Thursday, April 25

Focus: Workshops and hands-on training; evening conference launch and case study presentation

Location: SRYC 3040 (3rd Floor)

9:30 – 11:30 AM

Workshop 1: The Crossing Fonds Ecosystem

Presenters: Kahani Ploessl (OCAD U), Joey Takeda (SFU), Syr Reifsteck (VIVO)

This workshop will share the details of the planning and building of the Crossing Fonds platform/ecosystem with Omeka S; review module implementation and their interactions; and explore how researchers can use the Crossing Fonds platform in their own research and teaching. Attendees will have the opportunity to investigate the interplay between project data and design decisions, personal research goals, and the CF platform thus far.  

In this workshop, participants will: 

• Be introduced to the Omeka-S platform and framework, its affordances and challenges 
• Gain familiarity with metadata, data modelling, and making decisions about data 
• Experience combining/curating digital resources through the Crossing Fonds platform 
• Learn about the administrative processes and the management of user roles within digital archival platforms 

No prior experience with Omeka-S is necessary, and we invite all interested participants to kick-off the symposium with us! 

11:30 AM – 12:30 PM

No host lunch

12:30 – 2:30 PM

Workshop 2: Archives, Description, and Participatory Community Practices

Presenters: Andrea Fatona (OCAD U)

This workshop will explore the growing interest and practice of participatory cataloguing practices and strategies with communities and researchers (such as the co-creation of new subject taxonomies and classifications).

3 – 5 PM

Workshop 3: Visualizing Meaning Across Digital Archives

Presenters: Sheelagh Carpendale (SFU), Miriam Sturdee (St Andrews & Chalmers)

Visualization experts will share perspectives and practices in data visualization to navigate and discover new meanings in archives.

Location: VIVO Media Arts

6:30 PM

Welcome Reception @ VIVO Media Arts

Food will be served and exhibition will be open for viewing.

7:15 PM

Welcome & Opening

7:30 PM

Case Study 1: Restaurant Industry Histories – Archival Displays and Screenings

Presenters: Sara Diamond, (OCAD U), Karen Knights (VIVO), Mia Chi Vu (SFU)

Researchers will reflect on three decades of labour in the restaurant industries along three themes: work and labour activism, representation, and archival presence. Research draws from fonds at VIVO, SFU, UBC, and VCA and demonstrates the Crossing Fonds platform/ecosystem.

This event is open to the public for a small fee; free for symposium attendees. Buy tickets from VIVO Media Arts.

Friday, April 26

Focus: A Collaborative Digital Archives Ecosystem

Location: SRYC 2740 (2nd Floor)

8 – 8:30 AM

Doors open, registration and catered breakfast

8:30 – 9 AM

Opening, Land Acknowledgment & Host Nation Welcome

9 – 10:15 AM

What is Crossing Fonds?

Presenters: Paul Hebbard (SFU), Karen Knights (VIVO), Sara Diamond (OCAD U/SFU), Sheelagh Carpendale (SFU); Kahani Ploessl (OCAD U)

Leaders of the Crossing Fonds project will discuss the reasons behind their collaboration which brought together institutional, public, and community-based archives to build a collaborative platform using Omeka S technology. They will share their collaborative process, the participatory design process, and the limits and opportunities afforded by tweaking existing technologies rather than building from scratch. They will discuss the critical archival practice and ethics of care at the heart of Crossing Fonds.  

10:15 – 10:30 AM

BREAK

10:30 – 11:30 AM

VIRTUAL KEYNOTE: Dr. Marian Dörk (FH Potsdam)

The Promise and Opportunity of Archival Digital Interfaces – Coming to Terms With Data Visualization

Moderator: Paul Hebbard (SFU)

Conceptual analogues are metaphors that combine theoretical principles with practical experiences. They expand the basic vocabulary of data visualization and offer generative principles for design. With conceptual analogues we can step into intellectual universes, while remaining connected to concrete everyday practices. By building an evocative and accessible vocabulary, conceptual analogues can help cross disciplinary boundaries to formulate aspirations for interface design and visualization research. Especially in collaborations among technologists, humanists, designers, and artists all bringing expertises from multiple fields, conceptual analogues can support the joint development of coherent frameworks that are not impeded by disciplinary concerns, but imbued with shared aspirations and commitments.

11:30 – 11:45 AM

BREAK

11:45 AM – 1 PM

Technologies Towards a Culture of Sharing – Part 1

Moderator: Richard Dancy (SFU)

Lauren Sorensen (Stanford Libraries), Methods and Processes for the Virtual Tribunals access and preservation initiative (Virtual)

This talk will present recent, ongoing work within Stanford University Libraries’ collaboration with Stanford Center for Human Rights and International Justice to develop the Virtual Tribunals collection platform. The mission of this initiative is to provide access to post‐tribunal court documents and evidence openly online for legally trained users and lay‐audiences, including populations directly affected by conflict or living in relevant diaspora communities. Digitization methods, metadata strategy and digital preservation will be discussed, as well as use of open source tools such as ArcLight and OpenRefine.

Kate Hennessy (SFU), Digital Collections and Research Creation: Collaborative Media Production as a Method for Decolonial Curation

Hennessy will discuss a series of projects that she has been a part of over the last 15 years that used collaborative and decolonial research-creation methodologies for the curation of virtual and physical exhibitions that remediate and create digital cultural collections. Produced in collaboration with Indigenous communities and organizations in Canada, and with galleries, museums and archives both in Canada and internationally, Hennessy will show how these collaborative and participatory media productions have created opportunities for the articulation of crucial issues of representation, continuity, cultural property rights, and repatriation–– and the curation of this knowledge for wider the public.

Joey Takeda (SFU), Between Modularity and Minimalism: Sustainability, Platforms, and Ecosystems

This talk thinks through two paradigms of digital infrastructure—modularity and minimalism—to ask what it means, and what’s at stake, in creating sustainable digital platforms. Drawing on a variety of digital archival platforms, including Crossing Fonds, Takeda will outline both the theoretical challenges of creating sustainable shared ecosystems and the technical mechanisms available for building long-lasting projects.

1 – 1:45 PM

Catered lunch

1:45 PM – 3:15 PM

Technologies Towards a Culture of Sharing – Part 2

Moderator: Jana Grazley (CVA)

Jessica Bushey (CSU – San José), Harnessing Machine Learning for Archival Description and Community Sharing

Bushey will present on her professional perspective and research findings on the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support archivists in increasing discovery and access to collections of archival images. As both an archival practitioner and scholar, it is clear that current approaches by archivists for describing images (both digitized and born digital) and making them available via online databases cannot keep pace with the growing volume of visual archives and increasing demands for public access to them. Exploratory research into AI tools and archival practice offers the potential to develop methods for harnessing machine learning to assist in activities of archival description and improve access to archival collections. This will be especially important when developing archival access systems aimed at sharing information and collections between archives and with different communities, such as artists, BIPOC researchers and historically marginalized groups.

Richard Dancy (SFU) & Emily Guerrero (VIVO), How does it fit together? AToM and Collective Access

CollectiveAccess and Access-to-Memory (AtoM) are two platforms for describing and providing access to holdings that are widely used by Canadian archives. This presentation is by two research partners in the Crossing Fonds project – VIVO (users of CollectiveAccess) and SFU Archives (users of AtoM). It will look at the role these two systems have / could have in a software ecosystem that better supports work that crosses fonds, breaking down the traditional archival boundaries between repositories that hold related materials and between repositories and researchers who want to create their own collections and stories with the materials they have gathered from various sources.

Miriam Sturdee (St Andrews & Chalmers), Beyond the Textual – Visualizing Alternative Knowledge Search

How can we utilise creative practices in continuing to inform the design and development of novel systems and interfaces? Miriam’s interests within archival research concern alternative forms of knowledge production (beyond the textual) and the future of archival material ‐ how might archives collect and disseminate disparate objects and unusual formats, how might we search within these? She has built a practice of capturing data through drawing. Miriam will provide a creative overview of visualization tools and approaches appropriate for archival research.

Mark S. Fox (U Toronto), The Canadian Urban Dataset Catalogue: Towards Cataloguing Cultural Datasets

The mission of the Canadian Urban Data Catalogue (CUDC) is to provide awareness of the vast array of urban and non-urban Canadian data by providing an open catalogue of Canadian datasets. It catalogues both open and closed datasets, along with data accessible via web services. CUDC is openly available for searching and creating new catalogue entries. CUDC uses a rich metadata model, including OCAP and FAIR information, that supports the documentation and search for datasets relevant to a user’s needs. Over 1,110 datasets have been catalogued to date. This presentation will provide an overview to CUDC and describe the work we are doing to support OCAD University’s efforts in cataloguing Canadian cultural datasets. 

3:15 – 3:30 PM

BREAK

3:30 PM – 4:30 PM

Short Student Presentations: Community Archives

Moderator: Claire Grenier, Graduate Student (OCAD U) and Crossing Fonds Research Assistant

LATIN AMERICAN ARCHIVAL APPROACHES 

Alan Colín-Arce (U Vic), Two Approaches for Documenting a Mexican Feminist Student Movement

Traces of Mexican feminist activism tend to be ephemeral both because of the medium in which they are created (graffiti, protest signs) and because the government quickly removes them before they can be documented. In this presentation, I will discuss two approaches for documenting the 2020-2021 feminist student movement that happened in Toluca, Mexico. The first approach, followed in the Huellas Incómodas project, is through digital archiving. This counterarchive allows activists to submit their images and videos of feminist activism, along with metadata such as title, description, place, and time. These records, if the activists choose to make them public, are then used to create data visualizations such as maps and timelines. The second approach was creating a web archive of 100 local news stories about the movement. While they do not tell the story of the movement from the activist side, they are an important source for tracing how the university and local authorities responded to the movement. These news stories also contain traces of feminist activism before they were deleted. Both projects are counterarchives because they challenge the government’s removal of feminist demands from the public space, and the centralized approach to preservation in Mexico, where activism that happens in the capital is more likely to be documented. These two approaches could be useful for documenting similar local social justice movements in other parts of the world to prevent their traces from being erased without documentation. 

Ester Bovard (U Amsterdam), Hierarchies of Visibility: Mapping El Salvador’s Audiovisual Archives in the Digital Landscape (virtual/recorded) 

Global digitalization heralded the democratization and decolonization of archival access, promising previously marginalized groups unprecedented levels of autonomy and power to participate in the creation of their own political and historical narratives. This presentation explores whether these hopes have been realized, or if the power dynamics of the pre-digital archive have simply been reproduced in the digital realm. Increasingly, the structure of the digital landscape has proven to be driven by the largely unknowable hegemony of commercial search engines and a growing reliance on automated algorithms. My research reveals how this phenomenon is effectively impeding the digital visibility and accessibility of smaller archival organizations, especially in the Global South. Using El Salvador as a case study, I will demonstrate how I applied a systematic search analysis to examine the visibility of relevant audiovisual archival resources online. Dishearteningly, results overwhelmingly revealed this visibility to be skewed towards organizations and resources in the Global North, and resources within the country itself to be largely invisible to all but the most dedicated of searchers. This is particularly significant given that, while material that remains undigitized undoubtedly risks being consigned to the void, digitized material that is neither visible nor accessible to those who search for it fares little better. By taking a step towards understanding how the structures and processes of digitalization create hierarchies and entrench colonial power dynamics in the digital space, this study contributes to the identification of ways to achieve greater visibility for the most marginalized voices in the archive. 

NORTH AMERICAN QUEER AND TRANS ARCHIVES 

Sky Dragushan (U Vic), Unearthing Transmasculine Histories in the Archives

Cross-dressing was criminalized in the United States from 1848 until 2011. Prior to the overturning of this law, transgender, gender-transgressive, and cross-dressing individuals maintained radical communities underground through the discreet sharing of physical publications. The University of Victoria holds the largest Transgender Archive in the world, and within those holdings lie sixty-seven newsletters titled FTM, dated from 1987 to 2008. ‘FTM’, or ‘Female to Male’, describes the transition process of a person born female later identifying with a male gender identity. FTM was published by FTMI, or FTM International, and promoted the connection and community building of like-minded transmasculine individuals, as well as provided services and trans resources. FTM mailed physical newsletters to paying patrons, and maintained a free digital presence online at ftmi.org, accessible today via the Internet Archive. FTM was spearheaded by Lou Sullivan, a male gay trans activist, who later passed the torch to Jamison Green, another male trans activist. Sullivan, and later Green, began holding FTMI meetings and events in San Francisco, but by the early 2000s FTMI had chapters and events across the globe. My talk will briefly uncover the publication history of the FTM newsletters available in Special Collections at the University of Victoria, along with a look at what kinds of information was available online at ftmi.org, which has now been archived via the Internet Archive. My research on the FTM publications is currently supported by the University of Victoria Libraries-Special Collections Lowens Fellowship.  

Sabid Ali (ECU), Activating Queer Archives: The Currency of Queer Material Culture

Activating Queer Archives: The Currency of Queer Material Culture explores the epistemology of a queer material culture that developed out of the queer liberation movements in North American and particularly Canada, focusing on objects and print material designed and disseminated by queer people. Asking the question, “How does queer material culture gain meaning through exchange?” I surveyed examples of material culture through four key Canadian LGBTQ+ archives: The ArQuives in Toronto, the Quebec Gay Archives in Montreal, the BC Gay and Lesian Archives at the City of Vancouver Archives and The Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria. Community and institutional archives are examined to determine how the value of material cultures for marginalized expressions of gender and sexuality relies on the exchange of artifacts. When artifacts are exchanged, meaning pertaining to gender and sexuality is created. The theme of ‘Crosspollination’ is addressed through the use of communication design projects and a reflective, practice-based methodology to discover the material limitations of artifacts uncovered. A curated history of objects reveals those object’s hidden pasts and the ways queer designers used covert methods of pushing the boundaries of an increasingly overt material culture. 

ASIAN CANADIAN DIASPORAS IN BRITISH COLUMBIA 

Jocelle Refol and Kathleen Anne Zaragosa (U Toronto), Kuwentong Pamamahay: Stories of Place-/Homemaking of the Filipinx Diaspora in Vancouver (virtual) 

Kuwentong Pamamahay (KP; “Stories of Homemaking” in Tagalog) is a collaborative storytelling project on the Filipino-Canadian experience of identity and community in Vancouver, co-created through a partnership between Sliced Mango Collective, Heritage Vancouver Society, and UBC’s Asian Canadian and Asian Migration program and Public Humanities Hub. As told and framed by the youth members of the community on their own terms and methods, KP is a community-based archive that challenges traditional research methods by amplifying participant-centred narratives through kapwa (“shared sense of Filipino identity” in Tagalog) between Storymakers and Storytellers. Kuwento is the Tagalog word for stories and also the act of verbal storytelling. As a way of constructing heritage and cultural knowledge, exchanging these stories is the oral history tradition of the Philippines—a tradition that has found its iterations and practices despite centuries of colonization. As an oral history archive, KP highlights the presence of traditional Filipino values among the Vancouver diaspora. In doing so, they “map” community members’ relationship to the city according to their sense of pamamahay, the Tagalog concept of making both a physical and social space feel like home. Using an intersectional approach, KP has collected over fifteen stories across the Lower Mainland that will be curated in a public online exhibition by Summer 2024. 

Kiara Dabreo (UFV), “Let the day come when they will see clearly the interests of all workers:” Mapping the Social Histories of Muslim Immigrants of South Asian origin in British Columbia 

South Asian Muslims in British Columbia (BC) have a rich, diverse, and long history that spans over 100 years and is shaped by immigration, settlement, and cultural exchange. However, their stories are often overlooked or marginalized in traditional archival collections and histories. This presentation delves into the application of critical archival methods to document migration narratives of South Asian Muslims in BC, a research project undertaken by the South Asian Studies Institute (SASI) at the University of the Fraser Valley. We examine how archival practices intersect with issues of power, representation, and equity, particularly in the context of migration histories. By centering the experiences of racialized communities, in this case the South Asian Muslims, the project challenges dominant and often racist and Islamophobic narratives of the community. Through inclusive research methodologies, such as oral history documentation, SASI actively involves South Asian Muslim community members in the preservation and curation of their migration stories. This presentation will demonstrate how critical archival methods improve documentation of migration stories, particularly those of South Asian Muslims in BC. SASI’s approach in this project not only ensures that diverse voices are represented but also fosters a sense of ownership and agency among contributors. It considers the ethics of documenting migration stories, prioritizing consent, privacy and cultural sensitivity. It aims to honor contributors’ rights and promotes inclusion. The project will create an archival collection featuring an interactive digital exhibit with oral histories, photographs, and community documentation to ensure the preservation and accessibility to the general public.  

Raaynaa Madaan (UFV), Archiving South Asian Canadian Identities: Representation and Interdisciplinary Dialogue Through a Psychological Lens 

Trauma-informed archival practices are crucial for ensuring the responsible representation of equity-deserving communities, particularly those with histories of marginalization and historical injustices, like those arising from wars, residential schools and colonization. While archives hold immense potential for amplifying marginalized voices, they can inadvertently perpetuate harm if they inaccurately portray their narratives and experiences. This is especially true for communities like South Asian Canadians, who have faced various forms of oppression, a pivotal event being the historical tragedy of the Komagata Maru. My proposed presentation performs a case study on the tragedy through archival data obtained majorly from the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive (SACDA) to showcase how incorporating psychological frameworks like narrative inquiry, conceptual expansion, reflexivity, and community-based participatory research can enrich archival practices. These tools not only deepen our understanding of traumatic South-Asian experiences but also promote empathy and cultural sensitivity within archival practice. As a psychology major and a dedicated South Asian research assistant, I have actively engaged in characterizing archival materials pertinent to our community’s experiences in Canada. My objective is to demonstrate how psychological insights can be integrated within the archival landscape, thereby ensuring an inclusive and equitable representation. By advocating for the integration of diverse perspectives and promoting cross-pollination between psychology and archival studies, I aim to inspire fellow archivists and researchers to adopt trauma-informed practices and engage in critical reflection on the ethical implications of their work. 

4:30 – 4:45 PM

BREAK

4:45 – 5:45 PM

KEYNOTE: Donna Sacuta (BC Labour Heritage Centre)

Finding Working People in the Archives

Moderator: Sara Diamond (OCAD U/SFU)

Finding Working People in the Archives will introduce the BC Labour Heritage Centre (BCLHC), its history and current vision; consider whether there are “archival silences” pertaining to BC labour history, including whose and what stories are missing; and then look at the ways the BCLHC is filling those silences through it extensive work in creating digital materials including podcasts, social media, digital walking tours, labour history classroom resources, and union presentations. The Union Zindabad! Project will serve as an example of a major project.

Location: VIVO Media Arts

Doors open at 6:30 PM

Archival and Case Study 1 Exhibits @ VIVO Media Arts

Food will be served and exhibition will be open for viewing.

7:30 PM

Land Acknowledgement and Introduction

7:45 PM

Presenter: VIVO Crossing Fonds 2024 Programming Team

and finally… the image transfers to the screen*

Featuring work from the Crista Dahl Media Library & Archives (CDMLA) and contemporary artists inspired by, investigating or remediating analog archival resources and/or their community histories.

At VIVO
VIVO’s event features a screening of short media including the Premiere of Dana Claxton’s Fonds Crossing, created as part of Crossing Fonds Case Study 2. Also, Digit Recalls the Future (Elizabeth Vander Zaag) Caribou in the Archive (Jennifer Dysart), a so-called archive (Onyeka Igwe), Coyote X (Terry Haines), and Shattered (Karin Lee).

On-Demand
Available to Symposium registrants and public ticket holders to the longer-form works Framing Agnes (Chase Joynt) andStuck Between an Archive and an Aesthetic (Pamila Matharu)

*Title courtesy of Jennifer Dysart

This event is open to the public for a small fee; free for symposium attendees. Buy tickets from VIVO Media Arts.

Saturday, April 27

Focus: Critical Archival Studies in the Digital Context

Location: SRYC 2740 (2nd Floor)

8 – 8:45 AM

Doors open and catered breakfast

8:45 – 9 AM

Greeting & Land Acknowledgment

9 – 10 AM

KEYNOTE: Kristin Kozar (UBC)

Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Digital Tools

Moderator: Dana Claxton (UBC)

Kristin Kozar will discuss the fundamental relationship between data sovereignty and Indigenous sovereignty in relation to archives as well as her views regarding the ways that digital archives and tools can advance Indigenous data sovereignty as well as the risks. She will further discuss the role of community engagement in building an ethics of care in relation to Indigenous archives and the barriers First Nation communities face in regards to Indigenous data sovereignty.

10 – 10:15 AM

BREAK

10:15 – 11:30 AM

Reclaiming Histories: Indigenous Perspectives

Moderator: Kayla Lar-Son (Xwi7xwa Library)

Dana Claxton (UBC), Interpreting Indigenous Histories through Digital Artworks, Crossing Fonds New Work

Sheila LaRoque (USASK), Community Collaborations to Rethink Classification and Description

Laroque will reflect on the emerging collaborations between librarians, archivists and Indigenous community members and scholars, with particular attention to rethinking library classification systems and metadata redescription. Laroque will touch upon some of the current projects she is working on; including the North/Nord Shared print project. She will also touch upon two different experiences in introducing students to archival research; including genealogical work done with Métis students in the provincial archives of Manitoba, as well as with the Neil Richards Collection of Sexual and Gender Diversity. In addition, she will outline how Indigenous cultural resurgence and community development are concurrent with any digital practices that are adopted by libraries and archives. She will address these themes in the context of her current work as Liaison Librarian for Indigenous studies and Government Information at the University of Saskatchewan.

11:30 – 11:45 AM

BREAK

11:45 AM – 12:30 PM

KEYNOTE: Dr. Michelle Caswell (UCLA)

Culture of Care, Baking Feminist Care Ethics into Digital Archives: Lessons from SAADA and TAVP

Moderator: Sara Diamond (OCAD U/SFU)

The talk will frame the emerging discipline of critical archival studies and its core principles, defining an ethics of care and suggesting principles, policies and practices that can bring this foundation to archives, whether institutional, public or community based. Based on interviews and focus groups with contributors to two digital community archives (The South Asian American Digital Archive and the Texas After Violence Project), this presentation will address how minoritized identity‐based community archives design digital projects that model a feminist ethics of care across space and time. Caswell will explore the temporal, representational, and material aspects of liberatory memory work, arguing that archival disruptions in time and space should be neither about the past nor the future, but about the liberatory affects and effects of memory work in the present. She will consider what these ideas mean in terms of archival interfaces and finding aids.

12:30 – 1:15 PM

Catered lunch

1:15 PM – 2:45 PM

Collaboration With and Between Indigenous, Black, and Other Equity Deserving Community Archives and Libraries

Moderator: Kira Baker (CVA)

Elizabeth Shaffer (UBC), Generative Frictions: Archival Praxis in Contested Spaces

Shaffer will discuss a number of past and current projects she has been involved in that work to surface the coloniality of the archives and decentre oppressive systems of records creation in service to documented communities and individuals. Building collaborative and iterative digital systems, exhibitions, and interactive tools, these projects generate opportunities for co-operative and anti-colonial creation as a means of combatting exclusion and erasure. Engaging Black methodologies and Black feminist thought as frameworks for confronting the violence of the archives, Shaffer will discuss the need to reimagine archives futurity and navigate archives present in service to generative systems of disruption, ethics of care, and reparative spaces.

Dan Pon 盤大明 (grunt gallery), Co-learning and actionable steps toward a more accessible archive

Pon will share the process of developing and enacting strategies for a more accessible digital collection, drawing from his work coordinating the creation and population of grunt’s digital archive, which documents forty years of artist-run programming, on the CollectiveAccess platform over the past three years. He will also discuss the place of the archive in grunt’s larger Accessible Events, Public Programs, and Exhibitions (AEPE) initiative, and related theoretical and practical learnings from his participation in grunt’s accessibility work, positioned as a person without the lived experience of a disability.

Syr Reifsteck (VIVO), Beginning Slowly: Creating a Guide to the Indigenous Materials and Presence at the VIVO Archives (Virtual/Recorded)

Syr will share about the work that VIVO Media Arts Centre invited them to embark on as part of its overall journey to better understand, describe, tend, and reflect upon the videos, files, newsletters, ephemera, fonds and collections that reside within VIVO’s Crista Dahl Media Library and Archive (CDMLA). Syr will focus on exploring their path though the records held at VIVO and the creation of a research guide surfacing and coming to name the presence of Indigenous artists, producers, crews, casts, subjects, contributors and communities. The guide’s underlying values and strategies have also gone on to inform how VIVO is implementing Collective Access and participating in Crossing Fonds project. Alongside serving primarily as an initial discovery tool for communities, patrons and researchers, the guide has served as one of the starting points for the organization’s deeper work of returning to relationship and understanding how both the varied presences and absences of Indigenous artists and voices shaped and shape VIVO.

>> Contribute to Syr’s Padlet: https://padlet.com/sreifsteck/beginning-slowly-creating-a-guide-to-the-indigenous-material-e94oc82z4gujnzdu

2:45 – 3 PM

BREAK

3 PM – 4:15 PM

Digital Archives and Ethics of Care

Moderator: Melanie Hardbattle (SFU)

Melissa J. Nelson (Archives of Ontario), Description and Access for Anti‐Black Archival Material

Nelson will speak to trauma-informed and people-centered best practices for working with and providing access to digital archival material, particularly in the context of Black cultural heritage. She will discuss her work and research interests relating to the preservation of Black cultural heritage and ethics of care in preserving, describing and providing access to harmful archival materials. Contributing to the dialogue on creating inclusive archival descriptions, Melissa will share her expertise in thinking critically about the impact of archival practices on the discoverability of racist archival records and discuss how she incorporates this into her own work as an archivist.

Cait McKinney (SFU), Ethical and Political Questions – Queer and Trans Community Archives

McKinney will focus on the unique ethical and political questions queer and trans community archives bring to digitizing collections. They will focus on key examples of metadata creation in these archives. McKinney will situate these digital projects within a longer history of alternative indexing and classification practices, examining the politics of information in queer social movements, focusing on how these movements struggle to provide vital access to information using new digital tools, within conditions where that access is often precarious.

Gracen Brilmyer (McGill), The Crip Archives Project: Archives Through a Critical Disability Studies Lens (Virtual)

The Crip Futures Archive project––conducted by, with, and for disabled people––uses data collected through focus groups with disabled archival users to identify their current issues in archives, as well as how they desire facets of archives to be different. This research not only aims to understand the needs and desires of disabled people who have worked with archival materials but also demonstrates the critical role of disabled people in building and designing the scaffolding for a new digital disability digital archive.

4:15 – 4:30 PM

BREAK

4:30 PM – 5:30 PM

Short Student Presentations: Strategy, Policy, and Digital Methods

Moderator: Jordan King, Graduate Student (OCAD U) and Crossing Fonds Research Assistant

STRATEGIES FOR CANADIAN CULTURAL POLICY AND PRACTICE 

Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte (SFU), Archives in Action: Canadian Audio-Visual Archive Policy Plan (AiA) 

The presentation will provide an overview of the SSHRC-funded project Archives in Action: Canadian Audio-Visual Archive Policy Plan (AiA), currently underway under the leadership of Claudia Sicondolfo and ME Luka (University of Toronto Scarborough) and Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte (Simon Fraser University). The goal is to inform Crossing Fonds participants of this initiative and to invite collaboration and input. Archives in Action will help facilitate much-needed cross-sector dialogue around the policy implications faced by vulnerable and/or marginalized audiovisual (AV) collections and archive holdings across Canada. Led by key members of the Policy Working Group within the six-year Archive/Counter-Archive SSHRC Partnership project, AiA will facilitate a series of knowledge mobilization activities involving multiple stakeholders who think, work, and live through consistent challenges related to the preservation of and access to audiovisual cultural heritage materials. AiA aims to generate community care-oriented policy interventions which aim to centre the collections and media work of vulnerable community-based artists and of the audiovisual artefacts of their surrounding community. Bringing together academics, cultural workers, media artists, distributors and exhibitors, and community members, AiA will organize four regional workshops across Canada throughout May 2024 and a two-day symposium in Toronto in July 2024. Policy recommendations that come out of this project will rely on operational models and ICT tools that incorporate creative, collaborative, non-extractive, and community-centred approaches to (re)imagining audiovisual archival practices. Acting as a collaborative knowledge mobilization project, AiA symposium participants will contribute to a Manifesto and/or Working Paper in the form of a National Action Plan that will act as an advocacy call to action for industry stakeholders across exhibition, production, and heritage preservation institutions and organization.  

Carolyn Smith (DAL), From Policy to Practice: A Blueprint for Decolonization in Community Archives 

Analyzing national and international policies and protocols constructed to confront colonial practices in the archival field, I intend to build a policy framework and strategic plan for community-based settler archives to adapt a standardized practice prioritizing a respectful collaboration with Indigenous communities. Community archives housing Indigenous heritage are constrained due to a lack of funding, resources, and staffing, which in turn, effects their ability to implement the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015). Through an accessible strategy, the institutions have the potential to actively participate in the decolonization of Canadian archives. Focusing on justice-orientated practices the framework intends to deconstruct complacent colonial structures and policies that harm Indigenous peoples in primarily settler designed community archives. Using a knowledge synthesis approach I will survey, historicize, and contextualize policies, protocols, and relative literature to identify best practice in archival decolonization. I aim to build a policy framework that is accessible for settler archivists to apply an informed, collaborative, and respectful standard of practice. My research agenda arises from my experience working in a primarily settler-oriented community archive housing Indigenous collections who are limited by a lack of funding, resulting in the low allocation of resources to the development of Indigenous relations policies and practices. Understanding my position as a settler archival researcher, I will conduct my research in consultation with the ethical commitments outlined in OCAP, UNDRIP, and the Adelaine Declaration. 

Silvana Sari and Michael Li (OCAD U), First Steps Towards Building a Data Fluent Canadian Cultural Sector

The imperative for a data-fluent Canadian cultural sector, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, is evident. In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, the arts and culture sector is increasingly reliant on data analysis, a practice known as “cultural analytics” (Manovich, 2020). This shift requires cultural organizations, their funders, and their audiences to engage more deeply with data-driven approaches. Understanding the impact and effectiveness of cultural initiatives, both locally and globally, necessitates comprehensive data collection and analysis methods (Das et al., 2017). However, Canada currently lacks a cohesive cultural data strategy, standardized data storage, exchange protocols, and a unified analytics infrastructure. This research enhances Canada’s cultural analytics by identifying key data sources to improve sector-wide data collection and analysis. The project identifies community actors, researchers, and industry professionals in cultural analytics, documenting data collection efforts, types, and methods, and setting data governance standards. It seeks to connect researchers and their data, encouraging its utilization for coordinated research efforts, and identifying practice gaps, including tracking cultural data provenance, especially concerning Indigenous communities. Outreach ensures Indigenous data representation, applying OCAP and CARE principles. The initiative develops a model for an integrated cultural data database at national and provincial levels, focusing on creating a prototype and effective data visualization and navigation strategies. This research fosters an inclusive cultural data cataloging platform through co-design with partner institutions and data owners. Led by OCAD University Cultural Policy Hub and SynapseC, the University of Toronto provides front-end development expertise. Galeries Ontario enhances collaboration with galleries, ensuring effective co-design. 

DIGITAL METHODS FOR HERITAGE PRESERVATION 

Roxy Moon (U Toronto), Digitization as Preservation: Social Media, Collective, and on the Ground Archiving as Preserving Palestinian Heritage

In October 2023, a video of a handful of family photos on top of rubble was posted by Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad, with the caption, “I went on the ground to cover news today, and I saw these memories of a family that no one knows anything about now.” Memories, she felt, which were held in these material items. However, these memories and the people they depict, have now been shared and the evidence of the lives within them has become archived. In a time where the copious destruction of Palestinian heritage materials is occurring as a result of the siege on Gaza and assault on the West Bank, digitization through social media and digital archival projects are essential methods which counter the complete destruction of Palestinian history. This presentation seeks to argue that, despite not fitting into digital preservation standards, these on the ground actions of documenting heritage in Palestine are essential in preserving Palestinian material history. Photos, videos, and scans posted to social media and sent to initiatives such as the Accountability Archive, the Palestine Poster Project Archives, and the Arab American National Museum, create a copy of the evidentiary information held within Palestinian historical documents, therefore safeguarding this information in the case of their destruction. 

Ng Mawonthing (IIT Guwahati), Singing the Village: Towards a Participatory Micro Digital Archive of Phalee/Phadang Oral Culture (virtual) 

This presentation outlines initial thinking and work geared towards a projected participatory community archive of Phalee proverbs and folk songs within a doctoral project focused upon collecting and rhetorically analysing Phalee and Tangkhul proverbs. Phalee/Phadang village (population approximately 4000) is located within the Indo-Burma Biodiversity Hotspot, near the state capital of Manipur in Northeast India. The Phalee/Phadang language is spoken by the Tangkhul Naga tribal community from Phalee village but is mutually incomprehensible with the official written and spoken language of the tribe. Following increasing initiatives among tribal communities for heritage preservation, the Phalee too are beginning to document their language and traditions. My doctoral project participates in this endeavour. With increased population dispersion, especially in the younger generation, the Phalee have begun to use digital applications in ways analogous to what has been called the “digital family” model towards imagining a village community. For instance, the Phalee Longshim (the word used for the single-gender dormitories in which Phalee children and youth live till adulthood) and Phalee Literature WhatsApp groups have become crucial for information sharing to memorialise endangered Phalee rituals and lore. These text-based digital tools, moreover, have led to lively debates about preserving and documenting the language in Roman script. My doctoral work till date has generated 15 GB of audio folkloric data from elderly village inhabitants. This presentation will propose some ways of integrating this corpus online with community participation involving clean, smart and self-curated data geared towards an archival model based upon simplicity, accuracy, and ease of access and retrieval. 

Olivia Daniel (SFU), Preserving Legacy for Future Generations: Kwantlen First Nation Archive 

In this brief presentation, I will outline the collaborative effort with the Kwantlen First Nation’s Tribal Council and Knowledge Keepers to envision their digital archive. I will also explain why Mukurtu was chosen as Kwantlen’s Content Management Software, and how it best serves to preserve their legacy for future generations. I will also go over my experience curating digital collections that inspire joy within the community. Lastly, I discuss the plans for the Archive’s first open-house event. 
 

Location: Black Arts Centre

7:30 PM

Exhibition and Research-Creation Case Study 3 – Black History and Culture in the Lower Mainland @ BLAC

Food will be served and exhibition will be open for viewing.

Presenters: Andrea Fatona (OCAD U), Maira Castro (SFU), Moroti George (BLAC) and Hafiz Akinlusi (BLAC)

Digital fonds include fonds at VIVO, fonds documenting work lives of Black food service and cultural workers at SFUA and various Black history materials at City of Vancouver archives as well as personal archives. Fatona and the BLAC team will review research outcomes and curate historic and contemporary examples of Black cultural production.

Sunday, April 28

Focus: Crosspollination

Location: SRYC 2740 (2nd Floor)

8 – 8:30 AM

Doors open and catered breakfast

8:30 – 8:45 AM

Greeting & Land Acknowledgment

8:45 – 10:15 AM

Media Art and Art Archives: Principles and Practices

Moderator: Sara Diamond (OCAD U/SFU)

Oliver Grau, The Evolving Archive of Digital Art (Virtual)

Kickstarting the field of Media Arts research, the ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART (ADA) has documented the rapidly evolving field of digital art since 1999. This research-oriented overview of works at the intersection of art, science, and technology has developed in cooperation with international media artists, researchers and institutions as a collective project. Since today’s digital artworks are processual, ephemeral, interactive, multimedia-based, and fundamentally context dependent because of their different structure, they require a modified, or expanded concept of documentation. ADA ascribes high importance to artistic inventions like innovative interfaces, displays or software. How does ADA continuously adapt to address changing needs of researchers and artists? After the last research phase the focus was on further development of the social media functions of the living community, uploading and tool development for data analysis and visualization in AR, the next phase is a.) on the pros and cons of AI in a living archive, b.) the development of a transcontinental network of leading archives, c.) a federal initiative to integrate digital art into the museum world and d.) transfer of ADA to institutions in (smaller) countries with difficulties to afford many years of archive development but have a lively media art scene.

Sarah Beth Seymore (Internet Archive), Collaborative ART Archive CARTA

The Internet Archive and the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), embarked on a collaborative project aimed at capturing and preserving at risk web based art materials. The project, Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA), facilitates the development of a collaborative entity of art libraries building collections of archived web based content related to art history and contemporary art practice. Through this collaborative approach, the project leverages shared infrastructure, expertise and collecting activities amongst participating organizations, scaling the extent of web-published, born-digital materials preserved and accessible for art scholarship and research. The goals are to promote streamlined access to art reference and research resources, enable new types of scholarly use for art-related materials, and ensure that the art historical record of the 21st century is readily accessible far into the future.

10:15 – 10:30 AM

BREAK

10:30 AM – 12:15 PM

Case Study 2- Indigenous Media Arts Group; IMAGeNation Aboriginal Film and Video Festival

Moderator: Andréa Tarnawsky (SFU)

Presenters: Karrmen Crey (SFU), Dana Claxton (UBC), Cleo Reece (IMAG)

Researchers, fonds originators and archivists explore the comprehensive archive of documentary evidence in SFU Rare Books and Special Collections and VIVO, discussing its preparation, pertinence, interpretation, and presentation.

12:15 – 12:45 PM

Catered Lunch

12:45 – 1:45 PM

KEYNOTE: Ry Moran (UVIC)

Taapwaywin – A Podcast Series – Deep Conversations and Crossing Forms of Knowledge

Moderator: Andrea Fatona (OCAD U)

Moran will discuss his efforts to build relationships between scholarly and Indigenous communities in order to share knowledge that exists in both communities. He will discuss the creation of his podcast series Taapwaywin and share excerpts from it. The series highlights the stories and experiences of Indigenous Peoples, underrepresented populations, University of Victoria and other scholars and memory keepers from around the world, building a living archive that features deep conversations and analysis with Survivors, Elders, Knowledge Keepers and others on seeking truth before reconciliation can begin. Episodes
include discussions on the contradictory role of museums as potential sites of truth-telling or appropriation; the role of truth-telling and the power of place names.

1:45 – 2 PM

BREAK

2 – 3:15 PM

Research/Creation as an Archival Research Method in the Digital Context

Moderators: Karen Knights (VIVO) and Andrea Fatona (OCAD U)

Christine D’Onofrio (UBC), Scattered in Existence

D’Onofrio will discuss Intuition Commons (2019), an online, community-sourced visualization platform. It was created in reaction to “Wikipedia” editathons where the collaborative spirit was exciting, but the perpetuation of legitimizing references was antithetical to ways a community offers, inspires, contributes, communicates and produces. She will discuss this pedagogical work in the context of hooks’ performative and relational coming to know oneself via knowledge accessed through deep networks of human relationships (2003) and how users are encouraged to contribute their own perspectives and accounts, creating a rhizomatic web of nuance and overlapping stories. She will show how it demonstrates the complexity of Agamben’s inaccessible and radically unknowable communication of singularities as an attribute that does not unite them in essence, but scatters them in existence (1990).

Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda (SFU), Remediation, Reactivation and Re-enactment: A model for feminist archival practice through research-creation

Based in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University for the past eight years, cMAS members and collaborators have developed a series of interactive art projects that investigate and foreground the histories, roles and experiences of women within art, science and technology. cMAS interactive projects have explored the kitchen as a laboratory and an intergenerational family cooking recipe book to recover the role of women as agents of the Archive; combined analog, digital and artificial intelligence-driven imaging tools with live performance and sound; and explored motherhood as an expanded mode of caring that moves beyond the boundaries of the human into the non-human and the machine. Focusing on a series of collaborative and ongoing projects, including The Real, the Virtual and the We, Remediating Mama Pina’s Cookbook, Body as Border and Mitochondrial Ontologies, I retrace the methods used in their production and theorize on the possibilities of remediation, reactivation and re-enactment as feminist methods of archival practice through research-creation.

Sheelagh Carpendale (SFU), Visualization for Creative Exploration

The powers that be would have us believe that working with data is new. Not so. Calling it data – using that word – is new but actually, persistently, collecting information, or gathering data has been part of our lives through the ages. Often, our use of data is private, perhaps small, but it has continually formed a part of how we live our everyday lives. Often it has been stored, saved, and preserved as part of our arts and crafts through the ages. It is important that we do not let the current ‘big data’ revolution with all its emphasis on bigness and power, alienate us from our deep connection with data. It is important that we share the potentially empowering aspects of the use of small, situated, and embedded data. 

Carpendale will discuss how she is currently, in collaboration with the Creative Coast (a collective of local community artist organizations on Vancouver Island), exploring how to not only help the members of the community develop their own understanding of and relationship with data but to also see it is possible to take this further – leverage data to influence changes.

3:15 – 3:30 PM

BREAK

3:30 – 4:30 PM

Where Next With the Crossing Fonds Ecosystem?

Moderator: Sara Diamond (OCAD U/SFU)

Presenters: Crossing Fonds research team

This roundtable draws on in-person and online project participants and symposium attendees to frame a way forward for the collaborative research that Crossing Fonds has begun in building an open source ecosystem design for collaboration across archives.

4:30 – 4:45 PM

CONCLUDING REMARKS