Culture Mapping 2022
Program
Thanks to all the presenters and attendees who joined us for Culture Mapping 2022! Where available, session recordings can be found linked below, and the conference guide can be found here. We look forward to seeing you at next year’s symposium!
Keynote Sessions
Friday, April 8 5:30 – 6:30 p.m. NYU English Department 244 Greene St. (First Floor) |
On Dying & Being Dead in an Archive Dr. Jacqueline Wernimont, Dartmouth College |
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Saturday, April 9 10:00 – 11:00 a.m. NYU Bobst Library, Room 745 |
Textiles as Archives + Afterlives: Artists in Conversation Romi Morrison & Jacqueline Wernimont |
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Thursday, April 7
1:00 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.
Welcome Session
“Slavery’s Archives and the Afterlives of Historical Data:
The Brown Brothers Collection Project“
Thomas Augst & Nicholas Wolf, New York University & NewYorkScapes
Financial records represent one of the more opaque forms of records in archives, often requiring specialized knowledge in the history of accounting and banking to interpret. But with increasing awareness of the role of capitalism in America’s economy of enslavement, decoding and recovering the contents of these collections has become more important than ever. In this short session, NewYorkScapes will talk about the efforts of contributors to the Brown Brothers Collection Project to use handwritten character recognition, machine learning, and classic humanities research techniques to unpack one such large-scale archival holding.
2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Roundtable
“Thinking Locally: Library Research and Outreach on the Ground”
Susan Garfinkel, A J Aiséirithe, Christine Pruzin, and Ellen Terrell, Library of Congress
How can we explore the local in ways that are faithful to the specificities of historical context while speaking to broader concerns? How, too, do the specificities of locations where research is conducted and presented affect the final content of that research itself? In a set of case studies encompassing New York City sanitation surveys, Boston’s minority business communities, regional histories of the American West, Black women authors, and race riots — as well as LibGuides, blog posts, and a popular Today in History website feature — subject specialists from the Library of Congress address these questions as they play out in practice in our own local context of abundant yet sometimes circumscribed resources, past decisions that affect discovery, research and outreach, and expectations from within and beyond the institution.
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Workshop
“Cripping the History Curriculum: Teaching to Fill the Archival Silences”
Miranda Hansen-Hunt, Teachers College, Columbia University
Francine Almash, CUNY Graduate Center
Maria Guarino, Educator
In this collaborative workshop, participants will engage with disability curriculum and praxis in action. Together, we will break down the pedagogy, potential problems, and process of teaching archives and disability concepts in the classroom.
4:15 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.
Project Demo
“American Fashionscapes: The Ruth Finley Collection and Fashion Calendar Research Database”
Natalie Nudell & Joseph Anderson, Fashion Institute of Technology
“The Ruth Finley Collection: Digitizing 70 Years of the Fashion Calendar,” is a two-year digitization and digital humanities project organized by the Fashion Institute of Technology-SUNY. The project is digitizing approximately 45,000 pages of material including the unique Fashion Calendar archive, the unique clearing house and scheduling service for the American fashion and creative industries from 1941-2014. This demonstration and discussion will focus on the platform’s Beta version, slated to launch in 2023.
4:45 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.
Project Demo
“This Recommendation System is Broken: Algorithmic-Curated Online Exhibition and Interactive Demo”
Giulia Taurino, Northeastern University
The presentation will follow a hybrid format, halfway between soft launch and virtual art exhibition. A site demo of the computational art project “This Recommendation System is Broken” (developed by Giulia Taurino, in collaboration with Jonatan Reyes, for the metaLAB (at) Harvard series “Curatorial A(i)gents”) will be presented and shared with the participants, who will interact with the platform and will be able to explore understated and rarely seen artworks from the Harvard Art Museums archival collection. Collectively, we will then reflect on the misalignment between museum-goers’ expectations and invisible, underrepresented art histories, asking what it might mean to co-curate with machines.
Friday, April 8
10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
Teaching With Archives
“Slavery in the Bronx: Mapping, Advocacy, and Genealogy in a Digital Public History Project”
Adam Arenson, Manhattan College
“Wanting to Know and Wanting to be Safe to Learn: Pedagogy and Archival Practice in the New York City Civil Rights History Project”
Nelson Luna & Judy DeRosier, Teachers College, Columbia University
“Banned in DC: Tracing Action, Activism and Cultural Flow in a Hardcore Gazetteer”
Kimon Keramides & Holly Seefeldt, New York University
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Archives of Space and Place in NYC
“What’s at 14th St?: Deaf NYC Spaces”
Brianna DiGiovanni & Brian Greenwald, Gallaudet University
“Sense of Place and Politics of Space in New York City: An Archival and Institutional Ethnography of Lot 47”
Gabriela D’Addario, New York University
“REPOhistory’s Lower Manhattan Sign Project”
Christina Thompson, New York University
1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Mapping Community, Place, and Power
“Mapping Black Heritage in Wellington County: An Exploration of Narrative, Settlement, and Space”
Wencke Rudi, University of Guelph
“Diasporican Queens: How Puerto Rican Pageant Titleholders in the U.S. Navigate Embodied Forms of Dispossession”
Gabrielle Vazquez, The New School
“Queerolina: LGBTQiA+ geographies through oral histories”
Cassie Tanks & Hooper Schultz, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“The Long Tale: Redlining and 21st Century Opioid Treatment Programs”
Shawn Hill, Greater Harlem Coalition
2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Activist Archives: Historical Memory and World-Remaking
Moderated by Saronik Bosu
“Queering’ LGBTQ+ Archives: Practical Applications of Justice-Oriented Archival Theory”
Emma Frank and Sydney Jordan, University of South Florida
“Teaching Homophobia: Re/Reading 20th-Century Young Adult Sex Education Manuals”
Mark McBeth, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
“Activism and Archivization: The Dorothy Bolden Archives”
Damele Elliot-Hubbard, CUNY Graduate Center
3:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Lightning Talks
Moderated by Ari Peritz-Means
“The Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana: Revealing a Diplomacy Map from the History of Basket-weaving Traditions”
Arina Melkozernova, Arizona State University
“Archive Skeptic: Dan Taulapapa McMullin and A Queer Theirstory of Polynesia”
Sophia Merkin, Columbia University
“Josephine Nivison Hopper in the Digital Age”
Alexandra Davies, Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center
“The Stepford Lives: Domestic Manuals and 20th-Century Ideals of Home, Gender, and Family”
Eva Hill, Grinnell College
4:15 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Roundtable
“Whose Records? Asylum, Archives, and the Administrative State”
Bita Mousavi, Benjamin Berman-Gladstone, Bárbara Pérez Curiel, and Bryan Zehngut-Willits, New York University
Alexia M. Orengo Green, University of Southern California
Over the past year and through their work with NYU’s Asylum Humanities Lab, the roundtable participants have used new pedagogical, archival, and public history possibilities to confront the ways in which the U.S. government suppresses records of the immigration “crises” it produces. This roundtable will explore the results of their first forays into experimental humanities, as well as the questions and concerns their teaching and research prompted about government archives as sites of power, the arbitrary nature of government declassification and redaction, and the ethics of archiving and publicizing sensitive information in the name of preservation and the public humanities.
5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.
Keynote Presentation
“On Dying and Being Dead in an Archive”
Jacqueline Wernimont, Dartmouth College
Recorded live at the NYU Department of English Event Space.
From the speaker:
What are the temporalities of archives? In this talk, I would like to invite us to use the insights of scholars like Hartman, Caswell, Johnson, and Dimock to see if we can think about all of the temporalities of archives and the ways of knowing that we imagine them to produce. Queer, Indigenous, Black, and postcolonial scholars have productively observed that linear time serve colonial, straight, and white supremacist ends. If we take this as our starting point, how can we theorize the lives and afterlives in and of archives in a way that enables more just archival engagements? I’ll be focusing on mass mortality events like those seen in pandemics, environmental catastrophe, and war as a kind of case study for these questions.
Saturday, April 9
9:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Breakfast Reception
Free breakfast reception, located in NYU Bobst Library room 745.
10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
Keynote Presentation
“Textiles as Archives + Afterlives: Artists in Conversation”
Drawing on a rich array of work as scholar-artists, Romi Morrison and Jacqueline Wernimont share their experiences designing textile-based work and have a conversation about the aesthetic, material, aural, and informational qualities of textiles as archives + afterlives.
11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Medium, Matter, Method
“The Turpentine State: An Ecology of Painting in Minnie Evans’ Airlie Oak”
Colton Klein, Columbia University
“Above The Fold: 22 Years of War, 1999-2021”
Lorie Novak, New York University
“Wearable Documents: T-Shirts from the Barnard Archives”
Vita Kurland, New York University
12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Lunch
Note: Lunch not provided. We hope you’ll check out one of the many great lunch options in the neighborhood.
2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Information, Surveillance, and the Body
“Informational Labor and Immaterial Violence in Hannah Bond’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative”
Ethan Plaue, University of Pennsylvania
“The Digital Dragnet: Computers, Criminal Records, and the Birth of the National Crime Information Center”
Dan Ewert, Princeton University
“Seeing-Being and the ‘Playground for the Imagination’: The Psychic Gymnastics of FBI Surveillance of the Civil Rights Movement”
Samriddhi Agrawal, New York University
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Roundtable
“Days of Rage”: ONE Archives Activist Poster Exhibition & Conversation
Andy Campbell, Austen Villacis, and Tracy Fenix, University of Southern California
Days of Rage is a digital-born exhibition of activist posters in the collection of ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Gathering activists and designers (and activist-designers) to engage in tactile analysis and storytelling, the exhibition positions LGBTQ+ graphic design as embodied in community realities and histories, producing subjective reflection on the interdependence of design and activism. In this roundtable, the curators of the exhibition will illuminate their process, sharing early prototypes of the exhibition’s website and video content.
Organizing Committee & Event Support
Grace Afsari-Mamagani, Doctoral Candidate, Department of English
Thomas Augst, Associate Professor, Department of English & Co-PI, NewYorkScapes
Nicholas Wolf, Data Management Librarian, NYU Libraries & Co-PI, NewYorkScapes
Sonia Butt, BA Candidate, NYU College of Arts and Sciences
Ari Peritz-Means, BA Candidate, NYU Gallatin
Thanks to the NewYorkScapes Summer 2021 undergraduate research assistants, Abrielle Claude and Cecilia Innis, for their collaboration on developing this year’s conference theme.
Culture Mapping 2022 was made possible by support from:
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