Online Hands-on History session with Mark Tebeau, Arizona State University
A Journal of a Plague Year: An Archive of Covid-19 is a rapid-response digital archive of the pandemic, formed in March 2020. Operated by a curatorial collective representing more than 100 galleries, archives, libraries, museums, and universities in the United States (primarily) as well as globally, the archive collected more than 14K digital artifacts in 2020. The curatorial collaborative broadly shares authority, including researchers in Asia, Australia, the United Kingdom, Central America, Canada, and the United States.
In this talk, archive co-founder Mark Tebeau will explore a number of inter-related topics: the extensive metadata applied to digital objects in the archive, including using user-created metadata; the challenges of sharing authority in archival collecting, digital design, and user discovery; the particular challenges of pandemic collecting in the United States during 2020, with its multiple crises, including questions about the very nature of truth; ethical issues associated with pandemic collecting; and whether and how documenting a pandemic may be ushering in a completely new type of rapid-response archive.
If you want to participate, please send an email to vanessa.napolitano@ext.uni.lu.