The Crossing Fonds Digital Archives Symposium
April 25-28, 2024
The Crossing Fonds Digital Archives Symposium, April 25-28, 2024 hosted in Metro Vancouver and online, will share two years of collaborative efforts and stimulate reflection on both the Crossing Fonds platform/ecosystem and the opportunities and challenges of digital archives writ large. This gathering unites academic, GLAM (gallery, libraries, archives and museum) and community-based experts who bring knowledge and practice in digital archive platforms and interface design, visualization, critical archival theory and practice, principles of OCAP and CARE, an ethics of care, participatory and co-design methods and expertise with digital records, particularly from media arts and culture. The symposium combines face-to-face and online presentations and dialogues featuring archival projects from IBPOC, queer, disabled, and other equity-deserving communities. Preliminary workshops allow a deep dive into the Crossing Fonds ecosystem, its tools, visualization approaches, and critical archival methods. The symposium includes a call for short papers by students (due February 29) and student presentation sessions that the Crossing Fonds graduate student team will organize.
The symposium has three themes:
A Collaborative Digital Archives Ecosystem, which will critique and disseminate the Crossing Fonds platform and present case studies including micro sites and methods developed through the program of research. Tools and techniques will be discussed from a socio-technological perspective.
Critical Archival Studies in the Digital Context, which will highlight an ethics of care, framed by dialogues regarding Indigenous engagement with digital archives. Indigenous research team members, archivists and librarians, and artists are featured throughout the symposium. We will engage a wide range of equity-deserving communities and individuals from these communities in presentations and research-creation.
Crosspollination, which explores collaboration across boundaries, whether archives or discipline.
The symposium will begin with a series of workshops on visualization, participatory community tools and the Crossing Fonds ecosystem and end with a go-forward planning session that harvests the seeds planted over the four days and encourages application of the ecosystem.
Symposium activities will occur on the unceded traditional territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), Kwantlen, Qayqayt and Tsawwassen Nations, on which SFU Surrey and the Black Arts Centre are located, as well as on the traditional and unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, where VIVO Media Arts is located. We respectfully acknowledge that these places have been stewarded sites of learning and exchange for time immemorial.
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Questions? Email: sydneylines@ocadu.ca