Trust Matters

This paper was first presented as a keynote at the Society of Georgia Archivists\u27 Annual Meeting, November 3, 2017

Human Security Informatics, Global Grand Challenges and Digital Curation

This paper argues that addressing humanitarian issues and concerns about social and societal inequities that are integral to many societal grand challenges needs to become a concerted and sustained focus of digital curation. It proposes a new framing emanating out of the archival and record-keeping community – Human Security Informatics (HSI) – for human and humanitarian-centered rather than data, artifact or research-centered digital curation research and development. Human security is proposed as a new concept that promotes the protection and advancement of individuals and communities. It prioritizes individual agency and rights, and human-centered and multidisciplinary approaches that support democratization, transparency and accountability in trans- and supra-national governance and policy-making. Within this ethos, HSI specifically targets data, documentary, record-keeping and other accountability and evidentiary components of societal grand challenges. In so doing it necessarily highlights curation grand challenges, and demands the reorientation of some fundamental assumptions of digital curation relating to technological, economic and policy infrastructure priorities and standards, trust, scale, universality and content-centricity. To illustrate its argument, two research endeavors are discussed. The first is an Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) study that analyzed six areas of societal grand challenges and identified key, and often overlooked, areas where HSI could and should contribute. The analysis also surfaced grand challenges facing the digital curation community itself, many with particular applicability to digital curation capacity, processes and priorities in bureaucratic archives. The second is the Refugee Rights in Records (R3) Project, an example of wide-ranging HSI research that is focused on data, social media content and record-keeping, as well as on individual human rights in and to records and documentation. In both examples the paper identifies several specific areas of relevance to digital curation where an HSI approach would be appropriate

Research in the Archival Multiverse

Over the past 15 years, the field of archival studies around the world has experienced unprecedented growth within the academy and within the profession, and archival studies graduate education programs today have among the highest enrolments in any information field. During the same period, there has also been unparalleled expansion and innovation in the diversity of methods and theories being applied in archival scholarship. Global in scope, Research in the Archival Multiverse compiles critical and reflective essays across a wide range of emerging research areas and interests in archival studies; it aims to provide current and future archival academics with a text addressing possible methods and theoretical frameworks that have been and might be used in archival scholarship and research

Research in the Archival Multiverse

Over the past 15 years, the field of archival studies around the world has experienced unprecedented growth within the academy and within the profession, and archival studies graduate education programs today have among the highest enrolments in any information field. During the same period, there has also been unparalleled expansion and innovation in the diversity of methods and theories being applied in archival scholarship. Global in scope, Research in the Archival Multiverse compiles critical and reflective essays across a wide range of emerging research areas and interests in archival studies; it aims to provide current and future archival academics with a text addressing possible methods and theoretical frameworks that have been and might be used in archival scholarship and research

Human security informatics: A human-centered approach to tackling information and recordkeeping issues integral to societal grand challenges

Emanating out of ongoing research in archival and recordkeeping studies, this paper proposes Human Security Informatics (HSI) as a new human- and humanitarian-centered rubric and approach under which concerted research, development and educational efforts by the iSchool community, and the different fields and interests it encompasses, could be brought to bear to resolve or mitigate information, data and records-related challenges that are integral to and pervasive in societal grand challenges and wicked problems. The HSI approach is distinctive and provocative for several reasons: it puts humanitarian ethics and a participatory ethos at is core; it surfaces aspects of information infrastructure, particularly those relating to recordkeeping, transparency and accountability that often go unrecognized and unacknowledged as components of these intractable problems; and it places the expertise and scope of iSchools in conversation with each other and with many other fields, institutions and governments that are on the frontlines of addressing these problems fully demonstrating the intellectual power and societal potential of the iSchools.Ope

Metadata for the Information Multiverse

In today's Information Multiverse there are pressing societal, ethical and educational, as well as intellectual reasons why, rather than simplifying and reducing or streamlining, we should actually be complexifying and increasing our efforts to generate metadata that identifies, collocates, contextualizes, authenticates and enfranchises. Such metadata should not only draw upon, but should also simultaneously incorporate re-thinking of fundamental and long-established bibliographic and archival principles in light of the plural and increasingly post-physical nature of the Information Multiverse. Our ongoing research is modeling an Information Multiverse approach to metadata by identifying ways in which these complexified principles can be embedded in local, community and global (i.e., web) metadata infrastructures. Their underlying references to common concepts additionally open up the possibility of interoperability and re-use, and, outside the silos of professional/information fields, linking and navigation.publishedye

Use Scenarios in the Development of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT)

A user-centered, iterative design philosophy requires a common language between users, designers and builders to translate user needs into buildable specifications. This paper details the rationale, evolution and implementation of use scenarios —structured narrative descriptions of envisioned system use—in the development of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype. This paper discusses the strengths of the scenario approach, obstacles to their use, and lessons learned in the overall development process