Guest Editors      

• Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, University of Vienna
• Olivera Jokic, City University of New York

Description

This special issue explores the intricate relationship between archives and popular culture: how archives shape our understanding of “popular culture,” and how diverse forms of popular culture shape conceptions and contents of archives. Conventional conceptualizations of the archive as the repository of authoritative historical documents, assembled and maintained by institutions of the state, have increasingly been challenged. Formation of repositories, in public and private, of materials created by individuals who lack epistemic authority has been of interest not only to historians looking for traces of their lives. Especially through diverse forms of popular culture—from books, photography, video, and music to statues and garments—archives have taken on new lives to become part of public culture. In such cultural products, that which ostensibly belongs to history shapes how we understand the past, can experience the present, and imagine the future.

While both mainstream and unorthodox archives gain new lives in and through popular culture, they also challenge our contemporary conceptions of “popular culture” by revealing how the definitions of popular culture have changed, and how new genres of documentation have emerged and disappeared over time. With the profound transformation of the recording media and conceptions of literacy, these processes have reached an unprecedented speed. As more people have acquired access to recording, distribution, and preservation of written and visual texts with broad availability of high-speed Internet connections, the time difference between the moment of recording and the moment of historiography has shrunk beyond measure. The archive is still about the past, but the past may appear closer than ever to the present.

The questions we would like to explore include, but are not limited to:

• What is the role of the archive in defining what is popular?
• Can archives be classified as products of popular culture? When and how do some archives become popular?
• What would an archive of popularity look like?
• How do archives reproduce or challenge our conceptions of the popular?
• How does popular culture produce unorthodox archives?
• How do artifacts of popular culture use archives to create continuity or difference between the past and the present?
• How do archives of the popular shape the desires and imaginations of the future?
• How do minoritarian producers of popular culture use or re-define archives of oppression and dominance? What prospects and limitations are involved in such endeavors?
• What are the affective politics of archival praxis, and how do they unravel in the context of popular culture?
• What has been the effect of the digital and mobile technologies on the relationship between the archive and popular culture?

If you are interested in contributing to this special issue, please send a 300-word abstract to the editors, Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay (rea270@nyu.edu) and Olivera Jokic (ojokic@jjay.cuny.edu), by November 30, 2018. Authors will be notified in early December 2018 whether they should submit a full version of their article for peer review. Full-length articles of 5,000–7,500 words will be due by December 1, 2019. Please note that final decisions about publication will depend on the peer-review process.

Featured section in History in Africa:
Archives, the Digital Turn and Governance in Africa

Guest editors:

Dr Marie Rodet, School of Oriental and African Studies
Dr Vincent Hiribarren, King’s College London
Fabienne Chamelot, University of Portsmouth

digital.turn.africa@gmail.com

Deadline for abstracts: 29 September 2017

This featured section of History in Africa will address the wave of digitisation of archives in Africa over the last fifteen years. With the rise of information technologies, an increasing part of public – and to some extent private – African archives are being digitised and made accessible on the internet. This wave of digitisation is usually seen as a progress with the help of ambitious initiatives applying new technologies to cultural heritage of humanity such as the rescue of the manuscripts of Timbuktu or the Endangered Archives programme at the British Library. Yet as much as these new technologies raise enthusiasm, they also prompt discussions amongst researchers and archivists, which go from intellectual property to sovereignty and governance.

First, in the digital era, the issue of the ownership of these documents is crucial since the very definition of an archive is being challenged: from unique hard copies of documents, they can now exist in a variety of formats reproducible at will. Second, technical and economic issues at stake are also key to the discussion and intertwined with that of sovereignty: institutions elaborating a digitisation programme may do so under the pressure of donors or non-African scholars. All in all, beyond the discourse of transparency, whether to the benefit of governance or that of scientific research, this matter is eminently political. These archives are thus concerned with negotiations which go far beyond their sole technical and scientific aspect.

In the field of history, archives are usually addressed as sources for research, and questioned as such because of their documentary aspect. More rarely are they approached as historically constructed systems combining intellectual and physical aspects, as archival science theorises it. Yet digital archiving disrupts archival norms and practices, opening up a field of reflection relatively little explored by historians. The digital turn of African archives is therefore an object of study in its own right, located at the crossroads of political and economic interests.

This featured section seeks to reflect on the practices of digitisation of archives in Africa (pre-colonial, colonial or postcolonial) and to engage both with history and archival science.

Submission instructions

If you wish to contribute, please submit a 500-word abstract of the proposed paper as well as a short CV by Friday 29 September 2017 to digital.turn.africa@gmail.com

Notifications of decision will be sent by Friday 27 October 2017.

Selected authors will then be expected to send their full-length paper (no more than 10,000 words, including notes) by Friday 16 February 2018.

All completed papers will be subject to peer-reviewing process in accordance with History in Africa requirements.

Please address any query you may have to digital.turn.africa@gmail.com

THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN SEEKS ARTICLES ON LGBTQ PUBLIC HISTORY

In light of the LGTBQ theme study recently released by the National Park Service, The Public Historian invites proposals for articles to be published in a special issue of the journal on LGTBQ public history to coincide with the 50^th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. A broad range of proposals focused on LGBTQ public history in North America and beyond are encouraged, including community-based projects, oral history, digital history and new media, museum exhibits, archival initiatives, collective memory, and public history education and training. Proposals for alternative formats, such as reports from the field, interviews with practitioners, and roundtable discussions, will also be welcome. Proposals, which should be no longer than one double-spaced page, should be submitted to The Public Historian at scase@history.ucsb.edu and to the guest editor, Melinda Marie Jetté, at jettem@franklinpierce.edu. The deadline for submission of proposals is April 26, 2017. Selected authors will be notified by May 24, 2017. Articles will be due by January 1, 2018. Publication of the special issue of The Public Historian will be in 2019, Volume 41).

I saw this call come through and while the word “librarian” is everywhere in it, “archivist” is not. However, they mention things like data curation, preservation and access of DH projects, and other aspects that either archivists could (or should) have a say in, archivists with librarian duties may be involved with, or of interest to archivists with interest in digital humanities. Hope someone out there is interested in contributing!

THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES: IMPLICATIONS FOR LIBRARIANS, LIBRARIES, AND LIBRARIANSHIP

The redefinition of humanities scholarship has received major attention in higher education over the past few years. The advent of digital humanities has challenged many aspects of academic librarianship. With the acknowledgement that librarians must be a necessary part of this scholarly conversation, the challenges facing subject/liaison librarians, technical service librarians, and library administrators are many. Developing the knowledge base of digital tools, establishing best procedures and practices, understanding humanities scholarship, managing data through the research lifecycle, teaching literacies (information, data, visual) beyond the one-shot class, renegotiating the traditional librarian/faculty relationship as ‘service orientated,’ and the willingness of library and institutional administrators to allocate scarce resources to digital humanities projects while balancing the mission and priorities of their institutions are just some of the issues facing librarians as they reinvent themselves in the digital humanities sphere.

A CALL FOR PROPOSALS

College & Undergraduate Libraries, a peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor & Francis, invites proposals for articles to be published in the fall of 2017. The issue will be co-edited by Kevin Gunn (gunn@cua.edu) of the Catholic University of America and Jason Paul (pauljn@stolaf.edu) of St. Olaf College.

The issue will deal with the digital humanities in a very broad sense, with a major focus on their implications for the roles of academic librarians and libraries as well as on librarianship in general. Possible article topics include, but are not limited to, the following themes, issues, challenges, and criticism:

• Developing the project development mindset in librarians
• Creating new positions and/or cross-training issues for librarians
• Librarian as: point-of-service agent, an ongoing consultant, or as an embedded project librarian
• Developing managerial and technological competencies in librarians
• Administration support (or not) for DH endeavors in libraries
• Teaching DH with faculty to students (undergraduate and graduate) and faculty
• Helping students working with data
• Managing the DH products of the data life cycle
• Issues surrounding humanities data collection development and management
• Relationships of data curation and digital libraries in DH
• Issues in curation, preservation, sustainability, and access of DH data, projects, and products
• Linked data, open access, and libraries
• Librarian and staff development for non-traditional roles
• Teaching DH in academic libraries
• Project collaboration efforts with undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty
• Data literacy for librarians
• The lack of diversity of librarians and how it impacts DH development
• Advocating and supporting DH across the institution
• Developing institutional repositories for DH
• Creating DH scholarship from the birth of digital objects
• Consortial collaborations on DH projects
• Establishing best practices for dh labs, networks, and services
• Assessing, evaluating, and peer reviewing DH projects and librarians.

Articles may be theoretical or ideological discussions, case studies, best practices, research studies, and opinion pieces or position papers.

Proposals should consist of an abstract of up to 500 words and up to six keywords describing the article, together with complete author contact information. Articles should be in the range of 20 double-spaced pages in length. Please consult the following link that contains instructions for authors: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=wcul20&page=instructions#.V0DJWE0UUdU.

Please submit proposals to Kevin Gunn (gunn@cua.edu) by August 17, 2016; please do not use Scholar One for submitting proposals. First drafts of accepted proposals will be due by February 1, 2017 with the issue being published in the fall of 2017. Feel free to contact the editors with any questions that you may have.

Kevin Gunn, Catholic University of America
Jason Paul, St. Olaf College