concern is with the pedagogical possibilities of art works produced by black Canadians for telling different stories about who we are as Canadians.

Character description

• Loves sharing information
• Needs easy user interface
• Will ask for assistance
• Patient

Interest in archives & Life experience

Why interested in archives: I am interested in preserving the works and contributions of black Canadian cultural producers while seeking new ways to make these works accessible to broader publics.

Community affiliations: Black, arts, queer

Represented in archives: Yes

Professional affiliations: OCADU

Access needs and mobility: I have a disability that requires accommodation re: length of time in a sitting or standing position. I also suffer from paralysis is my left hand which limits my use of a computer keyword

Motivations

Why: Lack of information/gaps in the big “A” archive, desire to historicize Black Vancouver cultural production in the context of broader Canadian art historical narrative, desire for easier access to pedagogical materials

Frustrations

Barriers?

She can’t search collections by topic, specifically since she is looking for underrepresented and marginalized communities, she has to find evidence of Black people represented in the fonds and collections of largely white donors and collectors. She often wonders why archivists don’t add extra subject-based tags or metadata that can pull all of these items together, and finds the few instances of AtoM that do have subject taxonomies, aren’t helpful to her search and are still too broad. She understands that most things in archives do not get described at the item level due to time, budget, etc. but she is frustrated that it often takes twice as long to do these kinds of projects because she can’t immediately find results like she would in a library catalogue.

Info and Tech Access & Experience

Hardware: MacBook Air, additional monitor, keyboard, wireless mouse

Software: Microsoft Office, Adobe, Outlook, Zotero

Network connectivity: DSL

Experience with archival tools: High

Experience with archival frameworks: Moderate

Comfort with learning technology: High

Goals

What do they want to do?
Helen wants to find digitized photographs, oral histories, and diaries about Black individuals and communities in at the turn of the century in the Lower Mainland to add to Historypin. She also wants to share these photographs with a local Black community group and work with them on a collaborative event/exhibit.
What relationship do they want to the archives?
A positive, and quick interaction: getting the images from AtoM or via email and having them ready to display ASAP.