馃尡 seedling I first started thinking about the relationship between spirituality and information when Kyle Courtney, the copyright librarian at Harvard, told me about an interaction he had with a Buddhist monk. Some monks were collaborating with Harvard to give texts to the library, I think. These texts go back to the Middle Ages, so of course they鈥檙e in the public domain, ready to be digitized. Until one Monk said, 鈥淚 wrote this one....
馃尡 seedling There seems to be a popular belief that an archive is where you put things you don鈥檛 need anymore. They remain there, safe for when you need them, but they require no maintenance. In our personal knowledge management systems, in our code bases, wherever, you just throw things in there. That is not an archive. That is an attic. Archives require maintenance, care, and intention. They require workers who catalog the materials of people and institutions....
馃尡 seedling archival silence the unintentional or purposeful absence or distortion of documentation of enduring value, resulting in gaps and inabilities to represent the past accurately[^1] In particular, archival silence often happens in collections relating to Indigenous people and enslaved people. How do we ethically describe resources about people we have power over, historically or otherwise, if information about them was never never collected? How do we bring attention to these silences?...
馃尡 seedling For all of human history knowledge has been controlled and held by the elite and powerful and privileged. 鈥擟arrie Ben-Ysrael When we have control over how we relate to information and knowledge, that can be a radical act. When others control our relationship to information, it shapes our reality in ways we might not notice. It also affects how we construct the social identities of ourselves and others.1...