Wonderful webcomics, family history, archives, libraries, and beyond
This week I'd also like to share various pop culture reviews I wrote in the past week, whether about genealogy, libraries, and archives, and so much more.
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a productive week. This past week, I published an article on my blog reviewing genealogy in popular culture, focusing on one of my favorite webcomics, Tamberlane. I was surprised and honored to have the author of the webcomic, Caytlin Vilbrandt called my post an “interesting write-up” about how adoption makes “genealogical research more difficult,” using roots in the webcomic as an “entry point.” She said that roots and how “those can get complicated” is an angle she tries to “explore respectfully in the comic.” Apart from that, I wrote posts about library restrictions in animation and archives in one of my favorite animated series. With that, I’d like to move on with my newsletter.
When it comes to archives, my colleagues at NSA, Lauren Harper and Wendy Valdes, wrote about mail delays exacerbating problems with long-ignored FOIA requests. Apart from that, Heather Briston, University Archivist and Head of Curators and Collections at UCLA, talks about challenges with digitizing student work, personally identifiable information, and privacy. David Ferriero of NARA had a post celebrating transparency in government. On a broader note, The American Archivist just transitioned to digital-only content, and the new issue of the SAA publication was released recently. There are articles about born-digital materials, Haiti, electronic records, archival reparations, and various reviews. Most are behind a paywall which requires SAA membership, understandably, but others are not. There are other articles of note, whether about data loss, the challenges when it comes to digitizing records, the scholarly record, collections management systems, and architectural photography. For her part, Sam Cross had a post on her Pop Archives website which reviewed Cloud Atlas, complete with yellowface, and the role of archives in this film. She is not the first archivist to review the film. I mentioned it briefly on my blog and UW Madison Student Chapter reviewed the series, saying that while at first the archivist appears to enforce several stereotypes, archives, and by extension, archivists, have through history “reinforced the status quo, protecting the secrets of the powerful and preserving the history of the privileged.” The chapter adds that the archivist grows and “becomes more than a tool of the regime,” preserving and passing on an interview with a prisoner charged with sedition which is a “source of inspiration for generations to come.”
That brings me to the world of libraries. I Love Libraries had posts about how libraries have adapted during the pandemic and young adult books. Writers on Hack Library School posted about mental health, legal information, and a library science career. Elsewhere there were some other wonderful articles about the history of libraries in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, collections at college libraries, the National Emergency Library of the Internet Archive, and libraries getting creative when it comes to children’s books. The Library of Congress (LOC) had wonderful articles about obscure TV and film, a private art collection, young people’s literature, Spanish legal documents held by the Law Library of Congress, and science collections. Other librarians at LOC wrote about women and sports, an old Florida courthouse, she shanties from women composers, the gender gap in politics, and the Panic of 1907.
With that, we get to genealogy. There is a flurry of articles this week. Some talk about heritage travel and genetic testing, while others focus on DNA analysis, Roots Tech, Danish National Archives, increase in engagement on Ancestry.com, tax lists from the 1700s to 1850s, and female ancestors. Yahoo! Sports summarized the case of those who sued Ancestry, with two California residents insisting that “Ancestry violated their right of publicity by using, without their consent and without paying them, decades-old yearbook names, photographs, likenesses and student activities (including sports and clubs),” with the Judge, Beeler, acknowledging that Ancestry, which has “more than 730 million records from more than 450,000 school yearbooks” doesn’t try and obtain consent from those “depicted in the yearbooks.” However, Beeler said that information in the database is not private but is public and said that the activities of the site fall under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which “immunizes website operators from liability for third-party content.” Even so, the judge said that this content is not “protected free speech,” arguing that decades-old yearbooks are not “demonstrably an issue of public interest.” On the other hand, The Hidden Branch had tips about genealogy, whether about illiterate ancestors [dead link] and an X on the census form [dead link].
In closing this newsletter I’d like to share a number of other articles. I read some articles in Perspectives of History the past week about Mexican migration, online teaching, physical education, community history of the Black experience, and writing histories of witchcraft. Furthermore, I liked reading about unlocking centuries of secrets in unlocked letters, the great polio vaccine heist, Muhammad Ali, desegregation, fighting against voter suppression, peer reviewers, Mississippi biomass facility, air pollution, and aversion of nuclear war.
That’s all for this week. I hope you all have a good week ahead.
- Burkely