Overdue Conversations

This episode grapples with the many implications of one big question: what happens to literary archives when most of the work and communications around book publishing now occurs digitally? Columbia literature curator Lina Moe sits down with Lise Jaillant--an author, researcher, and lecturer at Loughborough University--to discuss this. Lise Jaillant's research lies at the intersection of Digital Humanities, Book History and Modernist Studies. Her core expertise is on literary institutions: she has written extensively about the publishers that marketed the new literature of the early twentieth century. She also has expertise on born-digital archives and the issues of preservation/access to these archives, which Lina and Lise discuss at length in this episode. While this conversation primarily focuses on digital archives in the publishing industry, it also touches on the larger significance of how to preserve archives for future generations to access in an increasingly digital world.

In this episode, Columbia literature curator Lina Moe sits down with Trevor Owens, the head of Digital Content Management at the Library of Congress. Trevor is the first person to hold this position because it's new— in fact, digital content management is new to most institutions. Lina and Trevor discuss the many, sometimes contradictory, challenges of dealing with digital content. How do we keep the things we want to preserve, but get rid of things that inadvertently get swept into digital archives—like personal, sensitive, or even offensive information? Lina's conversation with Trevor is wide-ranging, covering topics including digital forensic sleuthing, recovering overwritten data on wiped hard drives, humanities verses computer science training for librarians, and the overlooked labor that keeps libraries going. Despite working at one of the largest repositories in the country, Trevor also brought up the importance of preservation at smaller community archives, like those in tribal communities. Finally, Lina and Trevor discus the “more product less process” movement within archives, including the ethical questions raised by archival acquisitions like Stanford's 4chan collection. Overdue Conversations is a podcast about the ways archives inform our discussions around history, literature, and politics. From digital publishing to reparative justice, climate change to public health, this series of overdue conversations takes archival documents out of the stacks and into the public forum to consider how collecting practices, selective reading, and erasure of past knowledge informs and distorts contemporary debates. Music is by Poddington Bear via the Free Music Archive used under Creative Commons license. Overdue tile design by Amy Howden-Chapman. Researched and produced by Lina Moe and Thai Jones with assistance by Amanda Martin-Hardin.

As the COVID-19 pandemic compelled libraries and archives worldwide to close their doors indefinitely, stranded researchers were compelled to radically reimagine what a visit to the archive might look like. Rather than scrutinizing text amid the dust of decaying paper in a Special Collections Reading Room, these researchers found themselves poring over digitized documents bathed in the light of their computer screens. The relevance of organizations like HathiTrust and the Internet Archive, which are committed to the task of document digitization, has been felt perhaps most urgently during this pandemic. But their current prominence simply refocuses our attention upon a larger and long-ongoing debate regarding the digitization of archival materials. What are the benefits of the digitization of archives, and what are its drawbacks? How might libraries and archives, conceptualized initially as physical spaces of knowledge, be reimagined as digitization offers both prospects and challenges to their institutional structures and ethos? How does the impetus for digitization confront long-standing principles of fair use and copyright? In this episode we discuss both the role of controversial institutions like the Internet Archive today and the larger stakes of this debate on digitization with archivist and copyright scholar Peter Hirtle. MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Articles: Kathleen Connolly Butler, “Keeping the World Safe from Naked-Chicks-in-Art Refrigerator Magnets: The Plot to Control Art Images in the Public Domain through Copyrights in Photographic and Digital Reproductions” (Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal) Archival Collections: Making of America collection, Cornell University Library; Normal Mailer Papers, Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin); Salman Rushdie Papers, Emory University FURTHER READING 1. Elizabeth A. Harris, "Publishers Sue Internet Archive over Free E-Books" 2. Aja Romano, "A Lawsuit Is Threatening the Internet Archive — But It's Not As Dire As You May Have Heard" 3. Jill Lepore, "Can the Internet Be Archived?" and "The National Emergency Library Is a Gift to Readers Everywhere"

Publishing houses make the study of literature possible in more ways than one. Not only do publishing houses make literary texts available as finished goods for our cultural consumption, the archival holdings of these publishing houses also contain evidence of literature in its myriad unfinished, intermittent, exploratory forms before and after publication. Publisher archives house extensive paratextual paraphernalia that shed crucial light on the works that we read, the authors that wrote them, and the industry that produces them: cover art, correspondence, contracts, and various other ephemera. But, what might such archival holdings look like in a digital age when editorial epistles take the form of e-mail threads, when cover art is likely to be conceptualized on InDesign rather than on paper, and when the artist who drew it is likely a freelancer who is not formally associated with the publishing house at all? Or are publisher archives the disappearing of an increasingly digitized, corporatized, and gigified publishing industry? In this episode Lina speaks with Matthew Kirschenbaum, Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland to tackle these questions.

In this episode, Columbia literature curator Lina Moe sits down with historian and curator of NYU's AI Now Institute and author of A People's History of Computing in the United States, Joy Lisi Rankin. Lina and Joy discuss urgent questions about the social history of computing; the ethical dilemmas posed by the power of tech industry giants today; and how race, class, and gender factor into online culture. Lina and Joy also speculate on the paths not taken in computing. Instead of understanding computers as commodities for purchase, for example, computers could have been considered necessary public goods, similar to utilities. Joy provides fascinating archival stories that shift the paradigms of computer history, like how instant messaging was created as an educational tool decades before AOL popularized it--or how a Minnesota librarian wrote the early software for what became Apple's music library, but was never paid for it. Overdue Conversations is a podcast about the ways archives inform our discussions around history, literature, and politics. From digital publishing to reparative justice, climate change to public health, this series of overdue conversations takes archival documents out of the stacks and into the public forum to consider how collecting practices, selective reading, and erasure of past knowledge informs and distorts contemporary debates. Music is by Poddington Bear via the Free Music Archive used under Creative Commons license. Overdue tile design by Amy Howden-Chapman. Researched and produced by Lina Moe and Anirbaan Banerjee with assistance from Amanda Martin-Hardin.

Although the meaning of “archive” has always been complicated, an image persists: Vast storerooms with rows of bookshelves and boxes brimming with folders, a physical space that stores books, documents, and records of our collective physical and social world. Today, though, archives are grappling with a momentous shift. Much of the communication and content created in recent years only exists digitally. This digital transformation poses profound questions about how the form, function, and focus of archives will change–or how this digital turn has already affected the kinds of information that get stored, the way we access them, and how we share them. As we enter a new digital era, libraries and national archives are facing big questions about preserving the enormous amount of digital content created all the time: how will it be organized and accessed, what does ownership and copyright look like? These are questions not just for academics, but for anyone who uses cares about preserving the complicated, contentious, sometimes even violent issues of our times. Between social media, emails, and online transactions, most of us consume our news and information online. We have also become content creators, leaving digital traces that can last for years. As everyone from private citizens to presidential candidates has found out, the digital is not always ephemeral. In 2014, the European Union gave its citizens “the right to be forgotten,” or have their personal data erased from organizations. But, when a digital footprint crosses international borders, which laws will apply? It's hard to imagine all those digital files being sorted out so only certain ones can be made available for research. And, libraries are nearly always hampered by limited resources, with digitization one more competing demand, which asks libraries to balance the needs of local users, visiting in person, and digitizing items for a broader audience. The possible global reach was only underscored during the pandemic when schools closed and students turned to online collections. These conversations became: Season 2 of “Overdue Conversations,” a podcast about the ways archives inform our discussions of history, literature, and politics. From digital publishing to reparative justice, climate change to public health, this series of overdue conversations takes archival documents out of the stacks and into the public forum to consider how collecting practices, selective reading, and erasure of past knowledge inform and distort contemporary debates. In this season, we investigate how the digital revolution in archives informs these challenges. For a transcript of this episode, visit this link.

Would knowing that reparations were enacted for slaveholders change the conversation around the feasibility of reparations today? Can archives be spaces of repair and reconciliation? This week we speak with Elsa Mendoza, historian at Middlebury College and former curator in the Georgetown Slavery Archives at Georgetown University about the role of archives in the debate about reparations on campus as well as how the space of the archive has been a place where historians and members of the descendent community meet. We speak with Mendoza about how students on the Georgetown campus used documents from the archive during the debate about reparations on campus, even replicating documents and posting them around campus. We also learn about how members of the descendent community visit the archive today, using documents to find information about their ancestors. Mendoza places the Georgetown and Maryland Province archives in the broader context of reckoning with the close ties between institutions of education and faith and enslavement. — Music by Blue Dots Session and Podington Bear, used under Creative Commons license. Overdue tile design by Amy Howden-Chapman. Researched and produced by Lina Moe and Thai Jones.

Georgetown students made international news in 2018 when they voted to add an activity fee to benefit the descendants of enslaved people sold in 1838 to pay off the university's debt. As one of the first concrete steps toward reparations, the vote can be traced back to student activism, archival scholarship, as well as a series of articles in the student newspaper written by Matthew Quallen. On this episode of Overdue, we speak with Quallen, a lawyer and former Georgetown student who helped fuel the debate on campus with his articles quoting voices from the Georgetown Slavery Archives, including a letter sent from a plantation cabin on Florissant Farm— virtually the same site where a 150 years later Michael Brown was shot and killed. We speak about how archives have undergirded a range of important legal decisions, including the 2020 Supreme Court ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma that upheld the historic treaties the US government made with the Cherokee Nation. — Music by Blue Dots Session and Podington Bear, used under Creative Commons license. Overdue tile design by Amy Howden-Chapman. Researched and produced by Lina Moe and Thai Jones.

Maya Moretta is a recent graduate of Georgetown University. As a student, Moretta had worked with the Georgetown Slavery Archive to compile a massive database of names of enslaved people owned by Georgetown, and the Maryland Jesuits. She also became an activist working with Students for GU272 to pass a historic referendum demanding reparative justice for the descendants of enslaved people sold by the University in the 1830s. Since the referendum's successful passage in 2019, Maya fought to have the decision enacted in practice. Maya chose to attend Georgetown University because she had heard so much about student activism on campus, and she was impressed by what she read about the university's commitment to addressing its own histories of enslavement. But when she arrived as a freshman in the fall of 2017, she realized that these conversations – that were literally making news all around the world – were nowhere to be seen on campus. She set out to change that through research and activism.

In 1838, the Maryland Jesuits who operated Georgetown University, among numerous other concerns, conducted one of the largest sales of enslaved people in American history. Nearly 300 people were sold, mostly to plantations in Louisiana. The legacy of this tragedy has been at the center of Georgetown University politics for nearly a decade. Students, faculty, alumni, and descendants of the enslaved people sold in 1838 have all engaged in research, activism, and community building in the hopes of finding some meaningful form of reparative justice in response to this history. In this episode, we speak with Adam Rothman, a professor of history at Georgetown, who is a member of the university's Working Group on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation, and also the principal curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive.