NARA's "Harmful Language Alert," knowledge collaboration, deflating FamilySearch's mass digitization announcement, and the importance of critical consumption of media
Happy Sunday! This week I'll cover pressing archives, library, genealogy, and history-related news, while summarizing articles on related subjects
I hope you are all doing well! People responded on Twitter to my comment about the White male genealogist Alexander Bannerman who dismissed Biden’s slaveowning roots as non-important, in last week’s newsletter, an interview with a Politico reporter. AncestorsAlive called Bannerman’s argument, “disgusting. NOT history, NOT genealogy...just lies.” BlackProGen stated, “what was the point of dropping that info [that Biden has slaveowners] to the press but not doing due diligence to trace their descendants and tell us more about THEM?! Clickbait.” A genealogist, Valorie, made the best point of all: “All of our history is important. If we hide parts because they are now seen (rightfully) as shameful, we are failing to tell the whole truth. How can we dismantle the system of racism without all the truth?” On Tuesday I published a short article about representations of librarians in stock photos and gifs, and after a back-and-forth with a librarian, it turned out they just didn’t like one of the sites I chose. Fancy that. The same day I got the news that I’m a new member of the Steering Committee of Issues & Advocacy, a SAA Section! So excited! With that, let me move onto the rest of my newsletter. It is, again, “too long for email,” which means you’ll have to open it in your web browsers to read the whole newsletter, as it will be cut short, especially if you are reading this on a Gmail account.
There’s been a lot of chatter about archives this week. It was mostly related to a “Harmful Language Alert” on the NARA Catalog. Some folks with reactionary opinions like Sen. James Lankford, for instance, jumped on this when they saw that it was on the pages of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, declaring that “the left” was trying to censor/sully the documents. The reality can’t be further from the truth, as that warning appears on ALL the pages of the catalog, not those of specific records. Admittedly, the content warning could have a better name, but I think having the warning is a promising idea and should be supported. It is a result from the racism task force which I wrote about on June 19, 2021, and the full description of the warning is described here. NARA was right to point out that the warning is there because “the Catalog contains content that may be difficult to view,” specifically referring to the “photos and documents relating to war, slavery, lynching, KKK, and other topics.” I wrote a short thread about this, available here, and there is a thread between myself, Maarja Krusten, and Alexia D. Puravida, for those interested, here.
If I’d have to guess, the same people who are complaining about this warning are fine with the MPAA’s film rating system, the FCC’s TV Parental Guidelines, the RIAA’s Parental Advisory label, the DC Comics rating system, the Marvel Comics rating system, or the ESRB’s video game ratings, along with many other content ratings, which can be relatively comprehensive at times, or intrusive (in the case of internet filters). After all, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which called for, in section 551(b), a television rating code with “identification of…programming that contains sexual, violent, or other incedent [sic] material,” passed in a bipartisan manner in the Senate (also see here) and the House. NARA’s Harmful Language Alert is different. Unlike the above noted labels, codes, and ratings, which are socially conservative efforts to control content, this alert is the result, as noted earlier, of the Archivist’s Task Force on Racism Report, released in June 2021, the same month the “Harmful Language Alert” was published, and the page for the alert was published in July. It is part of what NARA describes as an effort toward “reparative description and digitization”, something which is sorely needed.
There is archives news beyond NARA’s alert. My work colleagues at NSA, Malcolm Byrne and Kian Byrne, wrote about forty years of U.S.-Iran relations, full with “antagonism, distrust, and frustration,” from a new volume of declassified documents! I read this week about ways that “records and recordkeeping are “bound up” in experiences of loss and grieving,” from November 2019, and reflections from Samantha Thomas on letters about profound loss. The Crossville, Tennessee paper, Crossville Chronicle wrote about the Cumberland County Commission committee considering a former bank as a place for an archives, while some talked about the Seattle Gay News archives, 10,000 volumes at a religious archives and records center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a new project to make Pittsburgh’s City Archive more accessible to the public. Apart from this, the Montgomery Independent noted that Alabama Department of Archives and History continued its Food for Thought series, with a guest that talked about some of the favorite drinks of Southerner, Knox County Archives received a national award for its preservation efforts, and an article about looking beyond “traditional written archives to a rich array of sources that can help to widen the scope of research.” Welcome to the newest member of the College and University Archives Section’s Steering Committee, Tiffany Cole.
Displaced Voices focused on the Twentieth Century Histories of Civic Society Responses to Crises of Displacement, Emily Judd of the Princeton Library talked on virtual teaching with special collections, with history professor Martha A. Sandweiss quoted as saying rightly “archives are created by people with points of view,” and Andrew Dunning of Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book noted open-access Bodleian publications on HathiTrust. Emma Esperon, Archivist, and Aliza Leventhal, Head, Technical Services, Prints & Photographs Division, both of the Library of Congress, blog on creating finding aids in an effort to enhance access. Apart from the Dance Music Archive, said to be the “world's biggest archive of electronic music and culture,” Margaret Long of History Associates, disproved the common misconception that archives “house mainly papers and books of the well-to-do or influential deceased,” and Maarja Krusten noted the value of creating “where we can share the joy or pain of learning something new, about ourselves and about the lives of others,” noting past blogs by Meredith, Lance Stuchell, and Kate Theimer. NARA blogs, spoke on the saga of the Hoover Dam, the children’s hour by FDR, and records of the Patent and Trademark Office.
On a related note is April Hathcock’s post proposing a feminist framework for radical knowledge collaboration, with three main questions: How has the patriarchy affected you? How has the patriarchy impacted your work? How have you been complicit in perpetuating the patriarchy? Hathcock goes on to say this evolved “into a framework for thinking through equitable collaboration in knowledge work,” with a focus centering on the “radical empowerment of the collective and the dismantling of oppressive systems and practices.” This connects with an ethic of care/ethical approach, intersectional lens, inclusion, importance of repatriation, and many additional principles, and knowledge work such as developing anti-oppressive description and metadata. Will such principles be used in archival contexts? Only time will tell.
With that, let me talk about libraries. LOC blogs focused on many topics, such as a review of So Many Islands: Stories from the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, the Rock Springs Massacre in 1885, how to view a “hefty set of search results in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog,” some of the Outstanding Women of Arsis Press, and new research guides available online on musicals and music, along with posts on specific topics such as The OKeh Laughing Record (1922), and Phonautograms (c. 1853-61). I enjoyed reading the five questions and answers the 2021 LOC Junior Fellow, Joseph A. Torres-González, and a LOC Junior Fellow working with the Digital Resources Division on the Foreign Legal Gazettes, Joseph Kolodrubetz. It was great to hear that Jason Reynolds will continue to be National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for a third year. NYPL had posts about historical fiction set in New York City and the Riot Grrrl revolution. Programming Librarian noted the value of librarian skills of outreach and marketing. Margery Bayne outlined the not-so-hidden-secrets of public libraries for booklovers. Paul Kelly wrote in Code4Lib about improving the lives of metadata creators with natural language processing. I’d also like to wish Jennifer Snoek-Brown’s Reel Librarians a happy ten year anniversary! Compare that to my Libraries in Popular Culture blog which has been around since July 26, 2020, so I wish Snoek-Brown the best on their blogging.
This week there was a lot of genealogy-related news. On September 22, Arelis Hernández, reporter for The Washington Post talked about an Ancestry DNA test she did and found that she is 50% Mexican Indigenous, more specifically Chichimeca,” adding she is interested in learning, upon her retirement Nahuatl, “the language of the Aztecs and also the Chichimeca and those folks that live there, and it's still very much spoken now.” The day before, FamilySearch celebrated the milestone of digitizing 2.4 million rolls of microfilm, a massive project which took 15 years, which was supposed to take 50-100 years to complete. James Tanner clarified that while this accomplishment is incredible, a significant chunk of the records are “restricted in some way and…all these records are not indexed and searchable from the FamilySearch.org Historical Records Collection,” meaning that many of the records “still show up as still being on microfilm.”
Paul Chiddicks wrote about his ancestors in the First World War and favorite genealogy podcast, while some had posts on genealogy-related humor, the unfolding of Black history over time, 101 genealogy websites worth checking out, and the Great Buchanan inheritance hoax. Smithsonian magazine explained a new study suggesting that Japan’s modern populations trace their ancestry to “three distinct groups, not two as previously proposed,” from DNA tests, history of farming ancestors in Upper Canada, how misspellings of names can throw you off, and Genealogy magazine focused on an opt topic these days: interpreting others’ direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry results.
That brings me to history. Smithsonian magazine had articles about a Vincent Van Gogh drawing going on view, revealed photos and documents of indigenous culture in 1920s Alaska, camel sculptures in Saudi Arabia which are older that the Pyramids in Giza and Stonehenge, a baroque masterpiece, and mass graves revealing the brutality of medieval warfare. There were articles in the magazine focused on the “great book scare” from the 1870s and 1890s when people thought that books spread diseases, which was disproven, new research suggesting that some Europeans who died of the bubonic plague were “individually interred with care,” a new species of giant rhino excavated in China, and archaeologists revealing the world’s first military memorial. There were also articles on the French scientist, André Michaux, who courted Thomas Jefferson, and the scandal he got pulled into, the sensational murder case that ended in an incorrect conviction, asking what Stonehenge sounds like, making clear why Black histories matter, and the incredible story of Hercules Mulligan, a spy and businessman in Manhattan during the Revolutionary War.
Then there are stories that don’t as easily fit into the earlier parts of this newsletter. Stitch, who I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, recently argued that critical reading and thinking should be part of how people engage with source media and fanworks, and how that work is created. She added that even if there is a problem with a fandom or media doesn’t mean you should never interact with it again, saying if you can understand where criticism is coming from, you can dodge that, provide effective tags and notes, then redirect criticism which comes from a certain direction. She also argued that media literacy is important, as it will help you become “a better fan, a better creator, and a better person,” noting a few resources at the bottom of her post. Putting aside the free online Critical Consumption course, and the list by family-friendly and generally socially conservative Common Sense Media, which sneers at any animations with “violence” or “bad role models” and once even wrote a racist review of Steven Universe according to the recent/last Steven Universe art book, on critical thinking and evaluating media, Jason Loviglio and Jenny O’Grady in UMBC Magazine write on how one can critically consume media. They suggest following the money, checking your facts, checking your priorities, and talking out a story. That is much better advice than the well-intentioned feel-good measures proposed by a pamphlet from the National Eating Disorders Association, which states that to be a critical viewer, recognize that media images and messages are not reflections of reality, the purpose of ads, talk back to the TV if you see a bad ad, write letters to advertisers to promote better messages, and write letters to companies promoting bad messages.
Fiza Baloch wrote in The Sheaf that you should ask questions, check facts, and be wary of specific outlets, applying the same to streaming shows, be critical of what you are watching, while Brette Bliss wrote on how to consume media carefully and critically. She declared that “not all media is evil,” and doesn’t have an agenda, saying it has the job to “inform and sometimes dissent,” adding that you should look at the advertisers, who/what the message is for, who could be hurt by the message, the company’s track record, different sides of the story, what other sources say, your thoughts, continuing to be informed and political, and to “be a responsible citizen, defend your arguments, know what you value, and know your news sources.” I have to disagree with Bliss that media doesn’t have an agenda, because it can, and does, have an agenda, and a perspective, especially when comes to so-called “enemies” of the U.S., and more broadly African, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries, and pushing for, at minimum, in the U.S., for continued support of imperial actions, shaped by the societal power structure which they are part and parcel of, without a doubt. That is something Bliss is ignoring and/or downplaying.
In the past week I also read articles about the growing movement to share science through quilting, the darker aspects of the rebellion in Star Wars, the development of the queer movement in the South in 1988, the exam surveillance company Proctorio suing critics of its practices, and how AI is making fake science worse. The Nib had illustrations about: a ransomware attack, casual or brutal death of children shown casually in films, lampooning COVID-19 deniers with a focus on deniers of Black Death, care workers during the pandemic, and the faulty attacks on critical race theory, to name a few.
That’s all for this week. I hope you all have a productive week ahead.
- Burkely