Month: September 2023

CFP: 2024 Oral History Australia Biennial Conference

Call for Presentations

Deadline  1 April 2024

Oral history can be powerful in so many ways. Interviews generate potent emotions. Recordings capture the power of voice as well as the power of silence. Multimedia productions engage and connect new audiences with the complexities of the past.

Fundamentally, oral history transforms the historical archive and challenges mainstream histories. It can shift traditional power dynamics, bring forth new voices and perspectives, reshape policies and politics, and shake up old certainties.

Yet those possibilities come with risk as well as reward. Recording sensitive subjects is never easy. Creating an oral history production takes time, skill and care, and sometimes goes wrong. Imaginative re-uses of oral history recordings can raise ethical and legal complexities. And oral histories that disrupt accepted narratives can generate pain and conflict, in families, communities and nations.

Our conference welcomes participants who use oral history in their work across the many fields and disciplines that contribute to community, professional and academic histories. We welcome presenters from Victoria and around Australia, from across the Tasman and throughout the oral history world, from First Nations and culturally diverse backgrounds. We invite proposals for individual presentations, workshops, performances and thematic panels that speak to The Power of Oral History– Risks, Rewards and Possibilities.

Join us in Melbourne in November 2024 for a celebration of the power of oral history. Our conference venue is the state-of-the-art Trinity College Gateway Centre on the campus of the University of Melbourne, in inner city Parkville, close to cafes, restaurants, parks, public transport and accommodation. The venue is accessible with a dedicated lift.

On Thursday 21 November oral history training workshops will be followed by the conference welcome reception in the evening. The main conference will be on Friday 22 and Saturday 23 of November, and on Sunday 24 participants may enjoy a variety of history tours in Melbourne and Victoria.

Conference sub-themes

Conference sub-themes may include, but are not limited to:

  • Indigenous oral histories and oral traditions
  • Oral history, culture and language
  • Interpreting memory in oral history
  • Transgressing boundaries with oral history
  • Documenting diverse voices with oral history
  • Histories of protest, activism and rights
  • Contested memories and histories
  • Oral histories of working lives and social class
  • Migrant and refugee history
  • Gender and oral history
  • LGBTIQA+ oral histories
  • Ethical issues in oral history
  • Technology and oral history
  • Archiving and oral history
  • Giving voice to history through music
  • Oral histories of family, community or place
  • Creative uses of oral history recordings
  • Oral history in galleries, libraries and museums

Requirements

All proposals to present at the conference must be submitted using the conference EasyChair submission portal (see below) no later than 1 April 2024.

We welcome proposals for presentations in a variety of formats and media, including standard paper presentations (typically 20 minutes); short ‘lightning’ accounts of work in progress (typically 5 minutes); participatory workshops; performances; or thematic panels comprising several presenters. Presentations should involve oral history. Contact the Chair of the Conference Program Committee, Professor Alistair Thomson, (alistair.thomson@monash.edu) if you would like to discuss the format or focus of your presentation before you submit it.

Proposals for presentations / papers / panels / posters should be no more than 200 words (single space, 12 point font in Times New Roman) and must include at the top of the page, your name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), postal address, phone number and email address, the title for your presentation/panel, the sub-theme/s your work best connects to, and the presentation format (standard 20 minute paper; 5 minute ‘lightning’ account of work in progress; thematic panel; performance; or participatory workshop).

Presenters will be encouraged to submit papers to the refereed, online Oral History Australia journal, Studies in Oral History.

Submission

New proposals should be uploaded to EasyChair via this link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=oha2024.

To use this online conference management system, you will need to create an author account (a simple process that we have used in previous conferences) and then submit your proposal by uploading it as a PDF document (with full details as listed above).

If you are unfamiliar with EasyChair, please follow the instructions available via a downloadable PDF available at: https://oralhistoryaustralia.org.au/wp-content/uploads/OHA_conference_2024_EasyChair-instructions.pdf.

If you are unable to use this system, please email your proposal as a PDF attachment to ohavictoria2024@gmail.com.

Further information

In launching this website we are also inviting submissions for Presentations. Go to our Call for Presentations to find out more about the conference theme and the guidelines for submitting a proposal.

For conference information or to join the conference mailing list, email our Oral History Victoria hosts at: ohavictoria2024@gmail.com.

CFP: Record, Document, Archive: Constructing the South Out of Region

Record, Document, Archive: Constructing the South Out of Region [edited collection]

Under advance contract with Louisiana State University Press
Editors: Stephanie Rountree, Lisa Hinrichsen, and Gina Caison
Proposals (500 words): November 1, 2023
Completed Chapters (7,000 words): March 15, 2024

As the double meaning of our title suggests, this collection intends “record, document, archive” as a triad of both verbs and nouns. Record, Document, Archive seeks projects investigating processes that record, document, or archive “event in place and time” as well as projects examining artifacts themselves, those records, documents, and archives that evince various souths within the region. Through examining the technologies and traces of recording, documenting, and archiving the U.S. South across disciplines and historical context, this collection asks what it means for the region to be both defined and imagined as a place of documentation.

In particular we welcome contributions that engage with processes and products that are im/material, un/documented, un/collected, or more-than-/human. We invite a wide temporal and disciplinary array of studies on, in, or about multiple iterations and scales of the South (American, Hemispheric, Global, U.S.): whether in recorded time (e.g., archival or media studies), time immemorial (e.g., Indigenous studies), and/or deep time (e.g., geology). 

Guiding questions might include:

  • What un/recorded, un/documented, or un/archived souths exist within or beyond hegemonic concepts? 
  • Within what constitutive or erasing systems have records, documents, and/or archives emerged or endured? 
  • How is “region” a humanist heuristic, one that scholars have perhaps reverse-engineered in our methodologies (broadly defined)? 
  • What alternate ways of knowing the region emerge when earth, life, and information sciences are brought in conversation with southern studies? 
  • What can documentary arts tell us about the dialectics of seeing as they apply to the region? 
  • What do archives cataloged as “southern” reveal about the limits of colonial and capitalist knowledge regimes of nation? 
  • What does the archive, as a collection of documents, a set of practices, and an institution, illuminate about the formation and continued domination of certain ways of understanding the South? 
  • How might the archive (broadly conceived) be a site for reclamation, narrative storytelling, ancestral recalling, and historical revisioning? 
  • How have queer, feminist, and postcolonial studies called into question southern archives or necessitated new documentary practices?

We encourage submissions that challenge Eurocentric documenting practices in disciplines with hegemonic legacies – such as studies in U.S. history, archive, anthropology, geography, literature, and media, and we prioritize scholarship from interdisciplinary approaches such as Indigenous, diasporic, transnational, queer, and environmental studies, among others. We especially welcome contributions interrogating un/documentation and immigration in context of what John-Michael Rivera calls in Undocuments (2021) “the spectral logic of undocumentality” (9). Contributions that engage with “un/documenting” in the broadest sense – conceptually, materially, organically, politically, bureaucratically, technologically, and otherwise – are highly encouraged.

Other Possible Topics Include: 

  • Artifacts and relics (im/material or un/collected); un/written or un/recorded correspondence; oral histories; etc.
  • Archival collection development, acquisitions, and access (copyright, paywalls, open access)
  • Activism in archival studies, museum studies, and information sciences; “liberatory memory work”; community archives
  • Indigenous archives and counter-archives, Indigenous data sovereignty, Indigenous earthworks
  • Undocumented souths and southerners
  • Geological or ecological formations that complicate dominant notions of “the South” or “southern”
  • Lost, erased, ephemeral, speculative or contested archives
  • Ecologies of the archive, the archive as an ecosystem, documenting climate change in the South, archive as conservation, archival migration/assemblage
  • Social and psychological acts of collecting, the emotional and affectual labor of documentary work, ethical and practical issues of curation
  • Digital documentary practices in the South
  • Diverse forms of documentary arts, including but not limited to television, feature and short documentaries, audio recordings, documentary photography and other audiovisual archives about the South
  • Data recovery and digital restoration, archive hacking
  • Recording corporeal testimonies and trauma, the body as archive
  • Disability justice, medical recordkeeping, accessibility issues, the archive as a space of resistance (i.e. the reclamation of knowledge systems, ontologies, and identities structured by disability)
  • Documentary as activism: feminist, trans*, and queer archives in the South, Civil Rights archives, labor archives, documenting the BLM movement, documenting environmental racism
  • Fake archives, mockumentaries, forgery and fabrication, hoaxes, archival appropriation
  • Interactive archives, documentary performances
  • Legal and financial documents, documenting evidence; contracts, policy memos, public records, and balance sheets as archive
  • Official government and/or historical records or recording systems 
  • Memorials and monuments, artifacts and material histories, museums, archival sites and spaces
  • Pedagogies of archival research
  • The role of literature in cataloging, archiving, remembering, and documenting, the memoir as documentary, auto-ethnography
  • Unruly or accidental archives, radical or revolutionary recordkeeping, anarchives, living archives

500-word proposals should be sent to Stephanie Rountree, Lisa Hinrichsen, and Gina Caison at Record.Document.Archive@gmail.com by November 1, 2023. Please also direct any questions about possible submission topics to this email.

For those asked to contribute to the collection, completed essays of approximately 7,000 words will be due by March 15, 2024. Submissions from both established and emerging scholars are welcomed, as is work from multiple perspectives and disciplines. Anticipated publication year is 2025.

Contact Information
Stephanie Rountree (she/her/hers)
Associate Professor of English
University of North Georgia

Contact Email: Record.Document.Archive@gmail.com

Call for Nominations: NCPH Book Award

2024 SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

The National Council on Public History invites nominations for its annual award for the best published book in public history. The Council seeks works about or growing out of public history theory, study, or practice, or that have compelling implications for the same. Books “growing out of” public history include, but are not limited to, exhibition catalogs, policy studies, and monographs that have a clear public dimension. Whether about or growing out of public history, successful contenders will clearly display the public aspects of their conception, development, and execution, and how they illuminate issues and concerns significant to audiences beyond the academy.

The NCPH Book Award consists of a $1,000 cash prize and a certificate, both presented at the NCPH Annual Meeting (to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2024). The award winner receives complimentary registration for the awards breakfast.

ELIGIBILITY

To be eligible for consideration, a book must have been published within the previous two calendar years (2022 and 2023). Entries may be monographs, edited collections of articles or essays, or any other published work of comparable scope. Singly and jointly authored/edited works are welcome, as are international topics.

AWARD CRITERIA

Criteria for selection include:

  1. Excellence and thoroughness of research
  2. Style and appropriateness of presentation
  3. Suitability and rigor of methodology
  4. Contribution to advancing the field of public history

(These four criterion receive equal weight in the book award committee’s discussions.)

SUBMISSION PROCESS

Fill out this form with the nominee’s information. The form includes a file upload for each author’s CV or resume. The completed form will be sent to each of the Book Award Committee members and to the NCPH executive office.

At the bottom of the form, in the “Shipping Information” section, please indicate when you will be sending the book and the shipping method you’ll be using. Send a copy of the book* to each of the Book Award Committee members and one to the NCPH executive office at:

NCPH Book Award
127 Cavanaugh Hall – IUPUI
425 University Blvd.
Indianapolis, IN 46202-5148

Submissions must be received (not postmarked) no later than November 1, 2023.
*Please note that materials will not be returned.

Questions?  ncph@iupui.edu; (317) 274-2716

A challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities makes possible our expanding awards program and other uses of earned income on the NCPH endowment. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this website do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Looking for Speakers: Open Archives & Special Collections Symposium – 26 October 2023

York University’s W.P. Scott Chair in Librarianship, Hilary Barlow, is seeking presenters for an upcoming symposium exploring digital collections and Open Educational Resources (OER). Potential presenters do not have to be familiar with OER, as the symposium is also seeking presentations related to digital projects in archives and special collections.  

The event will be hosted via Zoom on Thursday, October 26 at 1 pm Eastern time, with presentations lasting 20 minutes plus a question period. There will be a concluding presentation by the Scott Chair on her current research. Presenters from Canada, the United States, and abroad are welcome. The symposium is being offered as part of International Open Access Week.

Interested presenters can email Hilary Barlow via hbarlow@yorku.ca with questions and potential topics.

New Issue: Oral History Review

Oral History Review, Fall/Winter 2023
(subscription)

Special Issue: Disrupting Best Practices

Editorial
Editors’ Introduction
Abby Perkiss, Janneken Smucker, and David Caruso

Research Articles
Money Talks: Narrator Compensation in Oral History
By Fanny Julissa García and Nara Milanich

Oral History Indexing
By Douglas Lambert

The Evolution of Best Practice at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Oral History Program “(Special Focus on Best Practices)”
By Leslie McCartney

Learning about Sharing Authority With the Gathered Voices of Malmö
By Robert Nilsson Mohammadi and Sima Nurali Wolgast

Getting it Right: Safeguarding a Respected Space for Indigenous Oral Histories and Truth Telling
By Rhonda Povey, Susan Page, and Michelle Trudgett

Book Reviews
The Language of Russian Peasants in the Twentieth Century: A Linguistic Analysis and Oral History
Reviewed by Orel Beilinson

Once Upon a Time in Iraq: History of a Modern Tragedy
Reviewed by Mia Martin Hobbs

Remembering Theodore Roosevelt: Reminiscences of His Contemporaries
Reviewed by Rachel B. Lane

Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives Reviewed by Kimberly Redding

Fly Until You Die: An Oral History of Hmong Pilots in the Vietnam War
Reviewed by Troy Reeves

Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities.
Reviewed by Cameron Vanderscoff

CFP: Studies in Oral History

Studies in Oral History, Issue No. 46, 2024

Joint Editors: Skye Krichauff and Carla Pascoe Leahy

Working Lives & Workplaces

Peer-reviewed articles

Contributions are invited from Australia and overseas for the peer-reviewed articles section of the 2024 issue of Studies in Oral History, the journal of Oral History Australia (OHA).

This special issue will explore oral histories of working lives, workplaces and work, all broadly defined to incorporate histories of volunteering, military service and other types of service. Papers that employ or interrogate oral history methodologies and illuminate aspects of working life, workplaces, and workplace culture are invited.

Contributions are invited across the following themes (though are not limited to these):

  • How the experience of work is mediated by gender, ethnicity, class, and generation
  • How technological innovation changed the nature of work
  • How workers have sought to protect their employment rights and conditions
  • Migrants’ experience of the workplace
  • Occupational health and safety
  • Multi-generations of families working at the same workplace
  • Unfree work
  • Work and the environment
  • Workplace closures, redundancies and lay-offs.

As all articles are subject to anonymous peer review, pleasure ensure your submission contains no identifying material. Articles submitted to the Oral History Australia Editorial Board for peer review will first be assessed for suitability by the Editorial Board. Please consult the Guidelines for Contributors and Journal Style Guide for further information.

Word limits and deadlines

To be considered for peer review, articles should be no more than 8000 words, including references. Publication of the issue is anticipated in late 2024.

Deadline for submissions: Friday 1 December 2023.

Submission

Send submissions to: Dr Alexandra Dellios, Chair, Oral History Australia Editorial Board, email editorialboard.journal@oralhistoryaustralia.org.au.

Reports

Submissions are also invited for the reports section of the 2024 issue of Studies in Oral History. Reports may describe oral history projects conducted by academic researchers, museum curators, heritage professionals, consulting historians, community historians and more. Projects may have resulted in public outcomes such as websites, exhibitions, podcasts, theses, articles or books. Please note the reports section is not peer-reviewed; notes from the field, updates on exciting new work, or reflections on the process and/or outcomes of oral history projects are encouraged. Reports which relate to the issue theme of ‘Working Lives and Workplaces’ are welcome but not mandatory.

Word limit: 1,500 words.

Deadline for report submissions: Monday 30 April 2023.

Please send reports to Alexandra Mountain, Reports Editor of Studies in Oral History, reports.journal@oralhistoryaustralia.org.au

Please note that while the reports are not peer-reviewed, we cannot accept all reports for publication and accepted reports will need to be edited for length, clarity and adherence to the Style Guide. Reports will be selected on the basis of quality of writing, the diversity of oral history perspectives showcased across the reports section and relevance to the special issue theme. Please consult the Guidelines for Contributors and Style Guide for further information.

Call for Nominations: American Library Association’s “Best Historical Materials” List

The Historical Materials Committee of the American Library Association/Reference and User Services Association’s History Section is soliciting nominations for the committee’s annual Best Historical Materials list.

The list consists of the best print and online historical bibliographies, indexes, reference products, and published primary sources created, published, or significantly updated within the past two calendar years and primarily in English. The 2023 list will consider titles published or significantly updated in 2022 and 2023.

The committee encourages nominations from librarians, scholars, and students.

Nominations can be submitted for the committee’s consideration at https://forms.gle/ntm9UH8Y5M8pF5LbA .  The deadline for nominations is September 30.

For past winners, please see rusaupdate.org/awards/best-historical-materials/. For questions, please email one of the co-chairs of the Historical Materials Committee, Steve Knowlton (steven.knowlton@princeton.edu) or Jennifer Bartlett (jen.bartlett@uky.edu).

Contact Information
Steve Knowlton

Contact Email
sak2@princeton.edu

URL: https://forms.gle/ntm9UH8Y5M8pF5LbA

New/Recent Publications

Articles

Neville Vakharia, Alex H. Poole, “Knowledge management in museums: enhancing organizational performance and public value,” Journal of Documentation 75 no. 1, 2023

Cheryl Klimaszewski, “Towards a vernacular aesthetics of liking for information studies,” Journal of Documentation 75 no. 1, 2023

Jonathan Furner, Birger Hjørland, “The coverage of information science and knowledge organization in the Library of Congress Subject Headings,” Journal of Documentation 75 no. 1, 2023

Amber L. Cushing, “PIM as a caring: Using ethics of care to explore personal information management as a caring process,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 1–11

Garg, K., Jayanetti, H.R., Alam, S. et al. “Challenges in replaying archived Twitter pages.” Int J Digit Libr (2023).

Brady Lund and Amrollah Shamsi, “Women authorship in library and information science journals from 1981 to 2020: Is equitable representation being attained?” Journal of Information Science, 49(5), 1335–1343

Ya-Ning Chen, “An investigation of linked data catalogue features in libraries, archives, and museums: a checklist approach,” The Electronic Library 41 no. 5

Books

Allemagne et généalogie : retrouver ses ancêtres allemands (Germany and Genealogy)
Sandrine Heiser

The Anticolonial Museum: Reclaiming Our Colonial Heritage
Bruno Brulon Soares
Routledge, 2023

The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction
Edited by José Antonio González Zarandona, Emma Cunliffe, Melathi Saldin
Routledge, 2023

Tied and Bound: A Comparative View on Manuscript Binding
Edited by: Alessandro Bausi and Michael Friedrich
Volume 33 in the series Studies in Manuscript Cultures

Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide
Elyse Semerdjian
Stanford University Press, 2023

Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness
Moon Charania
Duke University Press, 2023

The Power of Oral History Narratives: Lived Experiences of International Global Scholars and Artists in their Native Country and After Immigrating to the United States
Edited by: Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker, Frans H. Doppen
Information Age Publishing, 2023

Queer Exhibition Histories
Edited by: Bas Hendrikx
Valiz, 2023

Sound Writing: Voices, Authors, and Readers of Oral History
Shelley Trower
Oxford University Press, 2023

Dimensions of Curation: Considering Competing Values for Intentional Exhibition Practices
Edited by Ann Rowson Love and Pat Villeneuve
Rowman & Littlefield, 2023

Podcast

Treasures Revealed Episode 12 – Pregnancy Photos

Talking Archives Episode 8 – Archivist Melissa J. Nelson

Reports

Towards a Glossary for Web Archive Research: Version 1.0
https://cc.au.dk/fileadmin/dac/Projekter/WARCnet/Healy_et_al_Towards_a_Glossary.pdf

Scholarly Use of Web Archives Across Ireland: The Past, Present & Future(s)
https://cc.au.dk/fileadmin/dac/Projekter/WARCnet/Healy_Byrne_Scholarly_Use_01.pdf

Understanding the history of national domain crawls: mapping and archiving the national web domain in Denmark and France
https://cc.au.dk/fileadmin/dac/Projekter/WARCnet/Teszelszky_Understanding_the_history.pdf

Using a National Web Archive for the Study of Web Defacements? A Case-study Approach
http://cc.au.dk/fileadmin/dac/Projekter/WARCnet/Kurzmeier_Using_a_national.pdf

Arts and Humanities Research Council and Research Libraries UK – Protecting Dispersed Collections: a Framework for Managing the At-Risk Heritage Assets of Catholic Religious Institutes
https://castrial.files.wordpress.com/2023/08/ahrc-rluk-fellowship-report-1-1.pdf

New Issue: Restaurator. International Journal for the Preservation of Library and Archival Material

Restaurator. International Journal for the Preservation of Library and Archival Material, vol. 44 issue 3
subscription

Some Practical Aspects of Nanocellulose Film: Characterization, Expansion and Shrinking Tests, and Techniques to Create Remoistenable Nanocellulose
Robin Canham, Alison Murray, Rosaleen Hill

Hidden Players: Small Paper Nails—Manufacture and Application of Paper Nails in Chinese Double-Leaved Books
Rong Yu, Zhewei Shen, Peng Liu

Barriers to Preservation for Digital Information Resources in University Libraries of Pakistan
Rafiq Ahmad, Muhammad Rafiq, Muhammad Arif

Intelligent Repair Method for Archival Videos Based on the Super-SloMo Technology
Hui Li

Announcing the “Archival Futures: Ethics and Carework in the Archive” Reading Group

From Archive/Counterarchive

If the archive is a remnant, it is one that keeps whispering to me, insisting on its place in my everyday life.

Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum, 2018)

How have attitudes about ethics and care in archival research – and other work concerning archives and special collections – changed in recent years? How has this shifted the social, cultural, economic, and political significance of archives in scholarly and creative forms of humanistic inquiry? In the Archival Futures reading group, we will make our way through a curated list of key readings that illustrate the ways that archival scholarship in a variety of disciplines and research areas and features a range of important voices in the field. Selected readings focus on contemporary, evolving critical and generative conversations taking place between scholars and the archive, attending to themes of ethics and carework and the ways relationships between collections and different forms of scholarship are framed and reimagined in recent texts. 

Our first reading will be a selection from Michelle Caswell’s Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021), a call to action for archivists and others to reimagine and renegotiate the relations between archives, affected communities, and the present.

This reading group is intended for academics, artists, and memory workers from any background interested and/or involved in scholarly and creative research about archives and invites participants to read, discuss, and share perspectives. Some knowledge and experience working and reading in archives and/or archival studies is useful but not necessary.

SCHEDULE AND REGISTRATION

The group will be led by Dr. Julia Polyck-O’Neill (University of Guelph). The first session will take place via Zoom on Thursday Oct 5 at 4:30pm EST. Please register using the Google Form below. Subsequent meetings will also be held throughout the Fall and Winter semesters, with specific dates to be announced shortly. 

https://forms.gle/3WpLKCcv79HG9uDb7