Acts of Freeing Information

a digital archival platform by Marlee Newman
Using correspondence and information visualization techniques, the Acts of Freeing Information project will be:
  • an interactive platform that illustrates the development and maintenance of radical information networks within and among the British American colonies, as well as the spread of information in pre-revolutionary America, using:
    • mapping tools
    • network visualizations
    • interactive search platforms charting the spread of information, by subject and year, illustrate network patterns and how the spread of information and knowledge impacted action
    • visual media elements will link directly to digitized primary source materials and place the material within the context of contemporary events
    • highlights the following collections:
      • NYPL's Boston Committee of Correspondence collection
      • the Founders Online digital collection, National Archives
      • and will eventually include local historical societies and archives across the country, as well as broadsheets and published pamphlets that also spread information​

​Acts of Freeing Information hopes to draw attention to lesser-known players in historical events and to create a broader narrative around the significance of information networks, action catalysts, and the speed with which information travelled during various periods. Several visual media elements will link directly to digitized primary source materials and place the material within the context of contemporary events. This expansive, collaborative collection will create a fully contextualized, and visualized, online database, with interactive maps and timelines, of informational interactions within and among the radical colonists leading up to the Revolutionary War. 

For a demonstration video, designed as part of the Archival Lab Remix project, please visit the linked screencast.
To continue the conversation, please feel free to contact me

via twitter:
@marlee_newman

via email: marlee.newman@rutgers.edu

The Benefits of Digital Materiality in Archival Outreach
Collaborative digital archival platforms:
  • allow the user to manipulate information from archival materials
    •  to look at the past from the macro-scale, which may look familiar to the general user
    •  to look at the past from the micro-scale, which provides a myriad of details and information that “great narratives” so often neglect—be it for time and page space, or because the whole story fails to fit within a tidy storyline
  • these manipulations give the user a sense of ownership over how they search and collate information, which gives the same feeling of excitement and discovery that might be felt by the trained researcher
  • the reach of the platform, and the augmented digital materiality afforded by digital platforms, creates a contextualized, more personal outreach experience that can highlight how ordinary citizens factor into the larger fabric of a historical narrative.
Many digital humanities/new media studies espouse digital materiality, which is most commonly expressed through the modes with which digital interfaces and platforms allow the user to interact with the text. These embodied text dimensions give the digitized archival unit weight and materiality and allow the user to analyze the unit in ways beyond the visual, or graphic dimension.[1] Examinations of recent digital humanities projects emphasize that which physicality cannot provide—wider public access and an extension of analytical tools and embodied dimensions, which in turn generate this materiality. New focus on relationship networks, geo-locational data, and over-arching trends reflect access to bibliographic dimensions, metadata, free text searchability, mapping, transcriptions, and the ability to compare multiple editions side-by-side.[2] The enhanced access provided by digital archive projects presents “digitizing material culture not in terms of new digital technologies acting upon passive written records, but as the imaginative investments of the past meeting those of the present.”[3] By providing the public with access to this materiality, we not only transform outreach by creating an experience in which the public can creatively interact with archival material at a “higher” level, we further transform perceptions of the archive by removing, further still, the sense of “gatekeeping” and elitism that surrounds traditional archival encounters. 

The explorative opportunities afforded by these platforms allow the user to interact with archival materials in an accessible, low-stress way, and for the public to perceive these materials in a way more common and familiar to the academic community. This gives the public power, and therefore the onus, over these materials and the narratives they can create – they can participate in knowledge creation and absorb information pertinent to their interest, in a manner previously only afforded by exhibits. Digital archival platforms like Acts of Freeing Information, which is still in development, give visual scope to information less easily readable in its original format, such as the sheer extent of these information networks in pre-revolutionary America, and make explicit key realities of the past that make it feel more present and more real--a far less distant landscape. It reminds us that great consensus for change is not obtained by a small group of privileged men, but by hundreds of diverse people, working together.

By presenting these sources in digital, interactive platforms, archival outreach becomes quite literal – the archive transforms itself into something transportable and dynamic, reaching out into the homes, interests, and imagination of the user, to be directly engaged with, interpreted, and made relevant and essential.
Endnotes:
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[1] Early calls for a multimodal digital experience can be found in Bruce R. Smith, “Getting Back to the Library, Getting Back to the Body” in Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, eds. Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 24-32; Kathleen Marie Smith, “Emblematica Online: A case study in humanities research projects” in New Technologies and Renaissance Studies II, vol. 4, eds. Tassie Gniady, Kris McAbee, and Jessica Murphy (Toronto: Iter Academic Press, 2014), 261-284, and others. Analysis of materiality and embodied text dimensions can be found in Bonnie Mak, How the Page Matters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Jim Kuhn, “’A hawk from a handsaw’ Collating Possibilities with the Shakespeare Quartos Archive” in New Technologies and Renaissance Studies II, vol. 4, eds. Tassie Gniady, Kris McAbee, and Jessica Murphy (Toronto: Iter Academic Press, 2014), 67-90; Marija Dalbello, “Digitality, Epistolarity and Reconstituted Letter Archives,” Journal of Documentation 67, no. 3 (2011): 480-506; and Johanna Drucker, What Is? Nine Epistemological Essays (Victoria, TX: Cuneiform Press, 2013).

[2] For an excellent overview of the genealogy of digital humanities, see Marija Dalbello, “A Genealogy of Digital Humanities,” Journal of Documentation 67, no. 3 (2011): 480-506. See also Clifford E. Wulfman, “The Perseus Garner: Early Modern Resources in the Digital Age,” College Literature 36, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 18-25; Ricardo L. Punzalan, “Understanding Virtual Reunification,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 84, no. 3 (July 2014): 294-323.
​
[3] Alan Galey, et al., “Beyond Remediation: The Rule of Textual Studies in Implementing New Knowledge Environments,” in Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture, eds. Brent Nelson and Melissa Terras (Toronto: Iter, Inc., 2012), 22. This also presents a discussion of the inherent paradoxical nature of digitization, where the process creates a model of an artifact that treats the artifact as an observation-based object of nature, but the act of modeling is in itself also clearly an act of imagination and creation.
​Marlee Newman is a Masters of Information student at Rutgers University. Prior to this, she earned her M.A. degree in Early Modern History at King’s College London, studying formal and informal knowledge as it related to and was impacted by plague outbreaks. Previous academic work includes her Master’s thesis, “The Press of the Plague: The Economic and Social Impact of the Plague on the Print Industry, 17th-century London” and serving on the organizational team of the “Enlightenment Senses” conference organized in association with the King’s College London Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s in 2014. She has experience working in reference at the Archibald S. Alexander Library at Rutgers University, and in archival processing as a volunteer at the National Archives in New York City.