A*Census II, the value of archivists, critical librarianship, genealogy fiction, history under fire, and the Netflix walkout
Happy Sunday! In this week's newsletter I'll share my recent posts reviewing some of my favorite shows, coupled with news and articles about archives, libraries, genealogy, history, and much more.
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a good week. I’ve been very prolific this week. On Monday, I wrote about approaching Packard family history more critically, noting the concept of critical family history, which I described in last week’s newsletter. On Tuesday, my post about the librarian, Cletus Bookworm, in Rocky & Bullwinkle, acquiescing to censorship, was published. It was one of my favorite posts to write because it shows that librarians and libraries are not neutral and notes the role they play in oppressive systems. On Wednesday, a review I wrote on one of my favorite webcomics, Everywhere & Nowhere, was published in The Geekiary! The same day, my review of the first and second seasons of an animated sci-fi comedy series, Star Trek: Lower Decks was published. I highly recommend you watch it. Then, on Saturday, my review of Inside Job was published on The Geekiary. Inside Job is a quirky series which is a mix of paranoid fiction, workplace comedy, and just plain weirdness, with a protagonist who suffers from social anxiety, which I found very relatable as a person who is socially awkward at times. I’d definitely recommend it, just as much as Lower Decks. With that, let me move onto the rest of my newsletter which has again been deemed to be “too long for email.”
There has been a lot of chatter on social media about the SAA’s new A*Census of archivists, funded by the IMLS and jointly developed by the SAA, which I’ve mentioned before in this newsletter. Some, like Brad Houston, have criticized it for a “TON of leading questions” and have worried that it will “affect statistical significance.” Alexia Puravida agreed, adding that the questions could end up warping results in weird ways. For my part, I said the census itself could have been better done, asked when I’d be able to retire based on the state of the world, and had a whole, long tweet thread about it, beginning by responding to Puravida’s tweet about it, saying there should be more options on how much to spend on professional development each year. I appreciate all the work put into the A*Census, with questions about contingent and precarious labor, student debt, salary, unions in libraries and archives, and other typical questions, the construction of too many questions is problematic, even if it is “fascinating.” One person answered correctly in stating what they felt were important issues the archives profession should address in the next five years: turnover, salaries, and burnout. Another noted that an option for business major was not listed in the census while someone else wasn’t sure how to answer the question on student debt and someone else offered their thoughts on their long archival career. I also said that I didn’t consider myself a “memory worker” for the case of the survey, in responding to a metadata librarian asking the question about it. Hopefully there is more data about the profession, but it is an open question for how good that data will be, or whether it will actually “help the archival field strive to make the field more diverse and solve inequities to the best extent possible.” It will be still be of interest to see survey results which will be shared next year.
Additionally, Samantha “Sam” Cross recently reviewed an episode of What If…? which featured an archives. She said that while she enjoyed the episode, there are the usual mistakes of archives, like the reference to Indiana Jones and the lack of a finding aid. She did say that she liked the “little conversation about keeping paper over digital files” and hoped for the best in the following season. I hope that my comments in response to Cross and others about the episode on Twitter helped her with her post. I briefly mentioned the series at the beginning of my newsletter on October 3. And it’s great that Cross wrote about it, with my blog on archives in a sort of semi-hiatus right now. Also of note is discussion of community archives, Leanne’s cool “Archives Are Not Neutral” mug, digitizing audio reels, and an interview with Domnique Luster, the founder and principal archivist at The Luster Company. Luster said, in part that:
An archivist is an individual who works with memory and history through its records, and that can be a person’s records, an organization’s records, a company’s records. But it is someone who works with memory and with history, and history record keeping through the vehicle of working with the documents, photographs, maps, oral histories that are left behind…I think there’s a misconception or there’s a perception, public perception that archivists, we keep all the things like we keep all the history or librarian, like we keep all the stuff and we have our boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff, which is true…A lot of archivists can relate to the tension you’re describing between the immediacy of social media, and the slow and careful nature of archival work that often characterizes what we do every day. You don’t see the results of our work right away. It may take weeks, it may take months, sometimes it takes years to find whatever it is you’re looking for, or to process a collection, or to provide access to that collection. And so I appreciate that you shared that tension because I think a lot of archivists feel that.
I thought that part was interesting. The same could be said of discussions of /r/Archivist about an embedded archivist, archivist resume resources, and about Marion Stokes, said to be the “greatest archivist” in American media, with reflections on her by RAMCPU, with editorials on arcade culture and additional subjects. Related to that is the below video. On another topic, it was first reported that the Democratic-led House select committee investigating the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, asked for documents from NARA for their investigation, along with subpoenas, while the former president declared he had “executive privilege” to deny access to the records, even though this doesn’t make sense since he is not the president. Recently, in NARA-related news, NARA announced a supervisory archivist role for the presidential library of the former president, which engendered some interesting discussion between myself, historian Michael Hunter, and archivist Maarja Krusten.
That brings me to libraries. The first issue of the Journal of Critical Digital Librarianship was published on Thursday. This issue included an interview with Tonia Sutherland, an assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, along with articles about building “programmatic and equitable collections online,” navigating the terrain between a “commitment to caring for and with impacted communities and the potential affordances and perils of using sensitive collections as data,” and another which includes “lesson plan ideas that…engage middle and high school students in ways that help amplify their curiosity and explore their identities.” The journal is looking for critical approaches to digitization selection, metadata remediation, digital humanities, collections as data, and digital library technology, with a particular interest in “work that integrates feminist, antiracist, anticolonial, queer, and other critical frameworks to digital librarianship.” The Library of Congress had posts about manuscripts, marriage equality, a relief concert for the Midwest Fires of 1871, an unexpected business resource, a peak into the past lives of the library’s photo collections, and Westinghouse Works at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. American Studies professor Ian Scott wrote about, earlier in the year, It Happened One Night, a 1934 film within the library’s film registry. Screenwriter Aubrey Solomon reviewed State Fair (1933), also on the film registry, and writer Brian Scott Mednick looks back at Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), yet another film on the film registry.
Apart from the previously mentioned articles, there were interesting articles about the public library in Memphis, Tennessee, giving and receiving feedback, patrons annoyed when librarians in Hawaii tried to enforce a vaccination mandate, a new library in Moorpark, history of libraries, and UMich libraries declaring there are limited hours due to the pandemic and labor shortages (as does another library system). Are there really labor shortages? Or is it that the library is paying too little money and benefits? I say this because of the story that a man in Florida applied to 60 entry-level jobs and only got an interview for one of them, proving that the “labor shortage” is a myth promoted by the bosses and others. The reality is that people cannot work for companies as wages are too low, bad working conditions, or additional factors, even acknowledged in the New York Times back in May. This so-called shortage is due to bad management practices by employers, often not giving enough money or benefits, and the workers should not be blamed for it. Not one bit.
On additional library-related news, some communities are pleading to keep local libraries open, waving goodbye to fees, libraries documenting life during the pandemic, or who decides what is on library shelves. It was worrisome to see the safety concerns at public libraries in Seattle and the targeted online harassment toward Reanna Esmail, a South Asian Muslim woman and Lead Librarian for Instruction at Cornell University, after her remarks at a Cornell University-sponsored event were taken out of context, presenting the text of what she said at the event. However, the story of the little seed library stocks with veggie and fruit seeds was wonderful to see, as were all those who responded to a school board member in Chattanooga, Rhonda Thurman, who decried supposed “vile content” in books, clearly taking it out of context. I also thought it was interesting to read the speech April Hathcock gave in May 2019 on the eve of getting the Agnes Scott Award, explaining why she does social justice work.
There was a plethora of genealogy-related articles and news. I was glad to see the family tree in one of my favorite webcomic series, Our Universe. It was fascinating to read about a genealogist who works at a 5-star hotel in Dublin, Rebecca Hall’s new film adaptation of the 1929 novel “Passing,” the Ohio History Connection has offered up a series of workshops called Where My Single Folk? this year which are about “finding those family members who never married or passed away unmarried, including those who might have been LGBTQ.” Paul Chiddicks, another genealogist, talked about digging deep for his family history roots, while Genealogy journal had posts on fathers, forefathers, Indigenous perspectives, role of heritage, and LGBTQ+ people in Indigenous societies.
Additional posts were on bookmarks for tracing roots, about Megan Smolenyak, who is a “genealogist who can unravel the mysteries of where you came from with a DNA test and a love for archival research,” and examples of fictional genealogy mysteries in a Family Tree magazine article. In the latter case, Steve Robinson’s In The Blood, Nathan Dylan Goodwin’s The Wicked Trade, M.J. Lee’s The Irish Inheritage, M.K. Jones’ Three Times Removed, and Stephen Molyneux’s The Marriage Certificate. There were also examples of historical true crime murder mysteries, fictional family sagas, and nonfiction generational narratives and memoirs. Perhaps it will be time to brush off my blog about genealogy in popular culture and review some of these stories!
There were several important additional posts. Some were on organizing your genealogy research notes, the best genealogy websites, pioneers on the U.S. frontier, Irish involved in the U.S. war for independence, whether your ancestor was, or wasn’t, in a debtors prison, and how one neighborhood coped in 1918 with the flu pandemic at the time. Of note is a review of a heartfelt Netflix documentary which charts three Chinese adoptees as they try to rediscover their heritage, to note one review which is interesting, which I saw in the past week.
With that, we get to history. Smithsonian magazine has fascinating articles on the supposed “humane” side of George III, “the monarch despised by the colonists,” that ancient Japanese wolves may be the closest wild relative of modern dogs (a lot of genetic work here), the giant Ram head statue found in Egypt, the story behind the photograph of two gay dads kissing, the story of the astrolabe, said to be “the original smartphone,” and how over 20,000 years ago, a coronavirus epidemic left marks in human DNA. Additional articles focused on a 3D reconstruction of ancient Egyptian mummies, x-ray technology revealing censored secret correspondence of Marie Antoinette, a new museum for Indigenous people in Oklahoma City, how Sparta was more than a warrior culture, that the oldest airborne animal was a reptile with strange wings, the controversial Cecil Rhodes plaque in England, and the history of fighting for farm worker rights.
I also enjoyed reading the review of Bruce E. Stewart’s 2020 book, Redemption from Tyranny: Herman Husband’s American Revolution, that the internet’s most incredible collection of food history has been saved, the importance of interracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, watching how Egyptian papyrus is made, the history of the U.S. and Dominican Republic when it comes to baseball, the Black refugee tradition (and how the U.S. violates all sorts of asylum agreements when asylum seekers are deported), and Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s new book entitled Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games which analyzes “how films and video games from around the world have depicted slave revolt, focusing on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804),” with Hollywood not having films on the event, and calls attention to how “economic legacies of slavery and colonialism warp pop-culture portrayals of the past and leave audiences with distorted understandings.”
John Broich, a historian, noted in Perspectives of History, how those on the right-wing “claim that professional historians are leftist partisans making mere political fodder of history,” stated that historians are “engaging with people playing a game of trolls” when encountering right-wing detractors, without any real debate, and said that “consumers of right-wing productions of history are interested exclusively in cheering on their side.” He admitted that historians aren’t “convincing people who were never interested in good history to begin with.” He concludes by saying that historians “don’t argue from claims about human nature…or from essentialist claims about ‘race’” or even “require ‘balanced perspectives’ if the evidence doesn’t provide a case for balance,” and that by operating through drawing “complicated conclusions from abundant, quality evidence, we’re often led into unflattering histories of nationalism, and nativism…that digs deep, multigenerational roots into institutions.” He ends by saying “…the practices of history have become anathema to right-wing politics as never before. Let’s face it: history is ‘partisan’ against a party that’s anti-history.”
(I added the above since its almost time for Dia de Los Muertos, otherwise known as The Day of the Dead, on November 1 and November 2)
There are a number of articles worth mentioning in this newsletter. Most prominent was the Netflix walkout on October 20, with employees wanting trans people to have a “bigger role in internal conversations surrounding potentially harmful content, hire trans and nonbinary executives, and eliminate imagery of transphobic content in the office.” GLAAD said they stand with the employees, as did Shadi Petosky, a trans woman who once ran her own show, Danger & Eggs, and currently works at Netflix, Elliot Page, and Jaclyn Moore, co-showrunner of Dear White People who severed ties with the company. Without a doubt, Dave Chapelle’s transphobia leads to hate, and subsequently violence, toward trans people. Netflix itself is duplicitous, suspending three trans employees for “trying to attend a private executive meeting to voice their criticisms” while claiming they support the walkout, a clear lie. Chapelle is profiting handsomely from Netflix, signing a $20 million deal in 2016. Some of the protesters made that clear, that the issue at Netflix goes beyond Chapelle, who has joked about victims of R. Kelly, said (in 2016) that we should give the previous president a chance (why?), along with stereotyping Asians. Chapelle has made transphobic jokes for years, at least since 2017, while he also endorsed capitalistic centrist Andrew Yang in the 2020 election, with Yang pushing for a universal basic income of $1,000 a month, which has been said as a way to gut social programs, and is a clear technocrat.
Attorney Valerie Diden Moore reviewed U.S. privacy law: past, present and future. Stitch proposed a Fandom Misogynoir Bingo Card, defining what each part of this bingo card means, especially for Black fans. The Guardian noted Dave Eggers is risking “American sales of his new novel, The Every, by limiting access to the hardback copies,” meaning that “only small bookstores will stock it.” Hack Library School provided reading recommendations on the “path to success” and Millennials becoming a burnout generation. Sally Albright wrote about White privilege and performative purity in a strange argument, enshrined in liberal logic, to try and justify voting for Democrats rather than Republicans, saying that concerns about Democrats don’t matter. Ashanté M. Reese explained how the pandemic didn’t end hunger but instead exposed racism. Hathcock, in a post in 2017, explained her conflicted feelings about the audience of Hamilton but somehow seemed to sidestep the problematic nature of the show itself, whether that it “ignores numerous examples of slave ownership” or that Hamilton was “an anti-immigration elitist,” among additional criticisms. I’m a bit disappointed in Hathcock on this, as I thought she’d be more critical of the play, but I guess she was pulled in by its charm.
Analysts explained how language models could change disinformation. Scalawag Magazine reposted a requiem for the longleaf pine and had an article on lead poisoning in the Mississippi. Hamilton Nolan wrote an In These Times article on how, in Middle America, unions and Democrats are sleepwalking into the grave, ceding ground to the right wing. NBC News explained what happens to R. Kelly’s music on streaming platforms, noting it is still available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music.
There’s more going on than this. There’s the fact that the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 89% of stocks, the huge delays in the D.C. metro due to 60% of the trains taken off the tracks due to safety issues, the news that the IATSE deal for workers in Hollywood may be rejected by those in IATSE, and a sequel to the 1981 film by Mel Brooks, History of the World, Part I, with this sequel being a special variety series on Hulu which will be titled History of the World Part II, helmed by Brooks, with production to begin in Spring 2022. This series is said to include Nick Kroll, Wanda Sykes, Ike Barinholtz, David Stassen, and Kevin Salter. I’m not sure what to think about it, as Brooks is a person who declare he isn’t a “fan of political correctness,” claimed that so-called “political correctness” is hurting comedy (Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Maher, Jeff Ross and Dave Chappelle have said the same), even though it isn’t, as comedy is different now than it was when most of Brooks’ films came out. Even so, Brooks does admit there are limits to comedy. Like anything, comedy changes over time, it’s not fixed, and how it is constructed changes as well.
Apart from comics from creator Noelle Stevenson about colors and her name, I enjoyed reading about the interview with Cissy Jones, who voices Lilith Clawthorne in The Owl House, and how the Harley Quinn show “might be the best thing DC has made since The Dark Knight” and is very gay, and hasn’t been “forced to change to appeal to a more mainstream audience, soften its edges, or avoid the carnage.” The same could be said about anime, whether impressions on some anime in this fall season, the new series Komi Can’t Communicate as summarized by Anime News Network and Anime Feminist, or the best anime shows from P.A. Works (specifically Angel Beats, Another, The Eccentric Family, Shirobako, and most recently The Aquatope on the White Sand). Of note also are announcements of new manga series being released, which includes a story focused on an asexual woman, Honami Shirono’s I Want to Be a Wall, and another, from a different company, entitled Namekawa-san Won't Take a Licking!, said to be “a hilarious and adversarial yuri series.”
I close out this newsletter with some illustrations from The Nib. They are about demonizing of drug use, getting a hair cut from Amazon, the forever chemicals (the comic says “PFE” but I think she meant “PTFE” with both referring to Teflon), the history of the fortune cookie, and political gridlock which would disrupt alien contact. Others were about uncritical race stories from Republicans, rise in global temperatures, Democrats abandoning free community college from infrastructure bill, and how paintings are more than objects but are conservations between the painter and the viewer, as long as they remain relevant.
That’s all for this week. I hope you all have a wonderful week ahead!
- Burkely