Designing the Born-Digital Archive

Light spoke generally about the major issues facing archivists who manage born digital records and how the UCI Libraries responded when providing access to the Richard Rorty papers. She discussed the challenges, such as dealing with rapid technological change, ensure present and future accessibility of legacy files, managing privacy and copyrights, guaranteeing the authenticity and integrity of files, preventing loss and destruction, and selecting the most important material for preservation. She also discussed numerous decisions archivists make that impact the future archive, such as emulation or preservation of the original computing environment, the organization of files, the migration of materials to new formats, and human or machine-generated description of the materials. She concluded with a description of the UCI Libraries\u27 Digital Scholarship Service, which endeavors to help faculty manage their digital research for future generations

Rhetorical Pragmatism and Histories of New Media: Rorty on Kierkegaard on the Internet

This essay begins with Hubert Dreyfus\u27s Kierkegaardian critique of the Internet and then turns to Richard Rorty\u27s neo-pragmatist response, an unpublished text found in the Richard Rorty Papers. After considering these contrasting perspectives, the author proposes a third view, arguing that a rhetorical pragmatist should borrow from both Dreyfus\u27s critique and Rorty\u27s defense. The Internet does enable media users who are unthinkingly complacent in their passionate commitments as well as those who are complacently unthinking in their detached, everyday busyness. But the Internet also provides its own unique opportunities for thinking critically and for challenging complacency. After proposing this more rhetorically pragmatic view, the author discusses Rorty\u27s published and unpublished comments on Kierkegaard more generally, concluding with Rorty\u27s comparison of Kierkegaard and William James

Managing Risk with a Virtual Reading Room: Two Born Digital Projects

In March 2010, the University of California, Irvine, launched a site to provide online access to papers of Richard Rorty in the form of a virtual reading room.1 Although we didn’t know it then, we quickly learned that we were one of the first academic repositories in the United States to risk providing remote, online access to born-digital manuscripts. The virtual reading room mitigated the risks involved in providing this kind of access to personal, archival materials with privacy and copyright issues by limiting the number of qualified users and by limiting the discoverability of full-text content on the open web. In January 2013, we launched a site providing access to another group of born-digital materials, the papers of Mark Poster. The two collections had as many differences as they did commonalities, and a comparison of the two projects is useful for understanding the range of decisions and issues that ultimately impact access to born-digital personal manuscript collections

Ch. 12 - In Search of Liberty: A Poststructuralist Extension of Jorgensen\u27s Dialectics

Against a contemporary backdrop of soundbite news stories and intransigent political divisions, music educators still have much to learn from Jorgensen’s lifelong dedication to the deep interrogation of multiple perspectives. Drawing heavily on Jorgensen’s use of dialectics in In Search of Music Education, I examine the liberatory nature of her philosophical writing. By explaining each paired term in marked depth and clarity, including its potential problems and possibilities, Jorgensen frees readers from narrow assumptions and unidirectional logic. Moreover, by refraining from championing one idea within a dialectic over the other, Jorgensen liberates readers by encouraging them to position themselves. While Jorgensen’s lack of clear conclusions aligns with aspects of poststructuralist writings, a Deleuzian analysis of her work suggests that focusing on differences rather than differentiation may propagate and solidify certain divides. Additionally, using Lyotard’s concept of the differend, I examine how naming specific dialectics might limit imaginative alternatives. I close by offering an extension of Jorgensen’s work that, rather than promoting either dialectics or the absence of dialectics, suggests how her dialectics might function in a productive tension with differing and the differend

From Accession to Access: A Born-Digital Materials Case Study

Between 2011 and 2013 the Getty Institutional Records and Archives made its first foray into the comprehensive ingest, arrangement, description, and delivery of unique born-digital material when it received oral history interviews generated by some of the Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. project partners. This case study touches upon the challenges and affordances inherent to this hybrid collection of audiovisual recordings, digital mixed-media files, and analog transcripts. It describes the Archives’ efforts to develop a basic processing workflow that applies the resource-management strategy commonly known as “MPLP” in a digital environment, while striving to safeguard the integrity and authenticity of the files, adhere to professional standards, and uphold fundamental archival principles. The study describes the resulting workflow and highlights a few of the inexpensive technologies that were successfully employed to automate or expedite steps in the processing of content that was transferred via easily-accessible media and consisted of current file formats

State Aesthetics and State Meanings: Political Architecture In Ghana And Côte D’ivoire

There is a striking difference between state buildings in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and in how citizens living in each country’s capital city think and talk about them. In this article we explore the degree to which these buildings illustrate very different ideas of statehood in West Africa. We draw on art theories from West Africa to argue that architectural aesthetics rest on juxtapositions of beauty and the sublime and we suggest ways these help establish state meaning. We then apply our aesthetic approach to citizens’ evaluations of their state buildings in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire and illustrate how differently the approach plays out, in Ghana where the state emerges as acclimatized and relatively robust and in Côte d’Ivoire where the state emerges as idealized and fragile

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen\u27s Legacy in Music Education

A collection of essays celebrating Estelle Jorgensen\u27s legacy in music education, edited by:Randall Everett Allsup & Cathy Benedic

The Born-Digital Manuscript as Cultural Form & Intellectual Record

Archives and manuscript librarians use the term "born digital" to refer to personal papers that were created using a computer, received by the archives as computer files, and accessed by researchers electronically. Using Richard Rorty's word-processing files as illustration, this paper discusses the significance of these technological conditions of production and reception for how this type of manuscript may be handled by an archivist and presented to researchers seeking to learn about a scholar's intellectual work. The author works as an archivist at the University of California, Irvine Libraries, where she processed the Richard Rorty Papers for the Critical Theory Archive

The Born-Digital Manuscript as Cultural Form and Intellectual Record

Archives and manuscript librarians use the term "born digital" to refer to personal papers that were created using a computer, received by the archives as computer files, and accessed by researchers electronically. Using Richard Rorty's word-processing files as illustration, this paper discusses the significance of these technological conditions of production and reception for how this type of manuscript may be handled by an archivist and presented to researchers seeking to learn about a scholar's intellectual work. The author works as an archivist at the University of California, Irvine Libraries, where she processed the Richard Rorty Papers for the Critical Theory Archive

The Born-Digital Manuscript as Cultural Form and Intellectual Record

Archives and manuscript librarians use the term "born digital" to refer to personal papers that were created using a computer, received by the archives as computer files, and accessed by researchers electronically. Using Richard Rorty's word-processing files as illustration, this paper discusses the significance of these technological conditions of production and reception for how this type of manuscript may be handled by an archivist and presented to researchers seeking to learn about a scholar's intellectual work. The author works as an archivist at the University of California, Irvine Libraries, where she processed the Richard Rorty Papers for the Critical Theory Archive